The drylands of the world constitute nearly half of our landmass (45%–50%) and provide a home to roughly 38% of humanity, or about 2.5 billion people. The drylands are arid to semi-arid, have highly variable precipitation and about 88% of the drylands are utilized as rangelands. This “dry half” of our world is commonly conceived as deforested and overgrazed, a worthless or empty wasteland that has been mismanaged for many years by destructive local populations. The received wisdom is that the drylands need to be “improved” with tree-planting, sedentarizing pastoralists, irrigated agriculture and more centralized control over environmental management. This article demonstrates that these common notions of the drylands and their people are misconceptions with a long history dating to before the colonial period. Moreover, most of these misconceptions are deeply rooted in arborocentrism, a tree-centric world view which sees trees as the “best” vegetation which belongs nearly everywhere, a view not informed by current science. Colonial ideas, especially desertification, have become institutionalized and continue to motivate development projects, like mass tree-planting, that are often misaligned with the biophysical and social realities of the drylands. The evidence reveals that drylands are valuable in many ways, play important roles in global geochemical cycles and the carbon cycle and many are high in biodiversity. Drylands are also very productive when local peoples like pastoralists and farmers are allowed to steward them with their indigenous knowledges, as they are frequently skilled at thriving with variability. All too often, though, governments and international political-economic forces use false desertification narratives to constrain local peoples from making the best uses of the drylands. The article concludes with a call to desert “desertification,” and the arborocentric notions embedded in the term, in order to liberate more scientifically accurate ways of thinking about the drylands, their inherent value and their management.

This special dossier examines how understandings of Andean glaciers transform under the planetary crisis, defined by humanity’s impact on geophysical processes at a planetary scale. Once regarded as remnants of deep geological time, glaciers have become emblematic casualties of anthropogenic global warming, their accelerated melting compressing geological history into human timescales and raising urgent ethical and political questions about protection, mitigation, and loss. This interdisciplinary collection, including contributions focused on Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and the wider region, calls for approaches that move beyond universalizing Anthropocene narratives and toward historically and territorially situated accounts of glacial change, challenging colonial and extractivist frameworks that have long shaped the governance of ice and nature. The introduction argues that dominant scientific and state-centered framings—rooted in objectivity, distant observation, and a physicochemical definition of ice—tend to abstract glaciers into universal, placeless indicators of global change, obscuring the local extractivist and colonial dynamics driving their destruction, particularly through mining of critical minerals for a green energy transition. Against this detached view, the dossier foregrounds situated, relational, and often Indigenous conceptions of glaciers as vital entities embedded in organic, social, and spiritual life.

In the academic literature on sports, cricket holds the distinguished title of “Game of the Empire.” The sport’s enduring presence across the former British imperial territories stands as a living testament to the role cricket played at the heart of this imperial project. However, I want to propose a different reading of the term empire and its associated sport. If we broaden our understanding and treat the concept of empire not only as a British historical project but also as a recurring modern formation, defined by a myriad of ways to exercise power and control beyond national borders, then cricket’s claim to the title becomes far less firm. Within this expanded understanding of empire, a stronger candidate emerges in golf. The latter followed the same early path as cricket but transcended the borders of the British Empire, becoming closely associated with US elites and the army for most of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, golf has become the game par excellence of global corporations and financial institutions. In this article, I contend that the title “Game of the Empire” should still be given to cricket, but the far-reaching and expansive title “the Game of Empire” is reserved only for golf.

Traveller, archaeologist, linguist, intelligence officer and political adviser: between 1915 and 1926, the year of her death, Gertrude Bell had a central role in the British Intelligence Office in West Asia (the Arab Bureau) and as a member of both the British and Iraqi administrations. Like many prominent figures of the European colonial past, her role in these events remains controversial. A fierce supporter of Arab independence but a British imperialist nonetheless, her political position within the country to which she dedicated a good portion of her life was marked by contradictions. One key area was the management of Iraqi cultural heritage. This article analyses and contextualises Bell’s actions in this field, not just within the boundaries of Iraq, as has previously been done, but within the broader context of British and French influence in the Mandates established after the First World War. In this way, we can place Bell’s policies into a coherent ideology alongside the contemporary debates on the fate of archaeological heritage, while following her path from ‘unofficial’ and ‘unimportant’ to an accomplished ‘person’.

While Mexico today is often characterised as ‘tequila country’, the most important alcoholic beverage both during the pre-colonial and the Spanish era was pulque, the fermented sap of the agave plant. In addition to holding ritual significance, pulque served a pragmatic purpose: it is nutritious, can replace food and water, and features high microbial diversity. This paper explores how – under colonial rule – pulque was characterized as ‘low-class’, but also became an important revenue source. While it was discursively linked to problems regarding public hygiene or ‘pagan’ religions, for many Mexicans pulque was irreplaceable. During the 1700s, a veritable pulque boom saw both enormous investments and state revenues related to this beverage.

Political turmoil resulting in Mexico’s independence led to a decrease in production and consumption of pulque, before the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a return to widespread popularity; this was closely linked to improved infrastructure, especially railroads that could transport the rapidly spoiling beverage to customers living further away from production areas. During the authoritarian rule of Porfirio Díaz (1876 to 1911), pulque continued to dominate the alcohol market, but beer consumption sharply increased. Domestic cerveza production was supported through strict tariff policies as well as the integration of foreign know-how and capital. From the late 1800s onwards, discourses on ‘progress’ and national identity often focused on consumption patterns and lifestyles, with pulque being singled out as an archaic menace to society. Beer, on the other hand, became the epitome of a ‘modern’ Mexico – especially in the decades following the revolution (1910/1911).

The complex relationship between women and colonialism is a popular topic of study. Women’s position within a society was often seen by imperialists as a yardstick for civilization and progress, and many European and American women found their purpose in “emancipating” indigenous women. Nineteenth-century Thailand (then known as Siam) occupies a peculiar place within this discussion, as Siamese women were often regarded as having relatively favorable social, economic, and legal positions. Although Siam was never formally colonized, imperialism still profoundly affected the country and, by extension, Siamese women. To clarify this relationship between women and colonialism in Siam, this article draws on the writings of women missionaries in the magazine “Woman’s Work for Woman” published by the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the American Presbyterian Church. While these women travelers came to Siam with a feminist mindset of helping their Asian “sisters,” they were complicit in spreading imperial ideas and power, even in Siam, which was nominally independent. Their travel writings were also used to produce knowledge and depict Siamese women in ways that support American-centric and imperial ideologies. This study extends discussions of the relationship between feminism and imperialism beyond formally colonized societies.

During the early Cold War, Canada’s Northern Co-ordination and Research Centre (NCRC) employed anthropologists and other ethnographers to make Inuit legible to northern administrators. The government sought information that would demonstrate how well Inuit were adapting to life in the newly established and permanent government-administered settlements. Research in Iqaluit, then known as Frobisher Bay, was assigned to Toshio Yatsushiro, a Japanese-American anthropologist who had previously participated in anthropological studies of interned Japanese and Japanese-Americans. Yatsushiro spent two summers (1958 and 1959) in Iqaluit with the goal of documenting the extent to which Inuit were adopting the cultural norms, values, and lifestyles of Euro-Canadians. Although Yatsushiro never completed his intended project, his published and unpublished writings identify specific ways in which Canada’s post-war administration of Inuit communities and its efforts to acculturate Inuit to southern Canadian ways of living were failing Inuit. Archival documents, interviews with NCRC anthropologists, and Yatsushiro’s published and unpublished writings reveal his disillusionment with the authoritarian practices of government officials in the North. His ethnographic observations and recommendations, coloured by his own experiences of internment, were dismissed by government officials as inaccurate and irrelevant.

This article examines the significance of ‘Chinese affairs’—both a quasi-ethnographic body of knowledge and a branch of colonial government that generated and circulated such knowledge—during the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960). First developed in the pre-war decades through the Chinese Protectorate, Chinese affairs was revived in the late 1940s as the colonial authorities sought to understand the links between rural Chinese communities in Malaya and communist guerrillas, as well as the influence of a newly founded People’s Republic of China. I will first examine the institutional reordering of Chinese affairs in Malaya via an office called the Chinese Secretariat following the outbreak of the emergency. I will then undertake a close reading of one of the main outputs of the Chinese Secretariat, namely the Monthly Review of Chinese Affairs. This internal periodical provides us with important insights into the ways in which Chinese affairs knowledge about topics such as ‘the Chinese family’ or ‘the Chinese peasant’ was deployed in support of the counter-insurgency needs of the colonial state. While Chinese affairs as a branch of government ceased to operate in the mid 1950s, Chinese affairs as a form of knowledge continued to influence studies of ‘the Chinese’ in Malaya for many years thereafter.

This article explains why opposition movements in the Middle East cycle between radicalization and moderation over long periods. I argue that twentieth-century colonization shaped both exclusionary state institutions and radical opposition groups, structuring how later episodes of inclusion and exclusion influenced movement strategies. The paper explains subsequent oscillations through a single core mechanism: shifting factional balances of power. State inclusion and exclusion redistribute influence between moderates and radicals, generating shifts between confrontation and accommodation. I develop and evaluate the theory through longitudinal process tracing of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt and the Iraqi Communist Party, supplemented by shadow cases illustrating colonial presence (Palestine) and absence (Turkey), using evidence from 96 semistructured interviews, archival materials, and participant observation conducted between 2021 and 2024 in Palestine, Iraq, and Turkey. By foregrounding temporality and factional dynamics, the article reframes debates on Islamist moderation and authoritarian durability as path-dependent and iterative processes rather than linear transformations.