Objects can serve as non-living actors in a Latourian actor network which spans not only geography but time. Over this spatial–temporal network, what I call ‘object-actors’ acquire meanings that motivate living actors to use these objects as connecting points between past and present. Object-actors form networks in original exchanges between individuals and institutions, connect the past and present, and generate new and shifting meanings in this global–temporal network. Object-actors work and generate meaning in four dimensions – distance, location, relation, and time. Globally, object-actors can accrue conflicting meanings bound by locality. This article uses the collections of Elihu Yale as a case study in how object-actors constitute an important aspect of networks, and how those networks are not bound to the original transactions between historical parties or to their original geographies.

This article explores a little known facet of transnational opposition to forced labour through the earliest case of ‘Chinese abolitionism’. It analyses the transnational formation of the first Sino-American actor network in the United States and its deployment in the 1874 investigations of coolie conditions in the forced labour regimes of Cuba and Peru. At the core of this actor network was the Chinese Educational Mission and its milieu of sociability, which served as a crucible of transnational cooperation between the first Chinese America experts and their US supporters. The flows of information, cosmopolitan ideas, and personnel across this network led to an unprecedented reinterpretation of the global coolie trade as a key concern in Qing foreign relations and a serious international problem that paralleled the problem of slavery. Two Qing interventions harnessed the actor network’s social capital, framing coolie abuse as an international atrocity, accelerating the abolition of the coolie trade, and signalling the need for a Chinese Foreign Service in Western countries for the protection of Chinese overseas.

This article analyses international scholarship of the early twentieth century by focusing on scholarly networks and the uncomfortable interplay between their claims to universalism and the realities of an international war with global dimensions. Academics, books, and ideas had traversed the world with relative ease and regularity from the mid nineteenth century. The consequences were the creation of a hierarchical and Euro-American dominated ‘academic world’ where mobility and the transnational transmission of knowledge were key features. The rupture of the First World War tested the durability of these connections but the Paris Peace Conference showed that scholarly connections – through shared disciplinary interests, alumni groupings, or mutual acquaintance – were not only durable but sometimes crucial to the recasting of the world envisaged by the peacemakers. While the scholars present at the Paris Peace Conference were there as representatives of their respective nations, they also demonstrated strong allegiance to disciplines and institutions.

From the Counter-Reformation to the present, women in a variety of contexts of colonization, decolonization, and slavery crossed the threshold from missionary congregation to missionary workforce to live in Catholic religious community. Comparative, transnational analysis provides insights from a variety of angles into the myriad local factors that fashioned their understandings of the relationship between the spiritual and material benefits so gained. Their experiences were uneven, shaped by the race, gender, and status politics of each ecclesiastical and secular context, by their usefulness to the wider missionary project and the state, and by shifts in ecclesiastical rulings that were prompted by changes in the Vatican’s temporal status. In the later twentieth century, some became activists and advocates, using their symbolic power to work in the interests of women and poor people, and to reform the patriarchy at the core of the church.

Slave traders forced more than 1.65 million captive Africans aboard illegal transatlantic slave ships during the nineteenth century. This article focuses on the final phase of this brutal traffic, between 1850 and 1866. It argues that slave traders sustained their illicit industry, in large part, by strategically coordinating their financial arrangements against a rising tide of international suppression. One key tactic was for slave trade investors in the United States, Cuba, Africa, and Iberia to lower the risks of interdiction by joining forces and co-financing voyages. Another was to combine with an international cast of merchants and bankers, who helped them launder slave trade capital and transmit it to their distant allies. This capital was concealed within broader currents of global commerce, which was, in turn, spurred by the growth of free trade in the nineteenth century. These myriad alliances and capital flows undergirded the trade until its final extinction in the 1860s.

During the interwar years, Moroccan anti-colonial activists organized a propaganda campaign abroad to discredit the French and Spanish protectorates that had been established in 1912. Yet it was not the famous nationalist leaders from the country’s major urban centres but a small group from the marginalized northern city of Tetuan that played a pivotal role in the internationalization of the Moroccan question. This article demonstrates that, by analysing the emergence of Morocco’s nationalist movement through a transnational framework, rather than within the confines of the nation-state, we can rearrange the geographical and political hierarchies of local history as previously disregarded individuals and locations suddenly emerge to the forefront of the narrative.

This article considers four aspects for understanding the greatly over-used term ‘fascism’: its place in space and also in time, the basis of its social support, and its modus operandi. While agreement exists on where and when fascism reached its apogee, there is little concurrence of opinion over the extent to which the world wars were determinative in its birth and death, and how far beyond European boundaries it has ventured. There are also wide-ranging discussions concerning the identity and extent of its backers, with some writers pointing to the formative role of the lumpen body politic, or various class fractions, and others to that of an elite vanguard, or even individual alienation. A similar spectrum of opinion over the basis of fascism’s appeal extends from studies emphasizing, and elucidating, its ideational content to those that focus on the pragmatic value of action. Such a great diversity of analyses brings both considerable empirical richness and the challenge of fragmentation. This article responds by reflecting on fascism as both a social phenomenon and a field of study, in the hope of bringing some analytical structure to what remains a vast, and continuously developing, literature.