The three decades spanning the 1930s, '40s, and '50s witnessed the birth of the modern global state system, characterized by a protracted and tortuous transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states. The demise of Nazi, British, and Japanese empires emancipated millions of people across the world. However, as old empires dissolved, new post-imperial states continued older colonial-origin forms of ethno-religious discrimination and ruling-class dominance, or invented novel hierarchies. Hence, this epoch was marked by catastrophic outbursts of racial violence, sectarian war, and genocide. If majoritarian nation-states were the privileged offspring of this transformation, then refugees were the unwanted issue. The national citizen and the refugee were co-created. Against their forced displacement and subalternization, refugees re-politicized their selves. We define this as ‘the refugee political’: refugees constructing themselves as political beings and building wide-ranging alliances – with churches, politicians, and entrepreneurs; with peasants, industrial workers, and feminists. They became ‘subaltern internationalists’, linking the Dachen Islands to the United States, and maritime Southeast Asia to India; connecting central European Jews to Australian women, or impoverished Indians to Soviet and Chinese communists. They created new forms of ‘refugee polis’ – political communities which were simultaneously local and daringly transnational.

This article examines the evolution of artifact hunting in Spain, particularly in Andalusia, highlighting the legal measures implemented to combat archaeological looting over the past three decades. In contrast to the liberal model led by England and Wales, a more conservative approach, like the Spanish one, offers valuable insights with a clear effect in the protection of archaeological heritage that can serve as an example for other nations grappling with similar challenges.

Historical accounts of the Indian space programme inevitably invoke the figure of Vikram Sarabhai (1919–71), credited as the father of its early development in the 1960s. A physicist by training, Sarabhai was best known for his ‘leapfrogging’ vision, into which social applications of space technology would catapult developing countries out of poverty. By interrogating official and unofficial records, speeches, cinematic productions and obituaries, this article examines how Indian leadership utilized Sarabhai’s persona to substantiate the role of space flight in the nation’s domestic modernization and geopolitical leverage. Especially after his death in 1971, the making of Sarabhai into the pioneer of Indian space flight allowed India to fashion a geocentric appeal specific to its space programme, which construed the benefits of low-earth-orbit satellite communication to tackle unequal development. In the 1990s, Sarabhai’s image was further appropriated by international powers and actors to propagate the commercialization of satellite systems. Despite its elitist outlook and subscription to received notions of nationhood and modernity, a closer look into the public resonance of Sarabhai’s persona reveals how the geocentric promise of space flight in the Indian context contributed to the formation of post-1960s astroculture globally.

After the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918, Czech teachers and other civil servants came to the peripheral regions of the Slovak part of the state. Their task, apart from ensuring the functioning of the newly established state institutions, was to promote the Czechoslovak national project. Some of these officials remained in their positions for many years, overcoming major macro-political upheavals. This article analyses the role of individuals, their loyalties and networks in establishing and maintaining stability across historical ruptures in a remote, linguistically heterogeneous area of Czechoslovakia. Since these actors fostered the official state ideology and played a prominent role in the lifeworld of local communities for many decades, this article shows how these figures endured numerous ruptures, bound together the state and their localities and reinforced the state’s presence on the ground. Using the case of a Czech school principal in the predominantly German- and Hungarian-speaking town of Nižný Medzev in eastern Slovakia, this article examines the role of individual actors in promoting and shaping the various forms of Czechoslovak nation-building policies on the local level.

Art theft is still a crime surrounded by inaccuracies. From the perception of flashy fictional thieves to unintentionally misleading monetary claims, the general public and some art and security professionals have a distorted vision of the scope of the criminal enterprise. As there is an alarming lack of empirical studies into the matter, this study aims to remedy the issue through the elaboration of a database to find common characteristics and aspects of interest amongst multiple art heists from the last three decades to provide a better understanding of crucial theft traits such as defeated security measures, methods of deception, timing and target selection, use of weapons and insider participation impact. Results indicate thieves tend to use brute force to defeat security measures; diversions and deceptions are a standard, uniform trends are present in absolute timing matters, and neither the use of weapons nor insiders appears to be the norm.

This article explores the little-known response of the Irish Save the Children Fund to famine in Soviet Russia and Ukraine from 1921, as well as to hunger in the west of Ireland in 1924–5. Drawing on wide-ranging sources from the Cadbury Research Library, the Women’s Library at LSE and elsewhere, it examines the translation of humanitarian relief into different local, national and transnational contexts. The Volga famine was a seismic moment in inter-war humanitarianism and the initial focus of the newly formed Irish Save the Children Fund, itself formed in the context of war and civil war. Humanitarianism in the new Irish Free State had distinctive gendered, class and religious dynamics, as well as connections to Britain and the Irish diaspora. This article argues that tracing relatively small and largely unexamined organisations like the Irish Save the Children Fund offers new angles into the relationship between humanitarianism, nationhood and social change.

Concerned by the revolutionary violence that spread in Catalonia after the failed military coup of 17 and 18 July 1936 led to civil war, France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Quai d’Orsay) appointed veteran ‘front-line’ consuls in Barcelona. These consuls had already experienced revolutionary events during the Russian civil wars; however, their prior experience shaped their interpretation of the Spanish Civil War, leading them to fear a Bolshevik contagion beyond the Pyrenees border. Their bias thus shaped the French general consulate’s humanitarian action in Barcelona. Far from being strictly neutral and impartial, it adopted a resolutely counter-revolutionary stance.

The arrival of an English translation of The structural transformation of the public sphere in 1989 set anglophone historians about revising Habermas’s original explanation of the development of the public sphere in the eighteenth century. In particular, his ‘model case of British development’ came under fire. Notably absent from these many critical appraisals is consideration of the wider British empire. Herein lies the problem that this article addresses: the rise of a ‘British public sphere’ has been described in national terms, and as a result those communities that were living beyond the realm have been left out of the discussion. In essence, the dominance of the nation-state in historical studies has obscured another transitional phase through which a British public sphere began, and in the end failed, to integrate political communities in Ireland and the American colonies in the evolving political structures of the imperial state. By recovering the features of this ‘imperial public sphere’, and the colonial presses that brought it into existence, we can begin to transcend national frames of analysis and reassess where the national stories we have inherited fitted into the larger story of what was really still an age of empires.

This article examines the context for the establishment of the non-denominational Port of London Society, and the dissenting Bethel Union, which came together to form the British and Foreign Sailor Society in 1833. Making forensic use of the surviving archives as well as contemporary reports in regional and national newspapers, it challenges the traditional historiography which focuses on the charismatic, but disruptive, figure of George Charles (‘Boatswain’) Smith (1782–1863). It suggests that the cult of the founder is misplaced for Smith, and that marine religious charities flourished despite, rather than because of, his contribution.

This paper examines Bobovius’ Serai Enderum (British Library, MS Harley 3409), with a focus on its insights into seventeenth-century Ottoman music. While the manuscript primarily describes the inner workings of the sultan’s palace in Constantinople, it can serve as a source for understanding Ottoman musical culture. Although Bobovius, a former court musician (Ali Ufkī), did not extensively detail music in his account, his use of terminology and facts related to musical education and performance provide valuable information. This study explores MS Harley 3409 as both a musicological and a linguistic resource, highlighting Bobovius’ role as a “multilingual terminologist” who translated Ottoman Turkish musical terms (and concepts) into Italian for European readers. By presenting a glossary of musical terms excerpted from Serai Enderum and comparing them with contemporary dictionaries (Meniński 1680, Molino 1641) and musicological information, this research demonstrates the potential of linguistic analysis to enrich the historiography of Turkish music.

Bank distress was a defining feature of the Great Depression in the United States. Most banks, however, weathered the storm and remained in operation throughout the contraction. We show that surviving banks cut lending when depositors withdrew funds en masse during panics. This panic-induced decline in lending explains about one-third of the reduction in aggregate commercial bank lending between 1929 and 1932, more than twice as much as attributed to the failure of banks.

During the First Taiwan Strait Crisis, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the evacuation of 18,000 local fishermen and their families from the Dachen and other offshore islands in Zhejiang Province. The resettlement to Taiwan was assisted by the US Seventh Fleet. In mainstream historiography, the evacuation is treated as an unimportant sideshow to the Strait Crisis. Little is known about the people who were displaced. This study explores the experiences of Dachen refugees using recently declassified archival documents and oral history. It argues that, despite the refugees being praised as model anti-communist citizens or ‘righteous compatriots’ by the Nationalists, the Nationalist–US resettlement programme in Taiwan failed miserably, due to its ‘wartime developmentalist logic’. The logic considered displaced people not as deprived human beings who needed assistance but as human resources to be utilized by the state for developing sparsely populated regions. This article also argues that the Dachen refugees were not just powerless victims of powerful nation-states. They were active agents in their own story, trying to make the best of difficult circumstances by constantly protesting and petitioning for better treatment. In doing so, they took advantage of their special status as Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s ‘righteous compatriots’.