British clubs and societies spread around the English-speaking world in the long nineteenth century. This article focuses on one particularly large friendly society, the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows (MU), which by 1913 had more than a thousand lodges around the world, especially concentrated in Australia and New Zealand. The MU spread so widely because of micro-social and macro-social forces, both of which this article investigates. It also examines the transfer of members, funds, and information between different districts of the society, and argues that such transfers may have smoothed internal and long-distance migration.

Scholarly literature on nineteenth-century nationalism concentrates on its strong exclusionary tendencies, while studies of the Cuban independence leader José Martí (1853–95) focus on his articulation of Cuban nationalism and pan-Latin American regionalism through his political activities and writings. This article identifies the globalism of Martí’s nationalism, moving beyond the national and regional frameworks to which studies of Martí have consigned the Cuban freedom fighter. It argues that the global history narratives that Martí wrote for children constitute critical and innovative components of his programme for national liberation and nation building, and encapsulate his nationalist ideology through three key components: the right to self-determination at the national level, the right to self-determination at the personal level, and a sense of global humanitarianism. The article’s transnational perspective places Martí, through his inclusionary, racially blind, humanitarian form of nationalism, as contradicting late nineteenth-century nationalist doctrines, and begs for ideas about the general intellectual climate of the period to be rethought.

This article traces the history of one geographical concept, hinterland, through changing political contexts from the 1880s through the 1970s. Hinterland proved a valuable tool for states attempting to challenge the global territorial order in both the Scramble for Africa and the postwar world of nation-states. In the context of German territorial demands in East Africa, colonial propagandists used hinterland to knit together the first longue-durée histories of the Indian Ocean to cast Zanzibar as a failed colonial power and win control of the coast. In the 1940s, Indian nationalists revived hinterland as a concept for writing about the Indian Ocean, utilizing the concept to link areas far from the ocean to an informal Indian empire that could be rebuilt to its premodern glory through naval expansion. In both contexts, hinterland provided a geographical framework to challenge British dominance on the Indian Ocean. The shifting meaning and usage of the term indicates continuities in territoriality between the Scramble for Africa and postwar internationalism.

This article follows Bulgarian officials engaged in cotton and textile exchange with African states in the early Cold War. These officials founded enterprises for carrying out transactions, collected information on prices at international cotton exchanges and attended meetings of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) to coordinate trade activities in capitalist markets. Exploring how Bulgarian foreign trade organizations positioned themselves on the scene of international trade, this article argues that cotton traders, instead of upholding the supposed bloc bipolarity of the Cold War, followed the logic of the markets they worked in. A focus on trade infrastructures in particular shows that early Cold War East–South trade was not as strictly bilateral as official agreements and statistics suggest and reveals the systematic embeddedness of the socialist traders’ practices in global capitalist structures. In the field of cotton, the globalizing economy of the early Cold War was not cut in half, as globalization studies have implied.

This article explores the global spread of the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement to colonial India. By looking at the Great Eastern Crisis (1875–78) and the intense public ferment the events in the Balkans created in Britain, Switzerland, Russia and India, this article illustrates how humanitarian ideas and practices, as well as institutional arrangements for the care for wounded soldiers, were appropriated and shared amongst the different religious internationals and pan-movements from the late 1870s onwards. The Great Eastern Crisis, this article contends, marks a global humanitarian moment. It transformed the initially mainly European and Christian Red Cross into a truly global movement that included non-sovereign colonial India and the Islamic religious international. Far from just being at the receiving end, non-European peoples were crucial in creating global and transnational humanitarianism, global civil society and the world of non-governmental organizations during the last third of the nineteenth century.

This article examines Libyan–US relations through the historical lenses of decolonization, international law, the Cold War, and the international political economy. The Libyan government exercised its newfound sovereignty in the postwar era through the negotiation of ‘base rights’ for the US government and ‘oil rights’ for corporations owned by US nationals. They did so in conjunction with other petrostates and through international organizations such as the United Nations, the Arab League, and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Libyan leaders’ strategy of using sovereignty to promote corporate competition relied on connections with similarly situated nations, and it was through global circuits of knowledge that they pressed the outer limits of economic sovereignty. At the same time, the US government consistently accommodated Libyan policies through Cold War arguments that linked the alliance with Libya to US national security. Those deep foundations of sovereignty and security created the conditions for the transformation of the global oil industry after Libya’s 1969 revolution.

Appointing a United Nations (UN) mediator to work in tandem with the United Nations Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) in March 1964 led to fundamental shifts in how the UN Secretariat inner circle orientated the organisation’s presence in Cyprus. The escalating crisis between the two communities in Cyprus and political pressure from UN member states to respond before Cold War superpower nations became engulfed, prompted the creation of UNFICYP and the recruitment of a UN mediator on 4 March 1964. This article argues that the UN leadership intended to restore member state trust following the controversial Congo mission (ONUC) and expand the organisation’s diplomatic agency through the innovation of deploying the dedicated mediator alongside the armed mission. However, the success of the meditator was diplomatically limited by the localised dynamics of the Cyprus conflict and the willingness of the Guarantor parties to surrender their sovereign imaginaries of post-colonial Cyprus. Ultimately, the experiment in field-based mediation forced the UN Secretariat leadership to acknowledge the incompatibility of appeasing all member states on one hand whilst leading field-based political negotiations with the other.

This study uses food as a lens to examine three historical phenomena: globalization’s limits, the rise of plantation-centric monocultures, and the resilience of social norms within migrant societies. The article scrutinizes the West African oil palm’s initial journey to, and reception within, the Malay Peninsula, one of the world’s largest exporters of palm oil by the end of the twentieth century. The article pays special attention to changes in the crop’s perceived food value during the interwar years, a facet overlooked by earlier scholarship. Five different migrant groups in Malaya – planter households, Asian cooks, colonial officials, government chemists, and estate labourers – played critical roles in transforming palm oil into a crop purely for industrial purposes, rather than subsistence. The peculiarities of Malaya’s social context are further sharpened by comparisons with Latin America and West Africa, where different clusters of migrants propagated the oil palm’s subsistence cultures, instead of shunning them.

The League Against Imperialism (LAI) was an international organization active from 1927 to 1937 that brought together communists, socialists, nationalists, trade unionists, and pacifists in order to coordinate their myriad ‘assaults against empire’. Founded with the support of the Communist International, the LAI at its peak had a membership of several hundred people, from every inhabited continent, among them prominent interwar activists and future heads of state. The organization aspired both to become an international movement and to coordinate specific instances of mass struggle. Exploring both aspects shows how the LAI interwove the global and the local in interwar anti-imperialist movements. This article draws from recent work on interwar anti-imperialism and internationalism as well as work on struggles for economic sovereignty in the 1960s–70s to argue that a critical aspect of the LAI’s anti-imperial politics concerned the relationship between political independence and the world economy. Through an examination of LAI members’ writings and public addresses, we can observe this relationship through the staging of their own claims for self-rule and control over land, labour, and resources.

Despite the growth of studies on slavery and slave trade outside the Atlantic world in recent years, especially in the early modern Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, our knowledge of regional price levels and their development remains surprisingly underdeveloped. This article questions how the price of enslaved people developed in the multi-directional and multi-faceted Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago slave trade, how this compared to the Atlantic world and what this tells us about slave trade and slavery in different parts of the world. Drawing on evidence from a large variety of sources, mainly from the Dutch Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago world, this article expands the body of data significantly and provides for the first time a reconstruction of the level of slave trade prices and their development in several important supplying and demanding slave trade regions in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago world and compares these to the development of slave prices in the Atlantic slave trade.

The Auckland Islands, a subantarctic archipelago 465 kilometres south of New Zealand, were the setting for one of the stranger episodes in the global history of colonial expansion. From 1849–52, these remote, inhospitable islands were governed and settled by a chartered company. The project was driven by lofty ambitions to simultaneously create a flourishing settler colony and unlock vast new whaling grounds in the Southern Ocean; the reality was a commercial disaster plagued by bitter internal disputes and a speedy abandonment. Drawing on the methods of global microhistory, I argue that the colonization of the Auckland Islands was a pivotal moment in the integration of the Southern Ocean world into global processes of governance, mobility, and trade. This anomalous case contributes to recent scholarship on ‘company-states’ and the central role of such hybrid polities in processes of cross-regional interaction and globalization.

Far from having only marginal significance and generating a ‘subdued’ response among African Americans, as some historians have argued, the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) collided at full velocity with the conflicting discourses and ideas by which Black Americans sought to understand their place in the United States and the world in the late 1960s. One of the most significant aspects of African American engagement with the civil war was the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa peace mission that sought to bring the Federal Military Government of Nigeria and the secessionist leadership of the Republic of Biafra together through the mediation of some of the leading Black civil rights leaders in the United States. Through the use of untapped primary sources, this article will reveal that while the mission was primarily focused on finding a just solution to the internecine struggle, it also intersected with broader domestic and international crosscurrents.