This special issue aims to present empirically grounded reflections on concepts of exile, asylum, and refugee during the long Age of Revolutions, before the emergence of the modern international refugee regime. During this period, hundreds of thousands of people fled their homelands, prompting authorities and exiles themselves to reflect on and negotiate the status of newcomers and their rights and obligations. What it meant to be a refugee mattered, especially at a moment of imperial crisis and reconfiguration. Thus, building on the emerging field of refugee history, we ask: Who was a refugee, for what reasons, and with what concrete implications? How did one claim refugee status? Who was denied refugee status? How translatable were the concepts of refugee, exile, and asylum across societies? And what other terms might overlap with or replace the concept of refugee? To what extent did these concepts create distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of mobility, between desirable and undesirable newcomers to host societies? The contributors to this special issue explore these questions in a variety of historical and geographical contexts across the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds.

This special issue analyses how formal independence from colonial rule has impacted institutions and epistemologies of history writing in different parts of the world after 1945. The integrated collection of articles focuses on the transitions and ruptures of knowledge production taking place in the wake of states gaining their formal independence. It explores how different types of decolonisation led to different engagements with history writing, and by doing so we provide fresh perspectives on processes of knowledge decolonisation. In this introduction we situate the special issue in two bodies of literature: firstly, decolonial and postcolonial debates about history and epistemology, and secondly, the literature on the decolonisation process with a specific focus on memory and commemoration. We argue that a fuller understanding of the similarities and differences between knowledge decolonisation then and now requires solid historical contextualisation of the mid-century ideas and vocabularies.

Refugee and forced migration studies scholars largely ignore the early modern period when they discuss modern refugee crises, thus overlooking the transhistorical, cultural origins of refugee identity formation. Following Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, around 200,000 Huguenots fled France for the wider diaspora. Often depicted as republicans, if not anarchists, bent on the destruction of Christianity and the French sacral monarchy, Huguenots sought refuge for their own safety and in the process reimagined themselves first as religious refugees and then as political ones. As religious refugees, Huguenots like the theologian Pierre Jurieu donned the mantle of the Ancient Israelites, as a means to maintain their community against French purgation of the Calvinist sect. As political refugees, Huguenots like Rabaut Saint-Étienne developed several strategies at courting the favor of the Bourbon monarchy, many of which challenged the French sacral state to imagine itself in secular terms. In developing a political refugee identity, these Huguenots created the empathetic, cultural refugee, which could transcend religious affiliation in favor of promoting a national identity.

I examine the two careers of British colonial administrator and Pacific historian Henry Evans Maude (1906-2006) to illuminate continuities between the logic of late-imperialism and foundational modes of Pacific historiography. Maude worked as a colonial servant in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony from 1929, where he instigated two coerced resettlement schemes. In 1957, he joined the Department of Pacific History at the Australian National University, where he championed new modes of history writing tailored to the era of decolonisation—especially “island-centred” ethnohistory and “participant history.” I argue that Maude’s visions of empire and of the past were deeply linked, and that imbrications between the two informed the practices of an emerging professional Pacific history during the 1960s. Modes of history-writing that would come to be understood as critical of older imperial histories, or even as anti-colonial, had their origins in colonial structures. At the same time, both of Maude’s careers evinced a colonial notion of futurity; he understood himself as a benevolent expert able to guide Indigenous peoples into eventual independence.

In 1793, during the Haitian Revolution, the burning of Cap-Français led to the flight of thousands of people across the Atlantic World, many of whom ended up in French port cities. The French government decided to grant them financial relief, in the form of monthly amounts of money. However, the administrative category “colons de Saint-Domingue réfugiés en France,” depending on the period considered, did not encompass the same populations. This contribution examines how the requirements for relief evolved between 1793 and 1802, when Napoleon sent the Leclerc expedition to reassert his domination over Saint-Domingue. It shows the passage from legislation that granted relief to all the displaced imperial populations, including former slaves, to a more restrictive law focusing on property owners only during the Directory (1795–1799), and then to a racialised relief prioritising white owners at the end of the Consulate (1802). These restrictions were linked to the sacralisation of private property during the French Revolution, but were also symptomatic of the permanence of a colonial relation between Saint-Domingue and its metropole, leading to the creation of an “imperial nation” in which white owners were considered full citizens, whereas people of colour were relegated to the margins of the empire.

This paper examines the history-making of the first two Raffles Professors of History at the University of Malaya, C.N. Parkinson and K.G. Tregonning, to demonstrate the impact Malaya’s decolonisation had on the historiographical practices of the university’s History Department. It argues that both historians, animated by Malaya’s decolonisation, attempted to re-frame Malayan history – through adopting a ‘world-historical’ and ‘autonomous history’ framework respectively – to meet what they perceived were the needs of a post-independence multiracial Malaya. Although both historians claimed to be producing histories for an independent Malaya, and while their frameworks were indeed methodologically innovative, both historians ultimately produced histories that continued to frame Malayan history using western frameworks. They were thus partially decolonised historians writing partially decolonised histories for a partially decolonised Malaya.

With the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, thousands of people sought refuge in neighbouring British Jamaica, or ended up there as prisoners of war. This contribution examines how colonial authorities responded to a mass influx of people in a time characterised by political uncertainty. It sheds light on a system of registration employed in 1790s Jamaica to manage refugees and to gauge who would be entitled to assistance. This system was built on surveillance, categorisations of people, and a language of deservingness, made use of both by colonial administrators, on whose deliberations access to support effectively depended, and refugees in their own narratives. The article shows how refugee registration was not a top-down process but rather one that was actively influenced from below, as refugees themselves made use of the unclearness of categorisations and hijacked the system in order to gain access to specific sets of relief funds.

This article delves into the emergence of Havana as site of refuge for exiles from the Greater Caribbean between approximately 1790 and 1810. It examines the institutional and political governance of relief to Spanish and foreign exiles in Havana, looking at the intricate intersection between notions of imperial relief, loyalty, and subjecthood. It scrutinises the confluence of two waves of exile migration to Havana from the island of Hispaniola, underscoring how both migratory flows were intricately linked and influenced one another. One involved the exile of French settlers from Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), while the other entailed the relocation of Spanish-speaking settlers from Santo Domingo following the Treaty of Basel (1795), which officially ceded the Spanish colony to the French Republic. Through the lens of relief policies, this article shows how colonial officials in Cuba aimed to present an imperial self-image of benevolence towards Spanish subjects and foreigners in exile who were perceived as loyal to the Spanish crown. Focusing on the category of emigrados, this article correspondingly highlights the instrumental use by these exiles of concepts of imperial loyalty and subjecthood, and their role in claiming special entitlements to material and financial assistance from Spanish colonial authorities.

This article re-examines the relationship between two key historiographical traditions seeking an epistemological sovereignty at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) in the 1960s. The first, sometimes dubbed the “Dar school of historiography” and associated with Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere’s recruitment of Terence Ranger to build a new History department at the University, centred “African initiative” as the sine qua non of any approach to the continent that was serious about breaking with Eurocentric epistemologies and approaching African histories on their own terms. The second was “dependency theory” or “world systems theory,” for which UDSM became a centre as Dar es Salaam’s fame in global leftwing circles attracted Marxist academics like Walter Rodney, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Giovanni Arrighi. In contrast to the “Dar School,” these scholars worked at a distinctly global scale and future-oriented timeline. Comparing the epistemological approaches of these schools as different attempts at a meaningful decolonisation of knowledge, the article also re-embeds them in the material politics of the University at the time. For underneath UDSM’s two expatriate-driven “schools” was a gradual but significant decolonisation of the professoriat happening just below their scholarly radars – one in which Walter Rodney, not coincidentally, would play a major role.

In the 1790s, hundreds of refugees arrived in Philadelphia from revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Though it is well known that the Alien Acts were promulgated at least in part in reaction to the large French presence on US soil and the threat of war with France, other barriers to entry and to remain on US soil are not often connected to the arrival and presence of French refugees. Using records of the Philadelphia courts, prison, and almshouse, this article situates the French refugee experience within the early United States’ broader kaleidoscope of restrictions on mobility, assistance, and rights to remain. For the French Black population, their race and class rendered them especially vulnerable to forms of mobility control focused on criminals and the mobile poor. Though the French were not ultimately deported for their political activities, a small number of French Black refugees convicted of theft were set on the move once again.

Compared to most other cases of independence, the creation of Libya is generally regarded as a conservative outcome. Rather than being founded on a nationalist impulse, the United Kingdom of Libya derived its legitimacy from Islam, specifically following the path of the Sanūsiyya—one of the key symbols of anti-colonial resistance—whose religious leader became the first king of the new state. As a primarily religious movement, however, the Sanūsiyya’s influence was unevenly distributed across the country. Consequently, when Idris al-Sanūsī ascended the throne, his political legitimacy was not universally acknowledged. Within this context, both history and historiography played a strategic role in the construction and contestation of political legitimacy. This paper aims to analyse historiographical narratives produced during the 1940s and 1950s, viewing independence as a process that transcends the moment of its formal proclamation. The objective is twofold: first, to investigate the construction of a “Sanūsī epistemological sovereignty” through historical revision and the promotion of a pro-monarchist historiography; and second, to examine its role in legitimising the new state and in fostering a shared sense of identity and nationhood.

This paper traces enslaved people’s attempts at staking out liberty in Hamburg and attendant reactions by Hamburg inhabitants and authorities. It argues that in the decades before Hamburg’s anti-slavery laws were passed in 1837, treatment of people of African and Asian descent intersected strongly with ever-stricter alien laws. Based on extensive research in archival sources as well as newspapers and other printed material, the article contains two parts: First, it examines Hamburg’s few existent traces of attempted flights from slavery, pointing to conditions of escape and recapture. Second, the paper links these findings to Hamburg’s legal history leading up to its 1837 anti-slave-trade law, examining alien legislation, poor relief regulations, and domestic workers’ legislation. It also highlights how these policies affected individual lives. In combining legal historical and micro-historical/prosopographical approaches, the paper contributes to studies of Black German history, free soil policies, and questions around the policing of aliens.

The public sphere burgeoned in Korea with the country’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, but it took South Korean intellectuals almost two decades to begin questioning the vision of Korean history formed under Japanese influence. This article explores the decolonisation of Korean historiography as reflected in the leading intellectual magazine of the time, Sasanggye (1953–1970). The analysis demonstrates a rapid substitution of the Japanese knowledge system with the American one and a more gradual change in Sasanggye contributors’ attitudes toward history, from the unconditional application of Western standards to a desire to write a “subjective history” of Korea from their own perspective. Still, the epistemology remained only partially decolonised as many epistemes of the colonial era persisted in the circumstances of colonial education-induced myopia, overwhelming American influence, national division and rivalry with North Korea, as well as the even more partial decolonisation of politics, economy, and diplomacy.

Hong Kong’s history remains contested during its decolonisation. The colonial government of Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and historians at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) all attempted to interpret the past in their own right. This article argues that the contest for epistemological territory between the Chinese and British colonial governments led to the fragmented accounts of Hong Kong history in official curricula. Unlike other cases, Hong Kong’s decolonisation did not result in independence. Instead, the United Kingdom transferred the colony’s sovereignty to the PRC in 1997. Both sides attempted to showcase their right and ability to shape the colony’s past. Instead of having an ultimate “winner,” both occupied a share of the epistemological territory regarding historical knowledge, producing fragmented accounts of the past. The article also recovers and examines the agency of locally trained historians. These people of Hong Kong did not have any chance to produce their own “autonomous history” precisely because of the impossibility of independence. This process resulted in the partially decolonised yet censored historical narratives that persist in Hong Kong under Chinese rule. Through this case, this article calls for further discussion of what ‘decolonisation’ meant for actors beyond the state.

This article examines the resettlement of Algerians fleeing French colonial rule after 1830 in the Ottoman Empire (Palestine, Syria, and Anatolia) to analyse the formation of the legal and administrative category of muhacir. It argues that the Algerian case offers a privileged vantage point for understanding how this status emerged and was gradually consolidated over the nineteenth century. Because Algerians migrated over a long time span and were not the initial targets of Ottoman resettlement policies - initially designed for migrants from Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Balkans - their progressive inclusion into muhacir entitlements makes it possible to trace how this category expanded beyond its original contexts and became a standardized instrument of migration governance. The article shows that Algerians first received assistance through discretionary measures, before being progressively incorporated into a regime of standardized rights after the Crimean War (1853-6). Under Abdülhamid II, access to these rights increasingly became conditional upon Ottoman naturalisation and the renunciation of French colonial subjecthood, revealing how migration policy, legal status, and imperial sovereignty became tightly intertwined. By following Algerian migrants across the French and Ottoman imperial spaces, this paper highlights how late Ottoman migration policy functioned not only as a tool of population management, but also as a key site for the juridical redefinition of imperial belonging in an age of colonial expansion.

This article delves into the Republic of Colombia’s emigration policies and émigrés’ petitions to return to the new republican regime in the early 1820s. During the Spanish American Revolutions, thousands abandoned their homelands with the hope of eventually coming back. However, returning was not an easy endeavour. The influx of returnees sparked many questions for the nascent government. Consequently, émigrés and their relatives employed various strategies to facilitate the return of the former to Colombia. This article argues that the constant back-and-forth movements experienced by émigrés during the war allowed them to highlight the temporary condition of emigration and, therefore, to embrace or reject the status of émigrés strategically. Concerned by the doubts about their return, expatriates, many times, rejected the epithet of “émigré.” Aware of the politicization of the term, they emphasised that they did not abandon the country out of political loyalty but out of fear. Furthermore, they appealed to ideas of belonging to the republic, family reunification, and national reconciliation to advocate for their return and formal recognition as Colombian citizens. In doing so, expatriates left the label of “émigré” behind, challenging the Colombian government’s prior perception of emigration and promoting wider conceptions of republican citizenship.

The History of Mankind-project (HoM) was carried out from 1944–76 under the auspices of UNESCO with the aim of producing a non-eurocentric history of the world from prehistory to the present. The article analyses how the mid-century wave of independence changed the HoM-project. In hindsight a trajectory can be identified from decolonisation as a marginal concern to a new situation where decolonisation as political process and epistemological agenda influenced the HoM with respect to its political aims, organisational structure, the selection of authors, and the narrative of world history it presented. As such it is a clear story of how the end of empire altered how world history has been conceptualised and written. The article explores this theme across four HoM volumes and breaks fresh ground by investigating the agency of individual author-editors and the actual historical narratives they produced in the published volumes. We argue that the approaches and the organisation of the HoM were challenged as anti-eurocentrism in history writing became coupled increasingly to decolonisation and the quest for epistemological sovereignty.

In this article I discuss the issue of place in the creation of decolonised historiography and argue that the location from where a historian produces historiography matters in terms of both conceptual and ideological influences as well as in regards to material circumstances. Making use of a case-study on the UNESCO General History of Africa Project (1964-1998), I bring postcolonial critique on the conceptual nature of academic history writing into conversation with a study of the scholarly practice of the UNESCO project to show that conceptual critique has its limits if it does not take material circumstances into consideration. Political decolonisation in Africa was connected to history writing, thereby blending conceptual and material considerations. Secondly, I look at some of the discussions that were ongoing within the UNESCO project to show that the historians working on it discussed these issues amongst themselves and were aware of critique levelled against them. In doing so I argue that decolonisation of knowledge production as a result of becoming politically independent is a multivarious and ongoing process which has to take into account all these different elements.

This article discusses key tenets from the conceptual history of exile and asylum during the half-century around 1800. During this transformative period, political refugees took shape as a recognizable mass phenomenon, although they remained closely intertwined with other forms of migration and mobility, both free and unfree. Their often-tortuous itineraries occasioned manifold interactions with societies and states of origin, transit, and destination, remodeling preexisting concepts of exile, or generating new ones. As state bureaucracies, host societies, and mobile actors used these categories to negotiate status, access to protection, relief, compensation, and various layers of belonging, the contours of a transformative period in the conceptual history of refuge become apparent. This period was marked by a hybrid vocabulary, informed by both historical notions of (religious) asylum and by emerging concepts of politicized mobility and state membership; it was the period in which ancien régime ideas of deservingness were refracted by the prism of political loyalty, and in which relief practices could give way to large-scale reparation schemes; and a period in which a fuzzy vocabulary of asylum and alienness sustained, and complicated, the lines between insiders and outsiders in a world marked by an uneasy coexistence of empires and nation-states.