This article presents a case study of the 1959 UK–USSR film weeks to investigate the political, cultural and industrial motivations shaping Cold War cultural exchange, focusing on the role of the British Council’s Soviet Relations Committee (SRC). Originating from a 1955 Soviet proposal for reciprocal film weeks, the project faced over four years of delays and aborted attempts due to a division of opinion among British state and non-state actors. The SRC sought to bridge the conflicting policy motivations between the British Council, the Foreign Office and the British film industry towards the film weeks, but the contradictory priorities and interests of the groups led to an ambiguous approach. The article reconstructs the negotiations, organisation and delivery of the film weeks from the British perspective, drawing on archival sources including the British Council Records at The National Archives to reveal new perspectives on the divergent policy motivations towards the use of films and film weeks in cultural exchange. In doing so, the article contributes to wider research into the role of the SRC and film weeks in the cultural Cold War.

Steam navigation in the 1850s and the Rubber Boom beginning in the 1890s connected the Amazonia to the world. This article studies Iquitos, a major riverine port city in Peru, to interrogate the kind of urban environmental regime produced by the contrast between the modernizing impulse of the rubber era and the conditions of the rainforest and the customs of its peoples. Studying urbanization as an eco-technical process that involves both the longue durée and contingent critical junctures reveals pervasive connections between social inequalities and environmental conditions. The long-term trajectory of Iquitos reveals a vicious cycle of urban inequalities and precarious urbanization.

The filling of the lagoons and creeks that framed the city and island of Lagos changed the relationship between people, power, land and the water at the turn of the nineteenth century. As elites in the city negotiated power with British colonial administrators, ordinary Lagosians pushed back against the measures that threatened to displace them and rewrite cultural space through the demands and logics of ‘slum clearance’ and anti-malarial campaigns. This article examines how these struggles over water, land and urban space were the catalysts for cultural change.

This survey argues that urban historians should be engaging with the climate crisis as a driver of urgent research and the environmental humanities as a vibrant and growing gathering of different disciplines and approaches. This will enable urban historians to help address the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century. The survey identifies three areas in which urban-environmental historians might go further than existing work in the field: ambitious thinking; radical critique; and engagement with play or experimentation. Each of these is explored through existing scholarship, with reflections on the implications for the practice of urban history.

The steam-driven transport revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dramatically altered the geography of globalization, fuelling rapid urbanization at an unprecedented scale in port cities across the globe. Whereas global historians have primarily studied port cities because of their function in globe-spanning networks, this special issue explores the intersection of global and urban history from a socio-environmental perspective. Crucially, the contributions to this issue underline that the creation of port cities, and their social histories, must be understood in relation to local landscapes, both built and natural, and their transformations over time.

Excrements are slippery objects of historical inquiry. They are seldom nominated, often tiptoed around. Excreta are only apparently trifling matters, yet they bear the traces of events that could not be otherwise observed. They demand consideration of the mundane and seemingly apolitical dimension of everyday life. They show up in archival trickles that, if followed up seriously, point to what political and economic histories may have swiped out of plain view. Excrements in 1859–69 Port Said convey that the Suez Canal Company may not have been at all that concerned or effective in its management of public hygiene in the encampments and towns sprouting along the canal. The Egyptian government was similarly unimpactful, but tried to tackle some of the issues confronting booming towns in Egypt and elsewhere: planning flaws, ‘miasmatic effluvia’, desertic and acquatic dumpsters and a seemingly ever-growing volume of and proximity to trash.

A city must stand on stable ground for it to be a place of residence, sociability and peace. If so, the following is an exploration of how a city came to be in a wetland, with marshy ground, with an overflowing river, with stormy seas and with lowland liable to flooding. A wetland, the key ecology in what follows, was not easily urbanized. Indeed, in the late modern moment, taken in what follows simply as a shorthand to refer to the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, earth was dug, water was channelled, a river estuary was changed, reefs were affected, harbours were built and sea flow appeared to change. Yet, the manipulation of terrain of various kinds did not create a space which was a smooth site of connection and meeting for colonists and colonized. Rather, nature obstructed these fluid experiments of engineering in various ways. Simultaneously, the people who congregated at these sites forged new ways of considering their status in the ‘new imperial’ colony. The colonial reorganization of nature ran parallel with colonial attempts at arranging people; yet, both nature and people did not yield automatically to the hand of this new regime of modelling and segmenting environments in and around the sea and land.

This paper examines the role of big business as the linchpin of late colonialism in Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe) during its Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) years between 1966 and 1979. After Rhodesia’s rebellion against Britain in 1965, London and the world, through the United Nations, responded by imposing sanctions against Salisbury, hoping to bring it to legality quickly. However, Rhodesia survived the expected impact of sanctions until its demise in 1979. Scholarship has accounted for this survival in various dimensions, emphasising the role of white solidarity/redoubt in the region, manipulation of the market and sanction busting or breach by friendly states and businesses. Regarding sanction busting, less accounted for are the other major sanction busters, except for well-known governments of Portugal, South Africa, and the USA, as well as British and South African oil firms. Using primary documents from British archives and intelligence work, this paper shows the specific companies that were the raison d’etre of late colonialism and the British government’s response and actions against these firms. The paper argues that by acting as conduits for Rhodesia’s access to international markets, British firms kept its economy going, thereby propping up and propelling the Rhodesian rebellion, paying and sustaining late colonial rule, and delaying the decolonisation of Rhodesia. The paper further shows the duplicity and indecisiveness of the British government in dealing with the Rhodesian problem, thus elongating settler rule. In doing so, the paper thus contributes to the historiography of the politics and economics of late colonialism and the role of business in decolonisation in Southern Africa.