Decolonization and the expansion of international organizations in the twentieth century are crucial developments in modern global history, yet scholars have seldom closely studied their impact on one another. While decolonization is often presented as the ‘success story’ of international organizations, these bodies have also been condemned as instruments of neocolonialism. This introduction and special issue moves beyond this binary and investigates the multifaceted roles that international organizations have played in decolonizing countries and how the dissolution of European empires has in turn affected the development of international organizations. International organizations were neither straightforward tools of empire or neocolonialism, nor natural instruments for ‘Third World’ liberation. Rather, the contributions collected here underline a history of decolonization that defies any teleological framing and emphasizes diverse trajectories of global interaction facilitated through international organizations. The introduction offers an overview of recent literature on the topic and discusses promising avenues for further research.

The Algerian war of independence (1954-62) was crucial to the extension of the modern international refugee regime beyond Europe. It is also the exemplar of how that regime became a site for the establishment of postcolonial sovereignty, globally. Tunisia and Morocco, newly independent, requested UNHCR’s help in assisting hundreds of thousands of Algerian refugees: interacting with the refugee regime allowed them to establish their credentials as independent states while asserting sovereignty over their own territories. In Algeria, the 1951 Refugee Convention applied before the war started, and UNHCR worked there to support ‘old’ refugees. During the war, the Front de Libération Nationale asserted itself as a state-in-waiting by engaging with UNHCR outside Algeria as the agency coordinated a vast relief operation. After the war, as refugees returned to a landscape riven by mass displacement, interacting with the refugee regime helped the new state assert sovereignty over Algeria’s territory, and Algerian bodies.

This article focuses on debates about the relationship between religion, science and national identity that unfolded in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengal. Combining perspectives from religious studies and global history, it offers a specific approach to theoretical and methodological issues revolving around entanglement, agency and modernity. This will be operationalized, first, through an exploration of personal networks surrounding the Bengali Tantric pandit Shivachandra Bhattacharya Vidyarnava; his Bengali disciple, philosopher and nationalist educator, Pramathanath Mukhopadhyay and Shivachandra’s British disciple, the judge John Woodroffe. Second, an investigation of the connections between self-referentially ‘orthodox’ societies, so-called reformers, and the Theosophical Society will further illustrate the global exchanges that conditioned and shaped contemporary debates about religion, science and politics. This will complicate and shed new light on the contested relationship between modernity and tradition, or reformism and orthodoxy, opening new perspectives for further dialogue between religious studies and global history.

This article analyzes and narrates the history of a clandestine propaganda project known as the Loyal African Brothers series. At the height of the Cold War, African leaders of public opinion received unsolicited leaflets from a group styled the Freedom for Africa Movement (FFAM). Addressed to ‘our Loyal African Brothers,’ the leaflets decried Communist penetration of Africa by connecting topical regional and global events with local histories meant to resonate with an African readership. Unknown to the recipients was that the leaflets were in reality a fabrication of the British Foreign Office’s clandestine propaganda arm, the Information Research Department. Examining the content and distribution of the series, this article uses newly declassified documents to situate Loyal African Brothers within a global ecosystem of Cold War propaganda, decolonization, and print culture. In doing so, it positions Africa as a key battleground in the cultural front of the Global Cold War.

The transnational campaign against the Italian invasion of the Ethiopian Empire (1936–36) has been widely acknowledged as a turning point for antiracist and anticolonial political organizing in the African continent and diaspora. This article seeks to reconstruct the South Asian participation in the Hands Off Ethiopia protests, to expand historical knowledge of the early-twentieth-century development of Afro-Asian solidarity ties as well as the intersection of anti-Fascist and anticolonial struggles. It examines the institutional responses to the invasion on the part of the Indian Legislative Assembly, and a series of demonstrations, local meetings and boycotts whose implications reverberated in the local and international press as well as in the concerns of British colonial authorities. As will be argued, this mobilization was fueled by feelings of racial solidarity, anti-imperialist analyses, anti-caste critiques, scriptural interpretations and religious universalisms.

The Anthropocene epoch, characterized by human-caused planetary-scale transformations like climate change and ocean acidification, today is usually associated with the period beginning in the mid-twentieth century. Taking an oceanic perspective on the Anthropocene in Asia, the article argues that oceanic and terrestrial energy regimes synchronized since the 1950s when, for the first time in history, oceanic ghost acres turned marine spaces into a major fuel source. Despite global connections between offshore oil regions located in North America, Asia, and other places going back to the late nineteenth century, Asia’s contingent offshore oil field locations and their physical geographies, combined with political factors, inhibited large-scale offshore drilling before the 1950s. These characteristics of marine spaces meant that Asian political elites and their developmentalist agendas became the guiding force in exploring offshore fields, a process that was hardly dominated by corporate capitalism or structural choice limitations due to the legacies of colonialism.

This article analyses the resilience of domestic textile production in Java and sub-Saharan Africa to uncover how local industries coped with the effects of broader global and colonial forces in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. We demonstrate that many domestic handicraft manufacturers managed to survive due to specific competitive advantages. Strategies of product differentiation, responsiveness to shifting consumer needs, and flexibility in manufacturing methods enabled local producers to remain competitive in confrontation with mounting imports from early factories, typically constituting cheap, but lower quality and less unique products. Some local manufacturers could even compete based on price given the very low labour costs associated with seasonally-oriented handicraft production, which raises questions about the extent of the comparative advantage enjoyed by early-industrializing nations in the Global North. The capacity of domestic textile producers to remain competitive amid colonial policies aimed at capturing local markets – and raw cotton sources – highlights not only the importance of product differentiation and the specificity of local demand, but also the agency exercised by both producers and consumers under colonial rule.

Following independence in 1958, hundreds of Guinean soldiers, students, and politicians fled their home country in order to build an opposition to President Sékou Touré in exile. This article examines how these exiles built regional and global networks in order to effect political change. In turn, West African states sought to manage exiles in order to apply political pressure on regional rivals. Despite their liminality in a region increasingly dominated by national politics and international organizations, exiles were at the centre of political contestations surrounding citizenship, sovereignty, and human rights that emerged in the three decades following decolonization. Their history underscores the importance of regional frameworks in shaping the post-colonial order in West Africa.

Patrick O’Brien has dedicated most of his career to studying British economic history, focusing on the Industrial Revolution, its antecedents, characteristics and consequences. He has always paid attention to long-term developments and never confined himself to strictly economic aspects. From the late 1990s onward, he increasingly turned ‘global’. His importance for global history cannot be overstated. His essay in this issue presents the outcome of his long intellectual journey. I will in this rejoinder try to assess his approach and his findings and comment on Patrick as a scholar and as a person. As we are close friends I will be critical.

This article moves past high politics and the most prominent activists to explore the daily, intimate practice of international movement building by mid-level fieldworkers within the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) during its first decade of existence (1952–62). It illustrates how fieldworkers and the IPPF’s practitioner-oriented newsletter Around the World attempted to bridge the ideological and geographic diversity of the family planning movement and connect with advocates around the world through an emotive narrative of suffering, love, and global humanity, reinforced by affective bonds and women’s volunteerism. The story of global family planning must thus be seen not only as part of the history of eugenics, population control, and feminism, but also as part of the longer trajectory of maternalist humanitarianism. This mid-twentieth century version of maternalist humanitarianism built on earlier traditions but also incorporated concepts of human rights, critiques of dominant gender and sexual norms, and an official commitment to local self-determination in the context of decolonization movements. Still, the organization was plagued by the problems that shape humanitarianism more broadly, including the difficulty of moving past colonialist discourses, deeply rooted feelings of racial superiority, and the contradictions inherent in attempts to impose an impossible ideal of political neutrality in a politically complex world. Looking at the history of global family planning from this perspective thus helps us understand how the different traditions, intimate relationships, and practical experiences mid-level actors bring to their work shape the broader process of international movement building, beyond high-level political and ideological activism.

Cooperative departments and organizations were a ubiquitous but rarely studied aspect of British colonial governance in the twentieth century. The Co-operative College in Britain provided specialized training in colonial cooperation to students from across the British Empire. The cooperative movement was a key part of the emergence of regimes of development in the decades between the 1920s and 1960s, reflecting their emphasis on modular solutions deployed by experts in an increasingly homogenizing ‘developing world’. However, the colonial and post-colonial students at the Co-operative College were also critical of colonialism and capitalism, participating in the anti-colonial internationalist effort to create a more just post-imperial world. As post-colonial governments retained cooperative structures, the former students of the Co-operative College used the movement as a counter-balance to the larger forces of nationalism and neo-colonialism.

Refugee history at present lacks a conceptual framework, notwithstanding the proliferation of recent contributions that contribute to enlarging the field. Our article seeks to advance refugee history by drawing upon extensive research into historical case studies and proposing the framework of refugeedom. Refugeedom takes proper account of the states and other actors that defined the ‘refugee’ as a category and sought to manage refugees as figures of concern, but it also insists upon the need to consider refugees as an active and assertive historical presence in situations of crisis and constraint. It offers a promising approach for analysing episodes and sites of mass population displacement from the perspectives of governments, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations. Crucially, refugeedom incorporates the experiences of refugees and how they narrated displacement. Finally, the article outlines a direction for global history by drawing attention to past episodes of displacement in ways that capture not only its global scale, but also the multiple relationships and practices of refugeedom.

As contribution to the debate about the interpretation of the process of economic growth before the Industrial Revolution, we discuss two concerns about the currently available estimates of historical national accounts and the way in which these estimates should be interpreted. Firstly, we argue that estimates of the long-term trends of economic growth should make use of all information contained in time series of Gross Domestic Product (GDP henceforth), and therefore use standard regression analysis to establish those trends. Secondly, we point to the problem that the time series of historical GDP are based on very different estimation procedures, which probably affect the outcome in terms of the level of GDP per capita in the period before 1850. Both concerns imply that we do not entirely agree with Jack Goldstone’s views of pre-industrial growth. In particular, his conclusion that growth was cyclical before 1800 is inconsistent with the available GDP estimates, which point to sustained growth, albeit at a very low rate.

Over the past 600 years, commodity frontiers – processes and sites of the incorporation of resources into the expanding capitalist world economy – have absorbed ever more land, ever more labour and ever more natural assets. In this paper, we claim that studying the global history of capitalism through the lens of commodity frontiers and using commodity regimes as an analytical framework is crucial to understanding the origins and nature of capitalism, and thus the modern world. We argue that commodity frontiers identify capitalism as a process rooted in a profound restructuring of the countryside and nature. They connect processes of extraction and exchange with degradation, adaptation and resistance in rural peripheries. To account for the enormous variety of actors and places involved in this history is a critical challenge in the social sciences, and one to which global history can contribute crucial insights.

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.

In the wake of the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, democratic nationalism promoted the liberation of oppressed peoples from the shackles of absolutist empires and prophesied the emergence of a cosmopolitan brotherhood of nation states. From a global perspective, however, this political culture could be imperial. The governors of State of Buenos Aires modelled plans for the White colonization of the pampas on French Algeria. They sent a Military-Agricultural Legion to the enclave of Bahía Blanca, near the Patagonian frontier, to participate in the war against the Indians. Launched as the successor to Garibaldi’s Italian Legion of Montevideo, its leaders promised to bring civilization to savage lands in the spirit of Columbus and in the name of the Risorgimento. This case study offers a window into the cross-pollination of ideas concerning conquest and colonization between Latin America and Europe. Expansion and secession, empire and nation, mestizaje and racial hierarchies, cosmopolitanism and adventurism, all coexisted within an entangled republican universe.

This global microhistorical analysis of the Swede Brigitta Scherzenfeldt’s capture in Russia and her subsequent enslavement in the Dzungar khanate stresses actors and regions needed to nuance the history of globalisation. The early globalisation process is commonly exemplified with maritime contacts, involving free and often male West European actors. In contrast, this study combines multilingual source material to trace and discuss economic integration, cross-border trade, forced migration, the circulation of knowledge, literary depictions, and diplomatic contacts in the Central Asian borderlands between China and Russia. In the process, I clarify the importance of female, coerced actors, and overland connections between non-European empires for the history of early modern globalisation.

This article offers a transnational account of the historical origins and development of the concept of ‘global psyche’ and transcultural psychiatry. It argues that the concept of universal, global psyche emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War and during decolonization, when West European psychiatry strove to leave behind its colonial legacies and lay the foundation for a more inclusive conversation between Western and non-Western mental health communities. In the second half of the twentieth century, leading ‘psy’ professionals across the globe set about identifying and defining the universal psychological mechanisms supposedly shared among all cultures (and ‘civilizations’). The article explores this far-reaching psychiatric, social and cultural search for a new definition of ‘common humanity’, relating it to the social and political history of decolonization, and to the post-war reconstruction and search for stable peace. It provides a transnational account of a series of interlinked developments and trends around the world in order to arrive at a global history of the decolonization of mental health science.