The exchange of raw cotton and consumer textiles has been widely portrayed as a core element of European imperialism in Africa. The case appears straightforward: textile industries were vital to European economies, yet depended on imported raw cotton and external markets for their surplus output. To meet these needs, colonizers allegedly enforced trade and destroyed African textile sectors, leaving Africans to resist or be coerced. This stylized rendering of ‘cotton imperialism’ was central to metropolitan rhetoric promoted by textile sector lobbyists and government officials, and often remains unchallenged in scholarship today. I show, however, that it is at odds with actual colonial efforts and outcomes across twentieth-century Africa. Colonial cotton and textile trade did expand, but in ways hardly consistent with the aims of European industries, and even textile sector actors themselves showed limited and inconsistent commitment to cotton production in Africa. Policies on the ground were shaped above all by fiscal, administrative, and political priorities in the colonies. Metropolitan rhetoric mattered, but shaped colonial policies and practices only in muted and subverted ways.

This article considers the history of Emergency Health Kits established by United Nations agencies and the larger medical non-governmental organizations of the 1980s to analyse the significance of standardized responses in humanitarian emergencies. We argue that, far from being a rigid and immutable response, the kits reflected a (not universally realized) desire to standardize and control both supplies and medical care from international organizations. As such, humanitarian medical practice remained a disputed field in which each object or drug was negotiated at the risk of creating innovation traps. Coming at a time of increasingly global logistics capacities, the Emergency Health Kits became a central feature of a more coordinated global marketplace of humanitarian aid. The kits’ promise to provide rapid transport of emergency supplies to crisis settings across the world was often experienced as a construct, with long delays and logjams in certain regions. Even so, humanitarian organizations were agents of globalization because they imagined a system of centralized production in the Global North and supply to isolated and/or insecure locations across the world.

Between the 1890s and the 1940s, a diverse group of Chilean diplomats, businessmen, and intellectuals sought to convert Japan into a principal consumer of Chile’s struggling nitrate fertilizer industry (saltpetre). The commercial effort to revive Chile’s export development model through Japanese markets also evolved into an intention to emulate Japan’s formula for sturdy nation-building and for fortifying the economic sovereignty against North Atlantic capital. Ultimately, this article situates Chilean–Japanese relations within a global moment of decolonization and development that sought to reform North Atlantic dominion over international affairs. That Latin American nation- and order-building were shaped not only by the binary embrace or rejection of models from the United States and Europe, but also by ideas from Japan, the Pacific, and Latin America itself, illustrates the possibilities for and sophistication of Global South designs for international engagements and development, even if their counterfactual imaginaries did not always materialize as intended.

This article is about how Calcutta’s image as the world’s foremost crisis city was constructed from the mid-1950s, and how it came to be used by a broad political spectrum—from the American left and right to, allegedly, Fidel Castro—for rationalizing a variety of positions on urban development. This hyperreal Calcutta was the product of a global conjuncture which centred on Western, mainly American, anxieties about how large cities of the Global South could destabilize the postwar world order and development paradigms. It influenced global urban development by challenging the anti-urban bias of development institutions of the 1950s and bolstering the case for state-led interventions thereafter. However, from the mid-1970s, Calcutta’s ‘refusal to die’ became an example used by the American right to argue in favour of planned shrinkage and benign neglect of cities. Calcutta’s resonance in global debates on urban issues lay in the city’s confrontation with ‘life’ and ‘death’ which helped mask divisive issues such as race and immigration in discussions about American and Western cities.

What role did nomadic and non-settled societies play in the early twentieth-century world economy? Exploring a remote mountain valley close to the border between the Russian and Qing empires, this article investigates the multiscalar history of the Karkara trade fair and its Kazakh and Kyrgyz pastoralist communities. Although at first sight incongruous given its remote location, this market was in fact one of the most significant fairs in the entire Russian empire. Tracing dynamic circuits of exchange on local, regional, and trans-imperial scales across northern Eurasia and beyond from the 1890s to 1916, the article argues that ecological perspectives are essential if we are to understand the anatomy of global capitalism in the valley, and that the shifting relationship between environment, economy, and political power as the Russian imperial state sought to use the fair as a site of control and regulation created frictions that proved deeply corrosive. Throughout, the article underscores the need to re-evaluate the often overlooked importance of pastoralist societies and seemingly remote rural places in the early twentieth-century global economy and in modern Eurasian history.

Despite the prevalence of slavery in world history, our understanding of its persistence remains limited. Most previous studies focus primarily on slavery as a labour contract, indistinguishable from other coercive arrangements such as serfdom. More recent literature on slavery in the United States shows that enslaved people also played an important role as financial instruments. In this article, we extend the investigation by comparing slavery in the United States with that in Brazil and the Cape Colony. We show that despite significant geographic, demographic, and economic differences, slavery was not merely a labour arrangement in the three cases but a unique institution that gave enslavers complete rights over mobile property. Slavery provided access to both labour and capital, with the capital investment dimension being key to understanding its persistence. We argue that understanding slavery’s persistence requires recognizing enslaved people as both sources of labour and capital investment.

During the 1960s, the Malaysian prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, struggled to establish the ‘Muslim Commonwealth’, an organization of Muslim-dominated sovereign states. This international programme for Muslim unity was particularly significant because it offered an opportunity for an unexpected player from outside the Islamic heartlands of the Middle East and South Asia to seize the leadership of the global religious community. This article recovers the project’s genealogy, objectives, and reception. In the global context of decolonization and the Cold War, the Tunku looked to the British-led Commonwealth of Nations to model this pan-Islamic institution in an attempt to promote cooperation, development, and peace among Muslims. He deployed a range of idioms to broaden the appeal of the Muslim Commonwealth, drawing from different intellectual genealogies and from an international circuit of ideas prevalent during decolonization. The eventual failure of the Tunku’s project exposes the hierarchies and rivalries in South–South relations during the decade and reveals how Malaysian-led pan-Islamism remained bound to the post-colonial condition of the nation-state.

Examining an all-but-forgotten episode of large-scale protest at the 1970 annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Copenhagen, Denmark, this article asks how officials at the World Bank understood and reacted to such protest. How did they characterise the protestors’ demands in the moment? Why and how did they feel the need to respond, and what strategies did they use to do so? And what does that response tell us about how officials at the World Bank understood about the relationship between development and social upheaval? Using heretofore unexamined institutional records, this article argues that already in 1970, World Bank officials were deeply concerned with public opinion about their institutions in both the developed and developing worlds—and therefore found themselves having to reckon with the riots that threatened to derail not just their meetings, but their mission.

Folk magic practices were common across the early modern Spanish Empire, including in seventeenth-century Manila where dozens of Asian herbalists and other practitioners of magic offered magical solutions in affairs of the heart and matters of fortune and divination to their mostly Spanish clients. At the centre of these folk magic activities were a group of Ternaten captives of war, relatives of the Sultan Saïd Berkat Syah, who was taken hostage by the Spanish during their invasion of Ternate in 1606. While the capture of Sultan Saïd by the Spanish in 1606 is well known within the historiography of the Maluku Islands, the presence of the Ternaten hostages within Manila in the early seventeenth century remains absent from the history of the port city. This article explores the lives of these Ternaten hostages, arguing that their spellcasting activities represent a hidden transcript of politics and power among previously marginalised historical subjects.

This article examines a collection of colour portraits housed in the Archives de la Planète in Paris. The portraits depict a group of Indian pan-Islamists who spent several months in Europe in 1920 advocating for more lenient terms for the Ottoman Empire—the seat of the Caliphate—in the peace settlement that followed the First World War. Europe, and particularly Paris, provided these Indians with opportunities to encounter numerous other Muslims from across the so-called ‘Muslim world’, some of whom also sat for portraits that now form part of the Archives de la Planète. By drawing on recent scholarship on colonial photography, global embourgeoisement, and interwar world-making, this article contextualises these portraits within a broader historical framework. While surface similarities between the images might suggest this was a moment of growing convergence, the Indian pan-Islamists’ textual accounts of their European encounters reveal deep intellectual and political divisions. In this moment of heightened global mobility and connection, the Muslim world emerges as a heterotopic space, containing and reflecting a multitude of competing realities and intersecting subjectivities.