Grounded in written historical records and oral sources, this exploratory article addresses the Portuguese policy that targeted Indian nationals settled in Mozambique in the aftermath of the liberation/occupation of Portuguese India in December 1961. It equally tackles the views, concerns, and responses developed by Indian nationals to cope with their confinement in internment camps, frozen assets, seizures and liquidation, and deportation. The analysis evinces the inbuilt ambivalence in the way Portuguese colonial authorities constructed the internment of Indian nationals as humanitarian and protective measures, while displaying their dispossession and repatriation as harsh retaliatory political measures, at odds with the purported political and legal principles of colonial governance based on Portuguese Luso-tropical exceptionalism. The differentiated impact of such political measures, far from being univocal and uncompromising, is discussed as marred by innumerable contradictions resulting from the Portuguese economic vulnerability and dependence on Indian subaltern elites in Mozambique. Furthermore, the article presents a particular analytical sensitivity to the ambivalence surrounding the modes in which men and women of Indian origin related to Portuguese colonial power and responded to its governance.

This article is concerned with the colonial state as a producer, consumer, and regulator of print. Propaganda and censorship may represent two extremes in the management of a colonial public sphere. Censorship was an interactive and negotiated process—one whose successful management was in the interest of both the censoring agents and those censored. One might think that censorship is a measure taken in order for communication to break down. If we imagine colonial print communication as a continuum suspended between partners that at one end desire full freedom of expression and at the other full control, absolute censorship does constitute silence, like that represented by the dramatic closure of the African press in Kenya with the Emergency of 1952. In a politicised colonial environment, like that in postwar Kenya, censorship may be understood as negotiation between colonisers and colonised on the limits of free speech. The article examines what changed in Kenya's late-colonial period in relation to the production, broadcasting, censoring, and suppression of non-European newspapers, and how the change affected the institutions and groupings that produced and received texts. More narrowly, it seeks to trace the dynamics of textual interfaces between the European print frameworks and those of the consolidated or emerging non-European publicists and publics. An examination that situates censorship in a broader context of management of discourse, of negotiation and dialogue, one that tests and goes beyond the dualism of suppression and resistance, may make it clearer why and to what extent a number of critical, anti-colonial publications were allowed to exist, and some were encouraged; and what the limits were, when opposition became unacceptable, and communication broke down.

This article analyses the causes and consequences of the sociocultural discrimination and exclusion of Equatoguinean women in Spain. The starting premise is that a notable familiarity with Spanish culture (language and religion) as a former African colony and a long period of settlement in Spain that dates back to the 1940s should have favoured greater social advancement of this group. However, the fieldwork shows that they have been held back by the marginalised position of Equatorial Guinea in Spain's current collective imaginary of its colonial past, as well as by the socio-laboural precariousness they have experienced since their arrival. Based on the body of thought of postcolonial theory, and from a predominantly anthropological and historical standpoint, this article analyses the heavy burden of social invisibility and unequal economic opportunities that these women carry. The paper concludes that migrant memories must be incorporated into the Hispano-African narrative to create a more trustworthy account of the shared Spanish and Equatorial Guinean past, and that there is an urgent need to implement policies in Spain that promote equality regardless of ethnicity, race, and gender.

Habermas saw the public sphere as coterminous with the national space. Anderson dreamed of newspaper readers facing the same paper for breakfast forming an “imagined community,” which he saw as vital for supplementing the subjective side of nationhood. Historical evidence supports neither proposition. Both remain locked in a nation-state focused history and have to sideline large and crucial parts of the record. This article studies two early Chinese-language periodical publications characterised by their radical difference to the standard European models, the East Western Monthly Magazine (1833–1838) and the Shenbao (1872–1949), and considers the implications of these examples for dominant conceptual frameworks.

Post-1945 Spanish and Portuguese emigration and immigration histories encapsulate the Iberian region's long-standing interconnectedness with the wider world (particularly Latin America and Africa) and other parts of Europe alike. Portugal and Spain have both been part of multiple migration systems as important sending countries that ultimately experienced an international migration turnaround owing to their transition to democracy, decolonisation, and accession to a European Union in which internal freedom of movement counted among its core principles. With the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and Europe's migration crisis of the 2010s serving as its vantage point, this article considers these topics as they intersect with issues that include nationality and citizenship, race and racism, and religion and Islamophobia in multicultural Spain and Portugal.

This article discusses the ways in which newsprint allowed local contributors and readers in colonial settings to think across gender, race, and other core colonial subject-positions. It also asks about the extent to which the central role of men in controlling local print networks has implications for how we conceptualise “publics” and “public spheres” in the colonial era.

This article chronicles the construction of the first permanent foreign settlement on the West African island of Fernando Po (today called Bioko) as part of the British effort to suppress the slave trade in the 1820s. The settlement ended centuries of relative isolation by the indigenous Bubi who hitherto had successfully navigated between occasional trade with outsiders and repelling slave traders. Although British plans ultimately failed, the settlement remained, as did a large portion of the settlers. This article argues that the disruptive power of suppression created the conditions for a colonial shift toward integration of the island into the larger Euro–West African world. While the settlement's influence grew in the short term through its successful leveraging of economic and military resources, it was the landing of liberated slaves that would have the greatest long-term significance, and highlights the (often unintentional) connection between antislavery and imperialism.

Much more globally entangled than many global historians used to think, the so-called Spice Wars were not only a story of European expansion and Southeast Asian interaction, but had an inextricable northern link leading all the way to China. From the capture of a Chinese junk serving the Spaniards in Ternate by Cornelis Matelief in 1607, to the completion of the first manuscript of the incense compendium (Xiangsheng) by Zhou Jiazhou in Jiangnan in 1618, and eventually to the proposal of the strange monopoly policy by Jan Pieterszoon Coen to the Heeren XVII (Gentlemen Seventeen) in the Dutch Republic in 1622, these seemingly irrelevant events are in fact the fragments of an untold global history of cloves which was not westward bound to the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and Europe, but northward linked with the East Asian world via the Manila route.

This article seeks to establish the value of the concept of cosmotopia to historians of intercultural connections through presenting a case study of the Calcutta Unitarian Committee, which was active between 1821 and 1828. In tandem, it aims to enhance understanding of the origins of one particularly sustained set of intercultural connections: the interfaith network which developed between an influential group of Hindu religious and social reformers, the Brahmo Samaj, and western Unitarian Christians. The article focusses on the collaboration between the two leading figures on the Committee: Rammohun Roy, the renowned founder of the Brahmo Samaj, who is often described as the Father of Modern India; and William Adam, a Scottish Baptist missionary who was condemned as the “second fallen Adam” after his “conversion” to Unitarianism by Rammohun Roy, and who went on to cofound a utopian community in the United States. It explores the Calcutta Unitarian Committee's activities within the cosmopolitan milieu of early colonial Calcutta, and clarifies its role in the emergence of the Brahmo Samaj, in the development of a unique approach to Christian mission among Unitarians, and in laying the foundations of a transnational network whose members were in the vanguard of religious innovation, radical social reform, and debates on the “woman question” in nineteenth-century India, Britain, and the United States. In conclusion, the article draws on the case study to offer some broader reflections on the relationship between utopianism, cosmopolitanism, and colonialism.