This chapter examines the formation of a liberal mining regime in Tonkin, which fueled a mining frenzy in the 1920s. To encourage prospectors and capitalists to invest in and exploit the mining resources of remote colonies, such as Tonkin and Annam, a colonial mining regime that granted mine explorers extensive rights to control and develop mining concessions as they saw fit was formulated in 1897. This chapter also explores how the liberal mining regime in Tonkin enabled the rise of big coal companies, such as the French Coal Company of Tonkin (SFCT) and Đông Triều Coal Company (SCDT). Their rapid growth and illicit mining expansion subsequently led to increasing conflicts among the two companies, the colonial government, and local communities over the use of natural resources, such as timber forests, public land, and maritime zones. Overall, this chapter highlights how the bubble created by mining deregulation led to the wasteful use and arbitrary division of land, rampant prospecting fraud, widespread destruction of preexisting forests at mining perimeters, and the illegal tactics employed by the big coal companies to encroach upon public resources.

This chapter explores the relationship between technology and US national security. While it affirms the continuing importance of “traditional” historical subjects like war and diplomacy, it calls for scholars to bring more rigorous research and critical sophistication to bear on them. In other words, it calls for scholars to take a “process-based” approach to these historical subjects rather than the “outcome-based” approach favored by strategic studies scholars. It explains how the author came to study the relationship between technology and national security and how other scholars influenced her approach, which seeks to blend empiricism with theory and benefits from a comparative perspective. Next, the chapter offers tips for conducting broad and deep archival research, emphasizing the value of finding aids and the need to minimize reliance on intermediaries between the researcher and the evidence. It also offers tips on reading in and across subfields and disciplines. Finally, the chapter highlights the importance of taking technical matter, whether it be weapons technology or law, seriously on its own terms while also understanding its constructed nature.

This chapter explores how African intellectual knowledge systems have been shaped by the cultural interchange between the African continent and the African diaspora in the Americas. In particular, I explore how notions of Africa and Pan-African thought have both shaped and been shaped by thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter attempts to trace a series of connections through a sampling of anglophone poetry, plays, letters, novels, speeches, music, and the ideas these texts embody in creating an alternative archive to that established by European thinkers. By focusing on the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the Drum Generation, political icons like Nkrumah, Garvey, Fanon, and Mandela, with odd pairings like Mugabe and Marley and a sampling of West African plays, I trace how the African diaspora shifted understandings of an imagined community on the African continent, while African thinkers changed how its diaspora understood the continent itself in terms of those imaginings. I am arguing for a vision of twentieth- and twenty-first-century African literary production as a repository of cultural strategies with material effects, which centralize how Pan-Africanisms imagine modernity.

What is ideology? How can we discern significant, enduring ideas from more fleeting ones? With these opening questions the chapter lays out some ways scholars might investigate the impact of ideology on international history. The chapter offers how-to insights for historians to examine worldviews, national visions, and personal biases as they have shaped US foreign relations. In so doing, we are reminded to always consider our own ideologies, preconceptions, and assumptions, regardless of whether those presuppositions are more or less obvious. The chapter singles out key contested concepts – such as “civilization” and empire – and suggests a focus on language and rhetoric in approaching this subject. Biography and a concentration on people and groups is crucial to any deep investigation of ideology. The cultural embeddedness and historical context of the actors and ideas we focus on is critical to this work. International and transnational dimensions of thought are virtually omnipresent in the historical record; so, too, one must keep in mind the shaping role of markets and economic ideas and the impact of competing forms of nationalism. Overall, the chapter emphasizes the relationship between norms and ideology, the significance of religion, along with themes such as power, progress, and democracy.

Drawing from the memoirs of Edmond Fuchs and Emile Sarran – two French geologists sent by the French government to Tonkin in the 1880s to conduct mining expeditions – this chapter reconstructs their geological mission and examines their ecological and geological findings about the Quảng Yên coal basin in Tonkin. The chapter also underscores several limitations and inconsistencies in the French geological findings, including Fuchs’ overoptimistic assessment of the industrial and military applications of Tonkinese coal, Sarran’s inflated estimates of Tonkin’s coal reserves, and their omission of the impact of environmental factors on future large-scale coal mining activities in Tonkin. It argues that these scientific limits resulted from logistical and topographical challenges encountered by the geologists in Tonkin. It further posits that the immense pressure imposed by both the French government and the French Ministry of the Navy and Colonies was likely a contributing factor, since it was necessary for the geologists’ missions to demonstrate how the discovery of Tonkinese coal could help strengthen French industrial might and imperial ambitions in Asia.

Historians of US foreign relations have much to gain by incorporating some of the methodological interventions made by scholars of race and Ethnic Studies. Drawing on research on US–Caribbean and US–Central American relations, this chapter tackles the following questions: What does it mean to study race as a central component, and not just a byproduct of US foreign relations? How does race appear in and outside of government archives? And what are some assumptions that require reassessment to ensure that US foreign relations scholars are not using –race– as a mere descriptor of –other–? A core component of the chapter is its combined use of field-specific observations and personal reflections amassed over the course of twenty years of research and writing. It does not propose one unified meaning of “race,” nor one specific method for examining race as an idea and practice. Instead, it maps out how the fields of African Diaspora Studies and Critical Ethnic Studies have expanded our understandings of racialization and racial formation, provides examples of effective approaches that draw from specific events and published works, outlines questions to ask before, during, and after conducting research, and invites researchers to recognize how archives function as racialized spaces.