This paper introduces an innovative method applied to global (economic) history using the tools of digital humanities through the design and development of the GECEM Project Database (www.gecem.eu; www.gecemdatabase.eu). This novel database goes beyond the static Excel files frequently used by conventional scholarship in early modern history studies to mine new historical data through a bottom-up process and analyse the global circulation of goods, consumer behaviour, and trade networks in early modern China and Europe. Macau and Marseille, as strategic entrepôts for the redistribution of goods, serve as the main case study. This research is framed within a polycentric approach to analyse the connectivity of south Chinese and European markets with trade zones of Spain, France, South America, and the Pacific.

This article examines the legal and sociopolitical position that Scots held in the English Atlantic world from the union of the crowns in 1603 to the restoration of the Stuart dynasty in 1660. It demonstrates that Scots gained access to colonial opportunities through the royal patronage of James VI and I and Charles I. The policy of those monarchs also largely supported Scottish endeavours in the transatlantic arena: in land ownership, commerce, and colonial leadership. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate disrupted the colonial opportunities that were opened to Scots in the preceding decades. They lost their access to royal patronage, and the concept of Commonwealth subjecthood displaced the earlier concept of postnati subjecthood. By tracing how concepts of subjecthood developed in this period, the article contextualises the Restoration period when Scots were labelled as aliens in the English Navigation Acts to restrict their access to the English Atlantic.

The underlying theme of this essay is how intelligence was gathered and expertise dispersed in an emerging colonial environment in Africa, and how that knowledge was captured, credited and distributed between local Africans and (largely) itinerant Europeans. It sets that discussion within a more recent debate on the mechanics of European exploration during the wider nineteenth century. The expanded population of Europeans (officials, merchants, missionaries) that arrived in the later part of that century to consolidate the colonial enterprise in German East Africa often moved with initial uncertainty through the landscape, triggering a demand for topographical knowledge to become commodified and commercialised, to become less dependent on the knowledge of individuals. This demand fuelled the production of an innovative series of standardised grid maps. At a time when slavery was still legal, when the local workforce was increasingly discussed in colonial circles in terms of unskilled plantation labour, our essay explores two case studies that demonstrate how certain African experts came to exert key technical and management influence within long-term scientific and commercial projects unfolding in the southeast corner of what is today Tanzania. The matter of water flows through this essay, and does so with deliberate intent.

Historiography on the extreme violence of fin de siècle colonial wars has often remained nationally fragmented or actively invested in theories of national exceptionality. Focusing on the British, German and Dutch empires, this article seeks to understand the extreme violence as a transimperial phenomenon and asks how we can conceptualise and give empirical substance to this transimperial dimension. First, I give some indication of the degree of transimperial connectivity in the field of colonial warfare, highlighting how intensive mutual imperial observation and the individual mobility of actors fed knowledge into what Kamissek and Kreienbaum have called an “imperial cloud.” Secondly, I argue that a transimperial body of thought behind the extreme violence can be discerned on the level of colonial warfare's racialisation and the resulting specific communicative and performative aspects. Drawing on fin de siècle manuals of colonial warfare and a selection of case studies, I take the transimperial notion of “moral effect” to demonstrate how such basic notions both generated and legitimised extreme violence in colonial warfare.

This paper focuses on the articulation between property, sovereignty, and the construction of new political subjectivities in post-Ottoman provinces. Drawing on the cases of British Cyprus, the Italian Dodecanese, and French Mandatory Syria, it shows that European sovereign claims on these territories were pursued through the perpetuation of Ottoman land laws and the reorganisation of the judicial system responsible for implementing them. Dictated by the enduring legal uncertainty regarding the international status of these three provinces, this peculiar path to imperium did not deter European officials from working towards the ambitious goal of creating a class of individual peasant-proprietors, protected in their rights by colonial courts. Acknowledging the differences between these projects, their mutual influences, as well as their relative failure, the article contends that they nonetheless impel us to envision the transition from “Ottoman” to “European” rule as a gradual, multilayered process, instead of a sudden break.

Between 1918 and 1923, Istanbul was the capital of a defeated empire and occupied by the “interallied” forces composed of Britain, France, and Italy. Notwithstanding, or precisely due to, these conditions, it functioned as a vibrant hub of global communist militancy. This article explores the brief history of occupied Istanbul and discusses different agents and aspects of communist network-making. It underlines the agency of two neglected actors: a multinational body of communist sailors who connected Istanbul and its communists to European, Middle Eastern, and Soviet ports; and European and colonial soldiers stationed in Istanbul, who counterintuitively contributed to these connections. Finally, it shows how Istanbul, as the multiethnic and multilinguistic soon-to-be-former capital of the Ottoman Empire, provided a fertile ground for communist connections.

The emergence of two states in Indonesia in the aftermath of the Second World War, namely the Republic of Indonesia and the Netherlands Indies Civil Administration, instigated a war that imposed citizenship, which schoolteachers had to choose carefully. By examining the quest for professional trajectories of Dutch and Indonesian schoolteachers during the 1945–1949 period, this paper argues that expanding citizenship fostered decolonisation through the teachers’ detachment from a shared dream of social mobility. The post–World War II reconstruction project, which is largely depicted as narratives of state building in many of the existing bibliographies, reflected a growing discontent in teachers’ expectations for economic reestablishment at the personal levels. The teachers’ detachment from a shared dream of social mobility reflected the dissolution of an imagined community where transnational cultural identities had met and melded in the early twentieth century. In contrast to the emerging historiography that emphasises atrocities and violence, this paper offers a perspective on the soft process of decolonisation.

Societal debates about climate change have rekindled interest in environmental history approaches. This review article considers three recent books in African environmental history, on the Kruger National Park, the East African Groundnut Scheme, and on infrastructure in postcolonial Dar es Salaam. Why is it important to study the empire–environment nexus? How do African experiences relate to discussions on the Anthropocene? Taking environmental dynamics into account enriches understandings of social, political, and cultural relationships and sheds light on imperialism and its complex legacies. This article makes the case for the importance of environmental history as a category of analysis, encouraging other scholars to think “with” the environment in broader debates concerning power, identity, and social change.