Atlantic history has become fashionable as a way of linking the histories of Europe and the Americas. However, much work in Atlantic history does little to challenge the national biases of traditional colonial and imperial history. This article argues that gender provides an important conceptual tool for a trans-imperial and comparative exploration, just as it provided important conceptual structures for all the peoples of the Atlantic world. An examination of the research on two gendered issues – work, and family and sexuality – demonstrates that while Europeans attempted to impose their ideas on the various societies that they encountered in Africa and the Americas, such attempts were rarely successful. Gender not only provides the basis for a trans-imperial analysis of the Atlantic world but also enables us to reorient our scholarly perspective in the Atlantic, highlighting the agency of non-European peoples and exposing the limits of European patriarchy.

This article examines three diasporic campaigns orchestrated by Middle Eastern political entrepreneurs in Paris, New York, and Cairo, in the years bookending the First World War. Mobilizing across borders, their organizers were exemplary denizens of the transnational public sphere created by Ottoman migrants from the 1880s onwards. Exponents of globalism, they regarded the body politic as a diasporic construct unconstrained by territory. Furthermore, they saw the associations that they founded both as instruments of civility capable of reforming society and as practical political vehicles, mouthpieces for the claims that they communicated to the ‘community of nations’ through petitions and telegrams. Such strategies of appeal suggest that many of the features of ‘interwar’ Middle Eastern internationalism emerged not in response to the post-war settlement but in the last decades of Ottoman rule. This article therefore contributes to our understanding of the histories of globalism, the practices and perceptions of public life, and the engagement of non-Western people with international society.

The structure of the USA and the countries that emerged from the remains of Gran Colombia ultimately took different shapes from those suggested in the era immediately after independence, particularly in regard to the extent of each state's fiscal and monetary capacities. This article applies Oszlak's model of ‘stateness’ to the early financial and monetary histories of the USA (roughly 1776–93) and Gran Colombia (roughly 1819–35) to assess and compare the role of financial and monetary capacities in long-run state consolidation and economic development. The US was ultimately more successful than Gran Colombia at adapting its financial and monetary capacities and institutions, creating better conditions for the attainment of ‘stateness’, stronger economic growth, and greater endurance as a national entity. The comparison ultimately suggests a reciprocal relationship between the legitimization of a state's authority (that is, state consolidation) and the development and solidification of fiscal and monetary capacities.

This article explores Russian perceptions of ‘America’ as they emerged in the eighteenth century when traders, explorers, and scholars approached the North American continent from the Pacific side. It argues that these perceptions were fundamentally different from the European mental discovery of America via the Atlantic. Rather than imagining a ‘new world’, the protagonists saw the north-west American coastline as a part of the North Pacific basin, which, in turn, was considered a part of the Russian empire. Only in the early nineteenth century did Russian geographic and cultural concepts change, becoming more similar to those of Europeans and to contemporary ideas of continents and global structures.

The Great War created new challenges for the proponents of pre-1914 cosmopolitanism. This article explores this theme by studying the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), an international association of members of parliament active in the interwar period. The IPU is first taken as a case study to discuss the difficulty of clearly differentiating between national politicians and agents of international civil society during the years between the wars. The article then shows how pre-war liberal internationalists had to reorient after the First World War, and how socialists and nationalists brought new agendas to the realm of international cooperation at the non-governmental level. These new perspectives shaping the international system even led to far-reaching plans for a world parliament. However, the IPU's history also shows how domestic political polarization contributed to the failure of interwar internationalism.

Although the Philippines is hardly known for sending out migrants prior to the twentieth century, and even among seafarers only the galleon age is remembered, this article provides evidence of transcontinental maritime movements from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century. These migrants were known in the English-speaking world as Manilamen. Most were seafarers, but some became involved in pearl-shell fishing, while others engaged in mercenary activities. They settled in key ports around the world, their numbers in any one location fluctuating in response to changing circumstances. Despite relocation to distant places, the difficulties of communication, and the impetus toward naturalization, Manilamen seem to have retained some form of identification with the Philippines as homeland, no matter how inchoately imagined.

Traditional American historiography has dismissed the Liberian settlement scheme as impractical, racist, and naïve. The movement of Americans to Liberia, and other territorial and extraterritorial destinations, however, reveals the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors that influenced movement in the African diaspora. The reaction of different African Americans to these factors influenced the political and social development of Liberia as well as the colony's image at home. Africans migrating within and beyond US borders participated in a broader movement of people and the development of settler ideology in the nineteenth century.

British clubs and societies spread around the English-speaking world in the long nineteenth century. This article focuses on one particularly large friendly society, the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows (MU), which by 1913 had more than a thousand lodges around the world, especially concentrated in Australia and New Zealand. The MU spread so widely because of micro-social and macro-social forces, both of which this article investigates. It also examines the transfer of members, funds, and information between different districts of the society, and argues that such transfers may have smoothed internal and long-distance migration.

During the First World War, civil society groups across the North Atlantic put forward an array of plans for recasting international society. The most prominent ones sought to build on the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 by developing international legal codes and, in a drastic innovation, obligating and militarily enforcing the judicial settlement of disputes. Their ideal was a world governed by law, which they opposed to politics. This idea was championed by the largest groups in the United States and France in favour of international organizations, and they had likeminded counterparts in Britain. The Anglo-American architects of the League of Nations, however, defined their vision against legalism. Their declaratory design sought to ensure that artificial machinery never stifled the growth of common consciousness. Paradoxically, the bold new experiment in international organization was forged from an anti-formalistic ethos – one that slowed the momentum of international law and portended the rise of global governance.

This article examines debates on the decentralization of the League of Nations that took place in the civil society networks surrounding it. Set in the wider framework of regionalist debates, particularly in Latin America, it focuses on two organizations, the International Federation of League of Nations Societies, which promoted the League, and the Comité Fédéral de Coopération Européenne, which focused on European cooperation. The analysis of the debate on regionalism and universalism highlights the role that Europe played in the League, and points to the use of universalist arguments to further British imperial ends. It shows that interwar internationalism was a multifaceted phenomenon, in which national, imperial, regional, and universal projects and concerns were profoundly entangled. Finally, the article stresses the overlap between official and civil society networks, which complemented each other's activities.

While English nationalism has recently become a subject of significant scholarly consideration, relatively little detailed research has been conducted on the emigrant and imperial contexts, or on the importance of Englishness within a global British identity. This article demonstrates how the importance of a global English identity can be illuminated through a close reading of ethnic associational culture. Examining organizations such as the St George's societies and the Sons of England, the article discusses the evolving character of English identity across North America, Africa, Southeast Asia and the Antipodes. Beginning in the eighteenth century, when English institutions echoed other ethnic organizations by providing sociability and charity to fellow nationals, the article goes on to map the growth of English associationalism within the context of mass migration. It then shows how nationalist imperialism – a broad-based English defence of empire against internal and external threats – gave these associations new meaning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article also explores how competitive ethnicity prompted English immigrants to form such societies and how both Irish Catholic hostility in America and Canada and Boer opposition in South Africa challenged the English to assert a more robust ethnic identity. English associationalism evinced coherence over time and space, and the article shows how the English tapped global reservoirs of strength to form ethnic associations that echoed their Irish and Scottish equivalents by undertaking the same sociable and mutual aspects, and lauded their ethnicity in similar fashion.

This article explores the global dimension of communism during the interwar period. It criticizes a literature that either depicts communist parties as small ‘red armies’ obeying any order from Moscow, or focuses exclusively on the local level and ignores any international aspects. The article first discusses attempts of communist leaders to create a ‘world party’ based in Moscow. It next analyses the conflicts between a globally acting communist leadership and rank-and-file members concerned about their local circumstances. Finally, it highlights the role that internationalism played on the local level. Such an approach – which locates ‘the global’ on the local level, both in terms of how internationalist ideas informed people's behaviour in local contexts and in terms of how they resisted forms of globalism – might provide a means for bridging the gap between global and local histories.

If we take recent income per capita estimates at face value, they imply that the average medieval European was at least five times ‘better off’ than the average Congolese today. This raises important questions regarding the meaning and applicability of national income estimates throughout time and space, and their use in the analysis of global economic history over the long term. This article asks whether national income estimates have a historical and geographical specificity that renders the ‘data’ increasingly unsuitable and misleading when assessed outside a specific time and place. Taking the concept of ‘reciprocal comparison’ as a starting point, it further questions whether national income estimates make sense in pre-and post-industrial societies, in decentralized societies, and in polities outside the temperate zone. One of the major challenges in global history is Eurocentrism. Resisting the temptation to compare the world according to the most conventional development measure might be a recommended step in overcoming this bias.

This article considers Asianism in the Indian trade union movement, against the backdrop of increasing international cooperation between Asian trade union movements in the interwar period, which culminated in the short-lived Asiatic Labour Congress (1934–37). It demonstrates how Asianist enthusiasm both propelled and hampered Indian workers’ representation at the International Labour Organization and other international bodies. Finally, it considers Asianism as a crucial characteristic of Indian trade unionism in the interwar period, by showing how the All-India Trade Union Congress, once the hope of Indian labour as an organized force, split into rival federations over the issue of its Asian affiliations.

South African state policy in the 1940s moved in significantly new political directions that were not simply the prelude to apartheid. This shift, under the leadership of Jan Smuts, towards a welfarist management of black urbanization, can only be understood by focusing on transnational dimensions of the period that have been neglected by historians of South Africa. The reorganization of the state was made possible as a consequence of the business of fighting a global war. South African policy changes were intimately linked to the evolution of British colonial policy. And the South African interventions in world politics to support the creation of the United Nations and to reconfigure the southern African subcontinent were to have drastic and unforeseen consequences.

As the Second World War unfolded and became global, intellectuals of various backgrounds turned their minds to the problems of peace. Internal persecution bred external aggression, some believed. States had to be tamed. Such reasoning led the American Law Institute (ALI) to try to draft a globally acceptable bill of rights. Although originating in the USA, the project was essentially a transnational one. The ‘Statement of essential human rights’ became the most elaborate code created up to that point, in both scope and detail. Completed in the early winter of 1944, it was promoted by the Panamanian delegation to the 1945 San Francisco Conference, and used extensively by the UN Commission on Human Rights. Refuting suggestions that human rights originated in the 1970s, the ALI project reveals the great depth of the transnational conversation on human rights during the early 1940s, and even before.