This article examines debates about the future of health coordination between French African colonies in the era of decolonisation. These debates illuminate tensions over the future of French doctors in Africa, the role of international organisations, and the meaning of colonial borders for public health. In the late 1950s, French officials sought to reformulate inter-territorial colonial medical structures in a way that could be sustained with African independence, resulting by the 1960s in the creation of new West and Central African regional health organisations. Newly appointed African health ministers supported these organisations for various reasons, including sharing costs of medical infrastructure and the idea of a French debt that could be addressed through technical assistance. Both French and African health officials in turn naturalised the idea of post-colonial health coordination between former French colonies, regardless of shared borders with other African states. Both French and African health officials used the rhetoric of “disease knows no borders” to engage in a process of health “region-making,” although the outcome was health coordination rooted less in epidemiological realities than colonial histories. Late colonialism catalysed change in public health and medicine that mirrored broader political developments but also produced distinct discourses, agendas, and institutions.

This article considers the ambivalence of late colonial race politics in France and French Africa through the life and work of celebrated ethnographic filmmaker and pioneer of cinéma vérité, Jean Rouch (1917- 2004). Part of a special issue on late colonialism in Africa, this study shifts the focus from the continent itself to the legacies of late colonialism in Africa for race relations in postcolonial Europe.

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.

This paper focuses on diplomatic training as a site for exploring the tensions in late colonialism around sovereignty and self-government. Training for the diplomats of soon to be independent states was understood by imperial governments as an ambiguous issue in this period immediately pre-independence: it offered the potential for the former metropole to sustain power and influence within a rapidly changing world, whilst at the same time challenging the very foundations of imperialism by empowering the diplomats of soon to be independent African states. Drawing on archives in France, the UK, and the US, as well as a newly recorded oral history interview with one of the first cohort of Ghanaian trainees, we focus on the development of diplomatic training from ad hoc responses to requests to a more formalised programmes provided by imperial powers and the United States, and tensions and competition between providers and over the content of the courses. We focus primarily on the Gold Coast/Ghana, contextualised within wider experiences of African colonies in both the British and French empires. We demonstrate that training for diplomats provides novel insights into the temporalities, spatialities, and agency that characterised the late colonial state.

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.

For a brief moment in the late-1950s, British policymakers and key African politicians shared a vison: an East African Federation of Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda. For British officials, one of the leading advantages would be transforming the colonial King’s African Rifles into a federal army. This aspect of the plans has rarely been recognised, but this article shows that British planning for the KAR became inextricably intertwined with federal thinking. Late colonialism was a time of alternative federal visions in addition to increased interventionism as British officials foresaw the end of colonial rule and sought to remake African institutions. A federal army was a key aim in such plans. This article argues that although no federation or federal army came into being, planning for them substantively shaped the military inheritance of the region at independence. Uganda and Tanganyika achieved independence with armies that were not fully autonomous, while Kenya took most of the shared colonial facilities. Thus, the article highlights the impact late colonial plans could have even when these did not come to fruition.

Nineteenth-century East Africa experienced a first and last, rather than second, efflorescence of slavery. Legal abolition occurred late, between 1897 and 1922. Nevertheless, unlike in many other formerly slave-owning societies, most slave descendants here do not form distinctive, marginalized communities today. Still, they hesitate to acknowledge slave ancestry. This paper investigates the dynamics behind this ambivalent outcome. Comparing two regions in today’s Tanzania, it argues that the role of colonial-era integration into global commodity markets varied between locations, and while it contributed to the obsolescence of slavery, it was neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for ending slavery and mitigating ex-slave marginality. Rather, ex-slaves’ efforts to acquire unspoiled identities profited from a range of factors, including the chaos of conquest and the First World War, the political and economic repercussions of both these events, and later the depression, on formerly slave-owning elites, and the wide availability of new religious identities. Since a majority of ex-slaves in the region were women, much renegotiation of status occurred within households, relating to markets indirectly.

The field of Atlantic history initially focused exclusively on the Anglo-American North Atlantic, largely ignoring the South Atlantic and Africa. This approach, dominant after World War II, portrayed a “Western civilization” based on North Atlantic liberal values, akin to a postwar Mediterranean. Over time, historians of the Anglo-American Atlantic criticized this narrow focus, recognizing the broader interconnectedness of the Atlantic world. Recent decades have seen a shift, with more historians acknowledging the Atlantic as a complex, interconnected space involving four continents. Particularly notable is the rise of studies on the South Atlantic, especially regarding science and empire in the Iberian world. These studies highlight the significant role of Spain and Portugal, challenging the previously North Atlantic-centered narrative. This research has revealed that the Atlantic world was as much, if not more, shaped by Spanish and Portuguese influences as by English ones. The reviewed works exemplify this shift, focusing on the South Atlantic's imperial entanglements and the African diaspora in the Caribbean.

This article investigates the introduction of human rights reforms in late colonial Africa, a period defined by the disintegration of European colonial rule. While existing scholarship often attributes these reforms to European efforts to ensure a smooth transition to independence, foster post-colonial stability, and address post-war geopolitical challenges, such analyses frequently overlook the agency of indigenous nationalist leaders and anti-colonial activists. These groups perceived the reforms as strategically motivated maneuvers by departing colonial powers and engaged with them accordingly. Focusing on the decolonisation era in Africa, this study argues that both colonisers and the colonised approached human rights rhetoric primarily as a tool for pragmatic objectives rather than as an expression of ideological commitment to human rights norms. European powers framed these reforms as altruistic, yet their underlying motivations were rooted in political and economic interests. Conversely, African leaders appropriated human rights discourse to expose colonial hypocrisy and advance their political agendas. This engagement underscores the tension between universal human rights ideals and the pragmatic realities of political strategy (realpolitik) during a transformative period in the development of the international human rights framework. It also highlights how political calculations constrained the realization of universal human rights principles such as dignity, equality, and inalienability.

Caroline Dodds Pennock, Ned Blackhawk, and Esteban Mira Caballos published three paradigm-shifting works in 2023 that flip deeply ingrained narratives of Indigenous Americans’ presence at home in the hemispheric Americas and abroad in Europe. Pennock's book introduces scholarly shifts towards a global Indigenous presence and reframes Europe On Savage Shores where Indigenous travellers arrived on their own accord in largely forgotten encounters; Blackhawk reimagines official United States history which often omits Indigenous peoples by making them its moving force in The Rediscovery of America; and Mira Caballos conversely breaks down stereotypical attitudes toward Indigenous travellers in Spain by evincing their transatlantic journeys to Iberia in El Descubrimiento de Europa (The Discovery of Europe). All three works are mutually reinforcing in their mission to dismantle popular beliefs rooted in imaginative, racist, and antiquated narratives rather than historically verified reality. They are critical for both the academic and public transformation of the history of Indigenous peoples in Northern Europe, Iberia, and the United States. They propose a necessary and well-founded revision of their respective historiographic traditions, all originating from models predicated upon the paradigm of European discovery which these authors successfully turn on its head.

The fourteenth century Indian Ocean world saw a rapid increase in seaborne trade, which led to developing port cities and new centres of power. These port cities sometimes became the capitals of emergent states which broke away from the traditional pattern of landed states and established their own spheres of influence over land-and-sea realms. One such emergent state was the polity centred on Raigama and Kotte in southwestern Sri Lanka, which gained prominence in the region thanks to the port policies followed by its rulers, the Alakeshwara family. This research analyses the rise of this state in the context of the Indian Ocean custom of the ‘right of the port,’ which allowed merchant groups like the Alakeshwaras to establish taxation and sovereignty over an area. This also presents an alternative perspective from which the politics of the kingdoms of Sri Lanka can be reframed and understood, breaking away from the internal logic of ceremonial succession and historical inevitability.

This article discusses how the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) shaped notions of rural life, rural community, and social reform in the context of South and Southeast Asian decolonisation. Building on scholarship analysing rural development either in term of continuities from the colonial era or as the result of specific circumstances after the Second World War, the argument here is that we can understand approaches to rural welfare after 1945 as the historical intersection of three factors: the rural specificities of decolonisation related to violence and mass displacement; FAO seeking relevance and legitimacy in the post-war order; and urban and rural elites objectifying rural life as a cornerstone of post-imperial nation-building. Empirically, the article analyses two (former) British colonies that experienced two different forms of decolonisation: territorial partition and imperial warfare. It relates these modes of decolonisation to the early formations of FAO’s rural expertise and argues that decolonisation was a structuring event for both local rural policy-making and the evolving international (rural) development agenda.

We carried out research into nineteen century Dutch logbooks, especially a series of naval logbooks kept at the National Archive in the Hague. It is voluminous archive, with its 500 metres containing an enormous amount of data. Our initial concern was meteorological data recorded in logbooks. We have digitized part of the archive, for six ships with a duration of about one hundred months, in order to reconstruct the climate of the past. Also in the process of this archival research, we became gradually aware of much wider and various implications this archive has as historical material. We decided to make our preliminary digitization open-access at the JCDP (Japan-Asia Climate Database Program) website. We hope that this will be more widely used by those who have historical concerns about maritime history, the history of environment in Asia and around Japanese seas, Dutch-Japanese relationships, and Dutch overseas history.