Identity in nineteenth-century British imperial port cities throughout East and Southeast Asia was imprecise and fluid, shifting according to socio-political, cultural, and racial exigencies. Such port cities have historically been understood as contact zones, nodes within or on the edge of imperial networks, or else as “in-between spaces,” “bridges” between the maritime world of commerce and migration and the coastal hinterlands, across which goods, ideas, and people flowed.1 In line with recent scholastic shifts, the papers collected here revisit these paradigms by examining semi-colonial and colonial port cities connected to the British Empire through the experiences of understudied communities living and working far from their purported homelands.2 Building upon scholarly shifts away from analyses of East-meets-West encounters and towards explorations of the “multidirectionality” of interactions in colonial port cities, the case studies in this issue are grounded in the lived realities of distinct populations and their particular interactions with other port-city communities and (semi)colonial authorities.3 The transient, mobile, and interconnected nature of these colonial and semi-colonial littoral spaces allowed engagement and encounter to erode not just geopolitical borders through the forging of expansive and wide-reaching networks, but also the boundaries that governed the positionality of various ethnic and national communities.4

The present article studies the foundation of San Juan de la Frontera de Paspaya in the jurisdiction of the Real Audiencia de Charcas in the second half of the sixteenth century, framing the event as part of the wider process of incorporation of new geographies into the Spanish monarchy. The documentation analysed describes the complex negotiations among various agents organised around networks of patronage and hierarchies, including Spanish frontier captains and their men as well as the Andean indigenous communities of San Lucas de Payacollo and the Guaraní-speaking Chiriguanaes. The article provides some insights into the manner in which frontier spaces of the Catholic monarchy were politically constructed and equipped with relations and institutions in the late sixteenth century.

Americans living in nineteenth-century Hong Kong and China's treaty ports encountered a contradiction. The British dominated elite foreign society, their political, social, and cultural agendas often setting the pace for life within the community. But as citizens of a country that had recently wrested its independence from its one-time imperial overlord, Americans arriving in China were ostensibly averse to imperialism and the culture of empire. They maintained a belief that theirs was a benevolent republic that championed international amity and self-determination. Still, as Elisa Tamarkin notes, if Americans were wary of the British Empire, many found the spectacle of it appealing—a tendency evident in Hong Kong and the foreign enclaves along China's coast. Americans eager to enter elite foreign society proclaimed newfound sympathies for British belligerence in China, in turn developing increasingly prejudiced opinions about their Chinese neighbours and staff. Their derisive expressions of racial difference reinforced efforts to reconcile Anglo-American cultural incongruities. Such sentiments reflect the entangled processes through which extraimperial groups such as Americans fashioned themselves as members of the colonial elite. I argue that through such processes, the British and Americans subordinated national rivalry in the interest of entrenching racial divisions between white and non-white communities.

The first diaspora of Portuguese subjects originating from Macau (the Macanese) to various port cities in East Asia began in the 1840s with the British colonisation of Hong Kong. By the early twentieth century, their presence in Macau and resettlement in the Shanghai International Settlement, British Hong Kong, and Kobe led to complex diversification of the “Portuguese” identity. This study examines Macanese experiences in their navigation through notions of cosmopolitanism and patriotism in East Asian territories that were neither fatherland nor homeland. The debates show not only the vulnerability of Portuguese solidarity amongst the Macanese but also unprecedented ideas of being “Portuguese” in a relatively liberal British port city. Through the analysis of two national celebrations organised in British Hong Kong that caused tension, I explore how the shaping of cosmopolitan-minded Macanese in colonial port cities complicated notions of Portuguese patriotism, which oscillated between a love for the pátria (fatherland) and a sense of responsibility to fight for a progressive and just Macanese future. Their initiatives show that, away from the political centres of Portuguese power, the Macanese negotiated their relationship to the Portuguese Empire and competed for the authority to define “Portugueseness” across the East Asian littoral.

Ragionamenti del mio viaggio intorno al mondo [Chronicles of my voyage around the world] by Francesco Carletti (1573–1636), a Florentine slave merchant and the first private individual to circumnavigate the globe, is a rich source of information about human trafficking from Africa to Spanish America. Carletti writes in detail about his encounters beginning in 1594 in Africa, America, and Asia, including the Philippines, Japan, Macao, Malacca, and Goa, before returning to Europe via the Cape of Good Hope in 1602. But what makes Carletti's record extraordinary are his reports about the sexuality of the peoples he observes in these locations. Following the publications of earlier Italian travel writers Niccolò dei Conti (1395–1469) and Antonio Pigafetta (1491–1531) about the practice of Asian men purposely piercing their genitalia to insert studs and other objects to gratify their female sexual partners, Carletti investigates this phenomenon, concludes its verity, and attributes its existence to the dominance of women's agency in Asia. Carletti's recollections of his voyage are testimony to how exploration during the early modern era catalyzed a transformation in racial discourses and the appreciation of erotic desire in foreign cultures.

Disorderly white communities, which elites associated with crime, poverty, and the transgression of racial boundaries, were often perceived as a destabilising force in the colonial world. Drawing upon the life history and the 1926 fraud trial in Shanghai of a multiply marginal woman named Edith Brentnall, this article explores three key dimensions of the British consular management of colonial criminality on the China coast: concern about the mobility of marginal Europeans and Americans, the ambiguity of national status in the extraterritorial environments of the treaty ports, and a preoccupation with female “delinquency.” Using Brentnall as a common thread to explore the varied textures of “white” criminality in the treaty ports, this article contends that marginal Britons’ misbehaviour took on a heightened significance on imperial peripheries, where patchwork consular justice systems and mobile, cosmopolitan populations impeded monitoring “undesirable” behaviour. Moreover, the management of marginal mobility, which often took the form of circular journeys between East and Southeast Asian port cities, was an overarching concern in British consular excavations of white criminality. The fragmented biographies of individual “undesirables” demonstrate how marginal British subjects exploited gaps in colonial administrative and justice systems, resisted consular intrusions, and actively shaped their life stories’ written records.

Logwood, a dyestuff extracted from its namesake tree native to the Yucatán Peninsula, was a commodity valued in the textile centres of early modern Europe. The trade in logwood began as an extractive endeavour attempted by merchants and former pirates on the margins of Spanish colonial authority, but by the late eighteenth century it had expanded to become a wide-reaching activity with connections to broader trends on both sides of the Atlantic. In the New World, the trade's growth fuelled Anglo-Spanish imperial rivalries and led to the introduction of slave labour to harvest dwindling logwood stands. The ecological consequences of human exchange also spread logwood's range to Caribbean islands, turning a frontier trade into a domesticated plantation industry. In the Old World, logwood was a versatile dye source that contributed to a range of hues. Initial regulations to protect consumers eased as dyers improved the quality of logwood dyes. The logwood trade expanded global textile supply chains and brought innovation to Europe's proto-industrial textile industry. It gave the continent's dyers new ways to meet consumer demand and spurred the development of mechanical methods to expedite refining.

This article describes the evolution of the commercial connections between China and the southern Sulawesian port of Makassar from the beginning of the seventeenth century until 1669, when the Dutch Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie conquered Makassar. It attempts to show that these connections went through several transformations. Initially direct Chinese shipping supplied Makassar with Chinese goods, but this direct trade lasted only about a decade. However, commerce carried by Macanese ships and trade in Indochinese ports that were frequented by both Sulawesian and Chinese vessels maintained the commercial connection. This connection in its different forms allowed Makassar to act as an entrepôt that supplied Chinese goods and Japanese copper to more distant parts of Southeast Asia, especially those in the eastern Indonesian archipelago. The article concludes by arguing that after the conquest of Makassar, Banjarmasin in southern Borneo developed as a new regional entrepôt connecting China to the eastern archipelago.

In 1897, a diplomatic incident involving a Straits Chinese trader in Amoy who was arrested by Qing authorities, despite his claims of being a British subject rather than a Chinese national, set into motion a series of public and private debates about British subjecthood and the rights that it ought to accrue to those that held said status. Drawing from contemporary accounts from the time, this paper investigates how Straits Chinese with the status of British subjects conceived of their subjecthood and understood their place in the British Empire and beyond. In particular, I make the case that Anglophile Straits Chinese understood British subjecthood as a form of what historian Daniel Gorman calls “imperial citizenship”: legal and juridical rights in exchange for loyalty to the Crown. Drawing from the wider new imperial studies scholarship which has made a compelling case for how being British went beyond legal definitions of status and incorporated a cultural identification with the symbols, language, and style of the empire, I contend that this conception of subject as citizen derived from a sense of cultural citizenship developed through the inculcation of cultural “Britishness” within sections of the community.

This special issue addresses the concealment of slavery and other forms of coerced labour. It brings together contributions from scholars working on different regions and time periods between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. The starting point is the observation that in the wake of abolitionism and imperial anti-slavery rhetoric, persisting areas of slavery and coerced labour became increasingly hidden. The term “hidden economies” helps to identify those areas that have been (and often still are) less visible for a variety of reasons, be it the development of shadow economies around them, the opacity of increasingly complex global supply chains, the remoteness of the region concerned, or the marginalisation of the economic sectors involved.

The history of European overseas expansion has traditionally been studied from a national perspective. However, the rise of Atlantic history, global history, and a revitalized maritime history has prompted scholars to question the rigidity of Early Modern borders assumed by these conventional national or imperial frameworks. In parallel, researchers have contested the state-centric viewpoint by advocating for an actor-focused approach to Atlantic System history, emphasizing the role of private merchants and their informal, international networks. These approaches have uncovered the involvement of entrepreneurs belonging to polities without a formal empire in the colonial ventures of other nations. This paper examines one such trans-imperial enterprise: Romberg & Consors, a firm operating from the Austrian Netherlands. During and after the American War of Independence (1775–83), Romberg & Consors leveraged evolving Spanish attitudes toward the slave trade and the establishment of neutral trade to organize slave trade expeditions to Cuba. By closely analyzing the operations of this Imperial firm, this study illuminates a decisive phase in Spanish imperial history while contributing to the often-overlooked Atlantic history of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Austrian Netherlands.

Rahmah bin Jabir (c. 1760-1826) is one of the most frequently mentioned persons in British sources from the Gulf in the first decades of the nineteenth century. He is also found throughout important Arabic-language chronicles. Despite his prominence in the sources, however, scholars have paid him relatively little attention, in either English or in Arabic. Though often cast as a pirate, this article argues that Rahmah bin Jabir was a political entrepreneur critical to shaping the international order of the Gulf in the first half of the nineteenth century. Reading against the grain of the colonial archive and synthesizing British sources with Arab chronicles, this article brings to life a textured political imaginary of the Gulf in the global age of revolutions, using Rahmah to weave overlapping political agendas between different emerging states, including the Omanis, the Saudi-Wahhabis, the Bahrainis, the Qataris, and the British. I suggest that Rahmah stands as one figure through whom historians can continue piecing together an age of revolutions in the Gulf that is more than Europe's emergence into modernity, one that highlights a complex and vibrant history of negotiation, endurance, and resiliency.

Gérants—plantation managers in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue—occupied a unique position as indispensable intermediaries and agents of a thriving hidden economy. Responsible for overseeing enslaved labour and maximising plantation productivity, they operated within the tensions of absentee ownership and the structural contradictions of the colonial economy. The cases of Binet and Arnaudeau, two gérants under absentee landlords, reveal how their autonomy facilitated fraudulent practices and illicit trade. These activities, driven by economic necessity and personal ambition, expose the complex interplay of trust, delegation, and exploitation at the heart of plantation life. By bringing these hidden economies to light, the role of the gérant emerges as central to both the economic prosperity of Saint-Domingue and the broader dynamics of colonial slavery and economic history.

This article deals with the French botanist Nicolas Joseph Thiéry de Menonville who in 1777 went to Oaxaca (Mexico) in search of cochineal. Although cochineal was one of the Spanish Empire's best-kept secrets, he managed to go there, acquire knowledge about its cultivation from local planters, and smuggle the insects on cacti to Saint-Domingue, where he successfully raised them. His voyage is, thus, a paradigmatic case that illustrates how botanical knowledge and objects from local Indigenous farmers were transferred into the networks of European science. The analysis of how the botanist managed to gain access to a space and knowledge that was actually closed to him is embedded within a broader contextualization: starting with the examination of its main source, Voyage à Guaxaca, the article reconstructs the scientific and economic discourse that led Thiéry de Menonville to undertake his voyage. It concludes with contemporaries' evaluation of Thiéry de Menonville's transfer of knowledge about cochineal and its cultivation and the impact that his successful mission had on comparable endeavors.

This essay, by revisiting the capitalism and slavery debate, explores the material relations between the Industrial Revolution and the crisis of Black slavery in the British Empire from the perspectives of critical theory and global history. After suggesting that the debate has made capital invisible as a category of historical analysis, I argue that the Industrial Revolution unleashed a process of widening trade circuits around the Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific within which the abolition debate should be understood. These new global circuits of trade became a powerful material mediation between the crisis of slavery in the West Indies; the rise of slavery in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil; and the advancement of New Imperialism in the East.

This study explores the first East Asian encounters with Western museums by travelers in the nineteenth century. In contrast with our contemporary familiarity with this institution, these travelers had to translate their new discovery into their own meaningful categories. In translating the word “museum,” East Asian travelers composed several words using Chinese character compounds that reveal much about their understanding of the concept in terms of their own culture and language. Moreover, the underlying conceptual categories they invoked shaped their perception of the displays they saw in the various museums they encountered. We see their struggle to settle on a shared term for “museum” so that Kume Kunitake (1839-1931), for example, differentiated the British Museum, the Mauritshuis Museum, and the Swedish Nationalmuseum by employing different common nouns. However, their insights, bewilderment, and even their “misunderstandings” offer us an opportunity to reconsider the modern museum from an external perspective.

Between 1847 and 1876, the textile factory Todos os Santos operated in Bahia. During these almost three decades, it was the largest textile factory in Brazil and came to employ more than four hundred workers. Until recently, many aspects of the factory’s labour force were hidden. There was a hegemonic narrative that all of these workers were free and waged individuals and that their living and working conditions were extremely progressive for the period. Meanwhile, there was a silence about the employment of enslaved people in the institution as well as a lack of in-depth analysis concerning the legally free workers. This article analyses labour at the Todos os Santos factory. On the one hand, it provides evidence on why the myth about the exclusive use of free and waged workers in the factory was formulated and the interests behind this narrative. On the other, through analysis of data from newspapers, philanthropic institutions, and legal and government documents, it reveals the profiles of the supposedly different classes of free and enslaved workers employed at Todos os Santos—men, women, and children of different colours—showing how complex, and often how similar, their living and working conditions were.

When Cuban sugar planters saw the abolitionist movement prevailing worldwide, they realised that African slavery was no longer a sustainable source of labour. They then searched the globe for substitutes, finding success in South China. The Chinese coolie trade to Cuba occurred between 1847 and 1874, during which time over 141,000 low-paid, low-skilled Chinese workers became indentured labourers. They sustained Cuban sugar production, among other vital economic activities. This paper examines how these Chinese workers contributed to Cuba’s labour transition from an enslaved to a free workforce. It argues that the substantial contributions of los colonos asiáticos, as the workers were known, went beyond their work in the sugar plantations: their minimally remunerated labour in key industries and usually unpaid work in public services made critical contributions to transforming the Spanish island’s economy and to meeting the ever-growing global demand for cash crops in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The 1943 Tour of Eight West African editors to London formed a major event in World War II United Kingdom–West Africa relations. The tour is often understood in terms of the symbolic importance of Azikiwe's landmark Memorandum on the Atlantic Charter. This article argues that we should reappraise our understandings of the tour and pay closer attention to African actors and networks beyond the Colonial Office. We must understand Britain as a periphery to a West African social, cultural, and political centre. The tour reveals how Britain was mediated in West African terms. Existing historiography focused on Azikiwe's Memorandum or decision-making within Whitehall has ignored both the importance of the tour in West Africa and the diversity of Africans in Britain involved in the tour. The present article focuses on African responses to the tour and, drawing on the historiography of print culture and wartime African mobilities, prioritises African-authored sources. Cumulatively, it situates the tour within an evolving historiography of global mobilities in WWII Nigeria. Rather than simply seeking to unite the metropole and colony in a single field, the article suggests that we must consider more deeply the ways that Africans provincialized the metropole, while centring African colonies.