The book’s first section, “Connections,” maps the connections between modern Iranian and South Asian litterateurs. This Indo-Iranian exchange had a crucial impact on intellectuals modernizing the Persianate heritage. The intellectual networks they formed facilitated the exchange of ideas and scholarship, making possible the shared project of Persianate modernity described in the following chapters. This preliminary section demonstrates that South Asians were well-integrated into Iranian intellectual and literary circles.

The combination of changing international circumstances alongside significant developments in China’s domestic politics made 1960 a turning point in Chinese international scientific outreach. Chapter 3 examines the impacts of these on Chinese engagement with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and the World Federation of Scientific Workers, considering the reasons for the significant divergence in how each was viewed and, consequently, those relationships evolved into the early years of the new decade. As had been the case in the 1950s, elite Chinese scientists and scientific organisations worked with foreign affairs officials, but in the context of the early 1960s this meant significantly adjusting and adapting their approaches to such external events and organisations. In all, Chinese science diplomacy via united front work was less well suited to the combative context of the Sino-Soviet split than when the two powers were not so overtly locked in competition for influence.

The 1964 Peking Science Symposium and 1966 Summer Physics Colloquium were the two largest-scale international science congresses hosted by Mao’s China. Chapter 4 delves into the inner workings of these events, which brought hundreds of visitors to the People's Republic of China from throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. From planning through to post-conference tours organised for participants, it examines the network of organisations and individuals at national and local levels that collectively shaped these major initiatives to bring foreign scientists to China on the cusp of the Cultural Revolution. In doing so, it shows the extent of integration and coordination between science and foreign relations systems during the Mao era.

This chapter frames the OSPAAAL within the longer historical arc of the interwar League Against Imperialism (LAI). It argues that the OSPAAAL recovered five major ideological tendencies of the LAI’s understudied Americas-based section, the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (La liga anti-imperialista de las Américas, LADLA), created in Mexico City in 1925. Despite the similarities of the political projects of these organizations, they exhibited a major difference in that the LADLA, in its early years, demonstrated less commitment to Black struggles in the Americas and was more focused on organizing with Indigenous communities. Through fashioning itself as a non-race-based global movement that prioritized Black struggles, the OSPAAAL aimed to correct this limitation of its predecessor. However, although the OSPAAAL focused on Black struggles from its inception, it did so largely with respect to African Americans in the United States and South Africa, repeating the tendency of its predecessor to elide the problems of anti-Black racism in Latin America.