This article deals with the European and American community in Korea between the conclusion of Korea’s first international treaties in the early 1880s and the country’s annexation by the Japanese Empire in 1910. It begins by presenting an overview of the community. Concentrated in Seoul and Chemulp’o, the Anglo-Saxon element dominated a community made up of diplomats, foreign experts in the service of the Korean government, merchants and missionaries. Next, the article describes two key characteristics of the European and American residents in Korea. First, they were individuals who defined themselves as bourgeois, or middle-class; second, the term “translocality” serves to bring together the multiple layers of border-crossing these individuals were involved in—as long-distance migrants between Europe or North America and East Asia, as migrants within East Asia, and as representatives of different European and American nationalities living together in Korea.

On 4 June 2016, Jürgen Osterhammel of the University of Konstanz and Geoffrey Parker of Ohio State University gave an all-day workshop on global history for graduate students and junior and senior scholars of the Universities of Dundee and St. Andrews in Scotland. The workshop consisted of three discussion sessions, each with a different theme, namely the conceptualization(s), parameters, and possible future(s) of global history. The central question was to what extent this fast-changing field required adjustments of “normal” historiographical methodologies and epistemologies. The workshop participants agreed that global history focuses in particular on connections across large spaces or long timespans, or both. Yet reconstructing these webs of connections should not obscure global inequalities. In the case of empires, many of the exchanges across space and time have been ordered in a hierarchical fashion—metropoles profiting from peripheral spaces, for example—and imposed by certain groups of people on others, resulting in, for example, the enslavement or extermination of indigenous peoples. As historians, we should also ask ourselves what we do about peoples or areas that were or remain unconnected, local, and remote. Where does globalization end?

This article focuses on changes in American philanthropy during the Progressive Era and the Young Men’s Christian Association’s (YMCA) domestic promotion of its global sports program during the 1910s and 1920s. Since the American YMCA’s foreign department was entirely dependent on donations, philanthropists’ demands concerning efficient and scientific methods to fight the causes of social dysfunction needed to be addressed. YMCA and Christian progressive media thus presented clear-cut success stories about spreading Western sports. Oft-repeated topoi included the superiority vis-à-vis local practices of Western scientific and rational approaches to public health and leisure, and a knowledge transfer to local elites, meaning that indigenization would prevent a permanent “donation drain.” During the First World War, Asian sports events were communicated as a peaceful contrast to the European battlefields. Following the war, YMCA writers turned Asian athletes into a vanguard among non-Western athletes, now promoting the YMCA’s experience gained in this region as a guarantee to donors that an expensive expansion of its sportive “civilizing mission” would lead to similar achievements on a global level. By the late 1920s, the YMCA had completely “de-Orientalized” its earlier coverage of Asian social deficits to emphasize its own efficiency.

In May 2016, Professor Ann Laura Stoler visited Leiden University as the Spring 2016 Global Asia Scholar. On the last day of her stay, Amrit Dev and Sanne Ravensbergen—historians affiliated with the Leiden Humanities Faculty—met Stoler on a sunny terrace situated alongside one of the canals for a conversation about the developments in her scholarly work, career choices, sources of inspiration, and the motivations for doing history. Professor Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research in New York. She has published extensively on the colonial history of Indonesia and the sexual and racial epistemologies of imperial politics. Her recent research addresses how colonial histories matter and manifest in the world today.

This article analyses the influence of confessional divides in the construction of a Mediterranean frontier between the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb at the very beginning of the early modern period. Questioning the influence that religious difference had on the geopolitics of the early modern Mediterranean could seem superfluous since historians have traditionally depicted the Mediterranean world as a space of confrontation between two confessional empires, the Ottoman and the Habsburg. Nevertheless, by focusing on a selection of diplomatic negotiations from the Western Mediterranean it appears that several actors envisioned a scenario where religious and political frontiers were far from coincide. This article will analyse the diplomatic negotiations promoted by different Muslim communities from the Maghreb to voluntarily enter under the rule of the Catholic Monarchs in the framework of the Spanish imperial expansion at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In studying these negotiations from an actor-based approach my aim is not to deny the religious or the political divide existing between the Christian and the Islamic shores. I will argue, however, that this frontier was constructed through the interaction of a wide array of agents such as local elites, royal officers, military men, religious actors, and rulers, with changing agendas towards religious difference.

While looking at the world’s politics and ideologies for a vision of the future nation state, India’s anti-British freedom activists and intellectuals remained deeply ambivalent about drawing lessons from Europe’s experience of Fascism and National Socialism. Indian nationalists cautiously admired elements of National Socialist and Fascist ideology and expressed their distress with imperialist expansionism, racism, and anti-Semitism that accompanied the two regimes. This article draws on the exemplary “global biography” of one such Indian internationalist thinker, Taraknath Das, to investigate interwar Indian preoccupation with Fascism and National Socialism in articulating the discursive ground of Indian nationalism.

This dossier focusses on non-European teachers within mission schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the period of colonial control. These teachers were central to the missionary project and helped to disseminate both Christianity and Western knowledge across the globe. Local teachers, alongside other mission assistants and helpers, also helped translate, transmit, and transform both Western and local forms of knowledge and contributed to broader discourse about knowledge, yet the importance of their work has often been overshadowed by the work undertaken in examining missionary elites. This dossier, with its extended introduction and three case studies from Africa, the Danish West Indies, and Bolivia, sheds light on the roles of non-European mission teachers as well as their recruitment and training, their self-representations, and methodological as well as conceptual issues about how information on these often inconspicuous intermediaries of mission education can be retrieved from disparate sources.

The aim of this article is to throw the worldwide mission efforts of the old Society of Jesus—the order from its implementation in 1540 to its dissolution in 1773—into sharper relief by applying a new analytical frame to it. The approach taken will be to view the Society as trying to establish a form of dominion over its extra-European converts that may be described as spiritual empire-building.1 To this purpose it will first sketch the theoretical framework of a spiritual empire, and then evaluate whether the old Society of Jesus may be taken to fit it either on an organizational level or in its treatment of its converts.

In the interwar years, the colonial powers of the day instantly saw long-range radio technology as an instrument to strengthen their empires as it enabled broadcasters in the European metropoles to reach audiences in the peripheries via the ether. This article focuses on the Dutch colonial station PHOHI, a company that pioneered global radio broadcasting. The station was founded by a group of influential entrepreneurs in order to strengthen ties between the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies by reaching out to colonial expatriates. This case study shows how geopolitical and ideological considerations shaped both the organisation and the content of Dutch intercontinental broadcasting.

This article concentrates on Catholic mission teachers in Southern Tanzania from the 1890s to the 1940s, their role and agency in founding and developing the early education system of Tanzania. African mission teachers are an underrated group of actors in colonial settings. Being placed between colonized and colonizers, between conversion and civilising mission, between colonial rule and African demands for emancipation, between church and government and at the heart of local society, their agency was crucial to forming African Christianity, to social change and to a newly emerging class of educated Africans. This liminal position also rendered them almost invisible for historiography, since the colonial archive rarely gave credit to their vital role and European missionary propaganda tended to present them as examples of successful mission work, rather than as self-reliant missionary activists. The article circumscribes the framework of colonial education policies and missionary strategies, it recovers the teachers’ active role in the colonial education system as well as in missionary evangelization. Finally, it contrasts teachers’ self-representation with the official image conveyed in missionary media.

This article proposes to study the role of Franciscan missionaries in the establishment of economic and diplomatic relations between the Spanish Philippines and Japan. More specifically, it argues that the missionaries played an active part in the construction of a trans-pacific commercial and religious network connecting the Spanish Americas with Asia. In so doing, the article aims at correcting the commonplace historiographical assumption that the Franciscan presence in Japan was negligible and of little interest compared to the Jesuits’. Indeed, the diplomatic relations between Japan and the Philippines were set against a general context of Iberian expansion in Asia. The Spanish conquered Manila in 1571 for chiefly commercial reasons. However, the spreading of the faith provided a justification for Spanish territorial ambitions in Asia. In this process, the Franciscans played a prominent role, as they were picked as ambassadors to Japan by the governor of Manila. The Franciscans did not have mere regional ambitions for Japan: they intended the country to become a hub for the whole Pacific region.

This article places missionary education squarely at the centre of any consideration of European expansion in the modern era. It focuses more specifically on the place of local teachers in Bolivia and their relationship with one evangelical Protestant mission, the Bolivian Indian Mission, which originated in New Zealand in the early 1900s. It takes a non-metropole and a “multi-sited” approach to missions and education. It argues that what we know about Bolivian teachers was mediated through the missionary voice and that these teachers negotiated their lives within a particular missionary space, in which there operated a number of intersecting influences from other sites within the wider imperial or Western network. It aims to both reclaim the identities of Bolivian teachers (focusing on teachers’ identity and function) and to reflect critically on intrinsic methodological and conceptual issues (emphasizing the nature of sources, missionary discourse, the resulting status of Bolivian teachers, and Bolivian agency).

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Dutch colony of the Netherlands Indies dominated the worldwide supply of antifebrifuge (to reduce fever) cinchona bark, the raw material for quinine, an antimalarial medicine. Over the next four decades, the high-quality and laboratory-conditioned cultivation of cinchona became the backbone of a Dutch transoceanic cinchona-quinine enterprise that dominated the international quinine markets. However, in the two decades after the Second World War, the Netherlands Indies’ cinchona bark dominance ended, and the Dutch transoceanic cinchona-quinine production and trade network collapsed. How can we explain this shift? In this study, we argue that this change was part of a process of globalization of cinchona bark production that created new sources and transoceanic production and distribution chains and hence new networks of control that were increasingly less associated with a specific nation than with multinational companies. Colonial networks of control were replaced by new industrial networks of control, and the colonial agro-industrial system was reconfigured into a global agro-industrial system. At the same time, this study also shows that the economic decolonization of Indonesia forced a process of deglobalization that resulted in a translocation of the cinchona-quinine trade networks. As such, this study shows a mix of globalization and deglobalization happening in tandem with Indonesian decolonization and agricultural globalization.

Of all of France’s early modern colonial ventures, the least studied and most obscure are the French efforts to establish settlements, missions, and plantations in Guiana. Still, the seventeenth-century French colonies in Guiana had much in common with the sixteenth-century French efforts to colonize Florida and Brazil, and their trajectories were every bit as dramatic and their outcomes equally dismal. Although not sponsored as Huguenot refuges in the New World from Catholic oppression in the Old, and thus not burdened with the fierce competition between Protestant and Catholic colonists that plagued the sixteenth-century ventures, the Guiana colonies were also prey to deep internal divisions over piety and morality, and even more over power and the purpose of the colony. Were they primarily missions to the Native peoples, plantations, or commercial ventures focused on locating sources of precious metals or establishing plantations? This paper examines the role of clerics in the genesis, financing, trajectories, and collapse of the earliest French colonies in Guiana, in particular two colonies founded about ten years apart, in 1643 and 1652. I will the argue that whereas historians have often assumed that missionaries and evangelizing were often little more than an encumbrance to early colonial ventures, useful mostly for raising funds in France, in reality clerics played a central role in shaping chartered colonial companies and the colonies they founded, for good and for ill.

This paper explores the multi-faceted nature of the spiritual geopolitics that shaped Cromwellian foreign policy in relation to the Western Design of 1654-5. It stresses the central importance of Protestant religion as a motivating force and argues that the failure of the Design was interpreted in religious terms just as much as its original aims had been. A number of motives combined to drive Cromwell into launching the Western Design. These included: the ‘Elizabethan’ tradition of English anti-Spanish policy; the pursuit of England’s imperial/colonial interests in the Caribbean; an attempt to strengthen England financially by weakening the Spanish economy; the search for security within Europe by allying with France against Spain; and, underpinning all these, the launching of a Protestant crusade against a power that Cromwell regarded as England’s ‘providential enemy’. The failure of the Design in the summer of 1655 was perceived in similarly religious terms. Just as recent scholarship on Britain’s internal conflicts of the 1640s has emphasised the central role of religion and its inseparability from other issues, so the same phenomenon is evident not only in the motives for the Western Design but also in how its defeat was perceived and interpreted.

On June 2, 1978, the Tanzanian government under President Julius Nyerere ordered the British multinational corporation, Lonrho Limited, to leave the country. The “official reason” provided for this action was Lonrho’s “continued defiance of the United Nations mandatory sanctions against Rhodesia and the expansion of its business interests in South Africa.” Using newly available materials, mainly from the National Archives London, this paper attempts to document the rise of Lonrho in Tanzania up until the nationalization, the factors that influenced the compensation negotiations process between Lonrho and the Tanzanian government, and the role the British government played in the entire episode.