Moving away from the grassroots version of events, this chapter explores the official colonial narratives created about the 1935 rebellions and the nature of British imperialism, arguing that the colonial government essentially operated as an extension of the sugar estates. Because of the entrenchment of racial stereotypes, the cross-racial cooperation fundamental to the rebellions seemed implausible to colony officials and was therefore rendered invisible. This chapter demonstrates the racial and ideological anxieties of colonialism itself and the global fractures within the British Empire during this period, where activists made connections between fascism and colonialism.

Between December 1671 and the summer of 1672, the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) addressed what amounted to a call for a new crusade against Egypt to the French king, Louis XIV. Leibniz’s Projet de conquête de l’Egypte deliberately situated its appeal in the history of French crusading, played upon the king’s piety and evoked the defeat of St Louis IX’s Egyptian crusade (1248–54) as a failure to be redressed. Devised partly as an attempt to divert the French from war in the Netherlands and partly as a call to unify Western Christian monarchs against a common foe on behalf of his employer, the Elector of Mainz, Leibniz’s plan seems never to have reached the French king.

Commercial opportunism played a central role in the development of popular military history after 1854. The potential readership for such material grew as the literacy rate of the public increased and as book markets in the colonies emerged. Declining book production costs and the general reading public’s greater awareness of current events, due to the emergence of a cheap popular press, further drove up demand. As a result, publishers and authors responded by producing ‘instant’ and serialised historical works on recent military events which were cheap and accessible. The popularity of this material led it to be used to influence the reading public’s understanding of military matters, defence policy and the British Empire. As the period progressed, the messaging popular military history contained underwent considerable change, reflecting the complexity of contemporary views on the British Army and empire.

Marxism is one of the three mainstream approaches in International Relations, along with realism and liberalism. Unlike the other two, Marxism acts as a critical theory that focuses on the hierarchical structure of the international system, driven by capitalist development and expansion. Since the early twentieth century, Marxists have used the concept of imperialism to analyse this structure. The first major debate on imperialism was about the expansion of European capitalism into non-capitalist societies, which was a key issue until the 1970s. Since then, the focus has shifted to analysing imperialism in the era of neoliberal globalisation and understanding why the interstate system endures despite the capitalist drive for global unification. The international relations of the Middle East have been featured in these debates among Marxists. The chapter first explains the basic concepts of Marxism as developed by Karl Marx. It then covers classical and contemporary theories of imperialism along with recent developments in Marxist geopolitics, while situating the Middle East into these discussions. Critics often argue that Marxism tends to overlook regional dynamics and powers. To address this criticism, the chapter examines Iran as a sub-imperial, peripheral power, exploring its role in the Syrian war.

Chapter 5 uncovers the overlooked role of cargo in shaping the rise – and decline – of the cartographic worldview that international lawyers take as natural. The chapter demonstrates that Europe’s early modern pursuit of cargo was the material engine behind the emergence of statist cartography. Through the carraca, Ptolemaic coordinates, and imperial planispheres, cargo-seeking fused with geometric representation to naturalize a proprietary image of the Earth as a divisible, appropriable whole.

The chapter then traces the unravelling of this cartographic order. Contemporary mobilities have given rise to pointillistic geographies structured by electronic coordinates, not contiguous borders. Technologies generate a trans-territorial topology where power operates through nodes, corridors, gateways, and data points rather than planar sovereignty. The emblematic object of this shift is no longer the carraca but the intermodal cargo container, which has reorganized global production and accumulation into a vast, continuously circulating containerscape.

This transition challenges the cartographic ontology that continues to anchor jurisdictional reasoning in International Law. Recognizing this shift reveals how authority, appropriation, and world-making now function through logistical infrastructures that exceed the representational capacities of the inherited “World Map.”

Through a series of readings in the modernist and non-modernist Persian and Turkic verse of the twentieth-century communist East, both Middle Eastern and Central Eurasian, this chapter explores how different repertories of poetic forms modeled the transregional literary connections in which their authors and texts participated. The modernist poems discussed in this chapter are among the most famous short works of two of the Middle East’s leading modernists, Nâzım Hikmet and Nīmā Yūshīj, while the neoclassical, neoromantic, or otherwise non-modernist poems are more obscure occasional works, although their authors are important in their respective national canons: the Iranians Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī and Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār, the Uzbek Zulfiya Isroilova, and the Azerbaijani Samad Vurghun. This latter cluster of poems is chosen in order to show how much the geopoetics of high modernism in Persian and Turkic owed to communist poetic and rhetorical systems that were at least as ubiquitous, but which have received far less attention from Western scholars.

In 1974 a group of radical economists based around Boston created an economic affairs bulletin, Dollars & Sense. The periodical was one of among many publishing initiatives originating in the academic New Left, such as Radical America, as it was the inheritor of a longer tradition of independent socialist publications, such as the Monthly Review. The bulletin blended the genres of the underground press of the 1960s and academic publishing. Its reporting was often centered on labor struggles and on international affairs, but it was also occupied by commenting and challenging the views propagated by the business and national press. Over decades Dollars & Sense was a companion in social justice campaigns and a school for graduate students and faculty who learned how to write to a mass audience.

The global turn in Modernist Studies has emphasized the connection between literary modernism’s unique aesthetic practices and the politics of a given modernity. In the Turkish experience of modernity, the question of how to differentiate the identity of the new nation from its predecessor the Ottoman Empire was at the heart of debates about the role of literature and aesthetics. Even though the empire had formally ended with the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, legacies of imperialism fundamentally shaped debates over how literature of the new nation should be written. In this chapter, Kaitlin Staudt suggests that the relationship between modernist literary aesthetics and the literary representation of imperialism in the early Turkish Republic was rooted in global imperial power relations.

The third arrest was of Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh), since Ducroux’s address book led police directly to him. Nguyen’s arrest was critical not only because police were getting closer and closer to the FEB network in Shanghai (he reported directly to Rudnik), but because his incarceration by British police in Hong Kong demonstrated so clearly the vitriolic anti-communism of the imperial powers (especially Britain and France). Nguyen’s arrest also provided an example of the ways Soviet networks functioned to free important agents.

This chapter concentrates on two authors, two contexts, and two works: US schoolteacher Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1881) and British-Indian author Rokeya Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” (1905). Extrapolating the techno-social emergence of female ballooning in the nineteenth-century United States and India, the chapter argues that the two feminist utopias intersect social and environmental freedom. Lane employs the underground setting popularised by Bulwer-Lytton to house a techno-feminist civilization controlling the climate at will, while Hossain describes the diffuse, oneiric terrain of Ladyland in which climate control supports a garden world. Comparing the two different feminist utopias and contexts, both marked by feminist aviation and atmospheric interventions, the chapters showcase the socio-political character of anthropogenic climate change: Hossain’s climate utopia is caring, inclusive, and decolonial, whereas Lane’s is cynical, exclusive, and imperialist.

This chapter examines the reciprocal development of climate understanding and intervention in the long nineteenth century. It studies the colonial practices of deforestation, cultivation, and drainage that philosophers and politicians such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Baron de Montesquieu, Comte de Buffon, and Johann Gottfried Herder hoped would induce a global, Westernised utopia of climatological temperance. It examines how the emergence, institutionalisation, and development of the scientific practices, theories, and models of climatology provided empirical documentation of climate as a global system subject to natural as well as anthropogenic change. Providing a century-long history of science, it concludes that John Tyndall’s small-scale investigation and Svante Arrhenius’s large-scale calculation of the heat-trapping agency of carbon dioxide led to the emerging insight that the global climate needed anthropogenic correction.

When Rudnik and Moiseenko were handed over to the Guomindang, the Comintern directed the Berlin-based communist media tycoon, Willi Münzenberg, to initiate a global publicity campaign to shame the Guomindang into releasing them. He willingly complied, and enlisted his Shanghai-based friends Soong Ching-ling (widow of Sun Yat-sen) and the American journalist Agnes Smedley to help him. Quickly, the team created a media storm both in Shanghai and across the world, and persuaded thousands of famous and influential people to protest against Rudnik and Moiseenko’s arrests. These efforts angered and embarrassed the Guomindang government, which in turn decided to leak all the incriminating documents found with the couple to the newspapers.