I examine the two careers of British colonial administrator and Pacific historian Henry Evans Maude (1906-2006) to illuminate continuities between the logic of late-imperialism and foundational modes of Pacific historiography. Maude worked as a colonial servant in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony from 1929, where he instigated two coerced resettlement schemes. In 1957, he joined the Department of Pacific History at the Australian National University, where he championed new modes of history writing tailored to the era of decolonisation—especially “island-centred” ethnohistory and “participant history.” I argue that Maude’s visions of empire and of the past were deeply linked, and that imbrications between the two informed the practices of an emerging professional Pacific history during the 1960s. Modes of history-writing that would come to be understood as critical of older imperial histories, or even as anti-colonial, had their origins in colonial structures. At the same time, both of Maude’s careers evinced a colonial notion of futurity; he understood himself as a benevolent expert able to guide Indigenous peoples into eventual independence.

This paper will trace the arrival of cocaine in colonial South Asia between 1885 and 1911. It argues that across that period two separate and distinct markets developed, one after the other. The first was a straightforward medical market, the second a more complex one, where the substance was made available beyond anything that resembled a formal medical context, to consumers who had uses for it other than the strictly therapeutic. This market had emerged by the end of the 1890s and endured until the Second World War. The study engages with David Courtwright’s ideas about the nature of ‘limbic capitalism,’ arguing that the sudden arrival of a novel therapeutic in a complex context at this time is the ideal place to see how far those ideas are useful to historians.

This article delves into the emergence of Havana as site of refuge for exiles from the Greater Caribbean between approximately 1790 and 1810. It examines the institutional and political governance of relief to Spanish and foreign exiles in Havana, looking at the intricate intersection between notions of imperial relief, loyalty, and subjecthood. It scrutinises the confluence of two waves of exile migration to Havana from the island of Hispaniola, underscoring how both migratory flows were intricately linked and influenced one another. One involved the exile of French settlers from Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), while the other entailed the relocation of Spanish-speaking settlers from Santo Domingo following the Treaty of Basel (1795), which officially ceded the Spanish colony to the French Republic. Through the lens of relief policies, this article shows how colonial officials in Cuba aimed to present an imperial self-image of benevolence towards Spanish subjects and foreigners in exile who were perceived as loyal to the Spanish crown. Focusing on the category of emigrados, this article correspondingly highlights the instrumental use by these exiles of concepts of imperial loyalty and subjecthood, and their role in claiming special entitlements to material and financial assistance from Spanish colonial authorities.

This special issue aims to present empirically grounded reflections on concepts of exile, asylum, and refugee during the long Age of Revolutions, before the emergence of the modern international refugee regime. During this period, hundreds of thousands of people fled their homelands, prompting authorities and exiles themselves to reflect on and negotiate the status of newcomers and their rights and obligations. What it meant to be a refugee mattered, especially at a moment of imperial crisis and reconfiguration. Thus, building on the emerging field of refugee history, we ask: Who was a refugee, for what reasons, and with what concrete implications? How did one claim refugee status? Who was denied refugee status? How translatable were the concepts of refugee, exile, and asylum across societies? And what other terms might overlap with or replace the concept of refugee? To what extent did these concepts create distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of mobility, between desirable and undesirable newcomers to host societies? The contributors to this special issue explore these questions in a variety of historical and geographical contexts across the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds.

Cocaine has become a paradigmatic case in the study of drugs and global histories, illuminating the interplay of bioprospecting, transcultural exchange, commodification, and legal regimes. Existing scholarship traces a trajectory from traditional Andean uses of kuka and Spanish colonial prohibitions to the nineteenth-century chemical research of Friedrich Wöhler and Albert Niemann, who isolated what is known today as cocaine. This narrative, however, is often framed through a teleological lens that moves from Indigenous “discovery,” through Catholic Spanish regulation, to Protestant Germanophone science. Such framing obscures alternative actors and circuits that were central to the making of cocaine’s modern history. This article examines one such neglected episodes: in 1858, the Italian pharmacist Enrique Pizzi announced his study of “Cocaïna” while working at his Botica y Droguería in La Paz. Samples of his preparation were delivered to Wöhler and Niemann’s laboratory in Göttingen by the Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob von Tschudi, routed through Vienna. Drawing on archival and primary sources from Bolivia, Peru, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Austria, the article reconsiders this episode, which has often been dismissed in contemporary and later accounts as either fraudulent or failed. Rather than altering the canonical story of cocaine’s global emergence, Pizzi’s work highlights how selective archival survival and historiographical framing have created gaps in the global history of cocaine. By restoring this missing link, the article reflects on the silences and asymmetries that structure global drug histories and argues for a more plural account of scientific modernity in nineteenth-century Latin America.

In the 1790s, hundreds of refugees arrived in Philadelphia from revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Though it is well known that the Alien Acts were promulgated at least in part in reaction to the large French presence on US soil and the threat of war with France, other barriers to entry and to remain on US soil are not often connected to the arrival and presence of French refugees. Using records of the Philadelphia courts, prison, and almshouse, this article situates the French refugee experience within the early United States’ broader kaleidoscope of restrictions on mobility, assistance, and rights to remain. For the French Black population, their race and class rendered them especially vulnerable to forms of mobility control focused on criminals and the mobile poor. Though the French were not ultimately deported for their political activities, a small number of French Black refugees convicted of theft were set on the move once again.

This article examines the resettlement of Algerians fleeing French colonial rule after 1830 in the Ottoman Empire (Palestine, Syria, and Anatolia) to analyse the formation of the legal and administrative category of muhacir. It argues that the Algerian case offers a privileged vantage point for understanding how this status emerged and was gradually consolidated over the nineteenth century. Because Algerians migrated over a long time span and were not the initial targets of Ottoman resettlement policies - initially designed for migrants from Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Balkans - their progressive inclusion into muhacir entitlements makes it possible to trace how this category expanded beyond its original contexts and became a standardized instrument of migration governance. The article shows that Algerians first received assistance through discretionary measures, before being progressively incorporated into a regime of standardized rights after the Crimean War (1853-6). Under Abdülhamid II, access to these rights increasingly became conditional upon Ottoman naturalisation and the renunciation of French colonial subjecthood, revealing how migration policy, legal status, and imperial sovereignty became tightly intertwined. By following Algerian migrants across the French and Ottoman imperial spaces, this paper highlights how late Ottoman migration policy functioned not only as a tool of population management, but also as a key site for the juridical redefinition of imperial belonging in an age of colonial expansion.

Within the dynamic realm of historiography and the generation of knowledge, the process of “Becoming Independent” serves as a profound testament to the tenacity and resolve exhibited by a wide array of intellectual communities in their efforts to confront and transform established narratives. This afterword explores the themes in this special issue, which not only offers a critical analysis of historiographical practices from both past and present but also emphasises the imperative for ongoing dedication in the endeavour to cultivate diverse and independent historical narratives. By discussing the different articles of this collection, the afterword explores shared themes, such as the decoloniality of historical scholarship through ethnographic inquiry, prospects of de-emphasising the Eurocentric gaze, fragmentation of history as evidence of varied epistemological sovereignties, and the decolonial agenda through “white expatriates.” By doing so, this Afterword serves as a resounding appeal for the continuous pursuit of intellectual liberation.

This paper traces enslaved people’s attempts at staking out liberty in Hamburg and attendant reactions by Hamburg inhabitants and authorities. It argues that in the decades before Hamburg’s anti-slavery laws were passed in 1837, treatment of people of African and Asian descent intersected strongly with ever-stricter alien laws. Based on extensive research in archival sources as well as newspapers and other printed material, the article contains two parts: First, it examines Hamburg’s few existent traces of attempted flights from slavery, pointing to conditions of escape and recapture. Second, the paper links these findings to Hamburg’s legal history leading up to its 1837 anti-slave-trade law, examining alien legislation, poor relief regulations, and domestic workers’ legislation. It also highlights how these policies affected individual lives. In combining legal historical and micro-historical/prosopographical approaches, the paper contributes to studies of Black German history, free soil policies, and questions around the policing of aliens.

This article re-examines the relationship between two key historiographical traditions seeking an epistemological sovereignty at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) in the 1960s. The first, sometimes dubbed the “Dar school of historiography” and associated with Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere’s recruitment of Terence Ranger to build a new History department at the University, centred “African initiative” as the sine qua non of any approach to the continent that was serious about breaking with Eurocentric epistemologies and approaching African histories on their own terms. The second was “dependency theory” or “world systems theory,” for which UDSM became a centre as Dar es Salaam’s fame in global leftwing circles attracted Marxist academics like Walter Rodney, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Giovanni Arrighi. In contrast to the “Dar School,” these scholars worked at a distinctly global scale and future-oriented timeline. Comparing the epistemological approaches of these schools as different attempts at a meaningful decolonisation of knowledge, the article also re-embeds them in the material politics of the University at the time. For underneath UDSM’s two expatriate-driven “schools” was a gradual but significant decolonisation of the professoriat happening just below their scholarly radars – one in which Walter Rodney, not coincidentally, would play a major role.

Historians have explored Japanese drug manufacture and trafficking in Asia in the first half of the twentieth century. They have pointed out that in the same decades a domestically oriented morphine industry developed as result of Japanese efforts to achieve self-sufficiency. However, little attention has been paid to the development and impact of this industry. This article argues that the Japanese morphine industry had a significant impact on Japanese agriculture, promoted the rationalization of production processes in factories, and stood for a modern medical consumer culture. It was not until the 1930s and 1940s that poppy cultivation and morphine manufacture increasingly relied on resources and labour from the colonies. This also reflected a shift to a war economy. Drugs were then mainly produced for the military and found their way onto black markets in Japan and Northeast Asia.

This article delves into the Republic of Colombia’s emigration policies and émigrés’ petitions to return to the new republican regime in the early 1820s. During the Spanish American Revolutions, thousands abandoned their homelands with the hope of eventually coming back. However, returning was not an easy endeavour. The influx of returnees sparked many questions for the nascent government. Consequently, émigrés and their relatives employed various strategies to facilitate the return of the former to Colombia. This article argues that the constant back-and-forth movements experienced by émigrés during the war allowed them to highlight the temporary condition of emigration and, therefore, to embrace or reject the status of émigrés strategically. Concerned by the doubts about their return, expatriates, many times, rejected the epithet of “émigré.” Aware of the politicization of the term, they emphasised that they did not abandon the country out of political loyalty but out of fear. Furthermore, they appealed to ideas of belonging to the republic, family reunification, and national reconciliation to advocate for their return and formal recognition as Colombian citizens. In doing so, expatriates left the label of “émigré” behind, challenging the Colombian government’s prior perception of emigration and promoting wider conceptions of republican citizenship.

This article discusses key tenets from the conceptual history of exile and asylum during the half-century around 1800. During this transformative period, political refugees took shape as a recognizable mass phenomenon, although they remained closely intertwined with other forms of migration and mobility, both free and unfree. Their often-tortuous itineraries occasioned manifold interactions with societies and states of origin, transit, and destination, remodeling preexisting concepts of exile, or generating new ones. As state bureaucracies, host societies, and mobile actors used these categories to negotiate status, access to protection, relief, compensation, and various layers of belonging, the contours of a transformative period in the conceptual history of refuge become apparent. This period was marked by a hybrid vocabulary, informed by both historical notions of (religious) asylum and by emerging concepts of politicized mobility and state membership; it was the period in which ancien régime ideas of deservingness were refracted by the prism of political loyalty, and in which relief practices could give way to large-scale reparation schemes; and a period in which a fuzzy vocabulary of asylum and alienness sustained, and complicated, the lines between insiders and outsiders in a world marked by an uneasy coexistence of empires and nation-states.

Opiate smuggling has found increasing scholarly attention. Legal distribution however remains largely a blind spot. Against this background, I follow in this article some of the traces it has left in Switzerland. I ask not only how it was regulated, but also where the drugs came from and how and by whom they were sold. In the first section, I examine the trade in the opium-based panacea theriac in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At that time, pharmacists were increasingly successful in claiming the exclusive right to sell remedies. When powerful industrial opiates gradually replaced the early modern artisanal goods in the nineteenth century, it was they who benefited most. As I argue in the second section, this line of business came under pressure when the use of opiates increasingly faced criticism in the last third of the century. However, as I show in the third section, legal provisions were only reluctantly enforced and followed. A fundamental shift only occurred in the 1960s when, in the context of the cold war, the Americanisation of international crime control and the “war on drugs” led to a repressive turn in law enforcement.

This article explores the multidimensional issue of drug policy in Turkey during the interwar era and its intersection with economic policy, public health concerns, and psychiatric discourse. As one of the world’s leading producers of opium, Turkey resisted international opium control conventions until the 1930s, viewing them as a means of Western economic domination. Parallel to this, domestic public debates increasingly framed addiction in medical terms, through the lenses of eugenics, nationalism, and racialized rhetoric. The article highlights the pivotal role of the psychiatrist Mazhar Osman in shaping these discourses, particularly through his reports to the League of Nations. In these reports, Osman portrayed addiction as a symptom of moral decay and presented Turkey’s repressive minority policies as a success in combatting the illegal drug trade. Drawing on archival materials, including government documents, medical literature, and contemporary newspapers, this study argues that Turkey’s opposition to international drug conventions was rooted not only in economic self-interest, but also in broader struggles over national sovereignty, modernity and the racialized construction of addiction as a social threat.

Refugee and forced migration studies scholars largely ignore the early modern period when they discuss modern refugee crises, thus overlooking the transhistorical, cultural origins of refugee identity formation. Following Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, around 200,000 Huguenots fled France for the wider diaspora. Often depicted as republicans, if not anarchists, bent on the destruction of Christianity and the French sacral monarchy, Huguenots sought refuge for their own safety and in the process reimagined themselves first as religious refugees and then as political ones. As religious refugees, Huguenots like the theologian Pierre Jurieu donned the mantle of the Ancient Israelites, as a means to maintain their community against French purgation of the Calvinist sect. As political refugees, Huguenots like Rabaut Saint-Étienne developed several strategies at courting the favor of the Bourbon monarchy, many of which challenged the French sacral state to imagine itself in secular terms. In developing a political refugee identity, these Huguenots created the empathetic, cultural refugee, which could transcend religious affiliation in favor of promoting a national identity.

Historian Alfred Crosby developed the concept of “portmanteau biota”—the organisms that accompany a human migration—to analyse European expansion in the Atlantic World. This concept has not been used to understand enslaved African migrations. I identify elements of the portmanteau biota of people whom slavers called “Congoes.” At least five other organisms accompanied these people from Central Africa: Cannabis, manioc, cattle, the tsetse fly, and the trypanosome that causes African sleeping sickness. Based on how these organisms affected social-ecological resilience for the “Congo” migration, I describe four ways to characterize elements of portmanteau biotas. Some organisms negatively impact social-ecological systems in which they were previously unknown; I call these “novel antagonists.” In contrast, “familiar antagonists” negatively impact social-ecological systems in which they were previously known. Other organisms, which I call “mutualists,” enhance social-ecological resilience, differing by whether they were familiar or novel in those systems. The role of any organism is context-dependant, and not categorical. Cannabis, for example, had mutualistic characteristics as it enhanced resilience for African social-ecological systems, and antagonistic characteristics as it enhanced the capacity of overseers to extract labour within plantation capitalism. Applied in this way, the portmanteau biota concept underscores the ecological complexity of human migrations.

Compared to most other cases of independence, the creation of Libya is generally regarded as a conservative outcome. Rather than being founded on a nationalist impulse, the United Kingdom of Libya derived its legitimacy from Islam, specifically following the path of the Sanūsiyya—one of the key symbols of anti-colonial resistance—whose religious leader became the first king of the new state. As a primarily religious movement, however, the Sanūsiyya’s influence was unevenly distributed across the country. Consequently, when Idris al-Sanūsī ascended the throne, his political legitimacy was not universally acknowledged. Within this context, both history and historiography played a strategic role in the construction and contestation of political legitimacy. This paper aims to analyse historiographical narratives produced during the 1940s and 1950s, viewing independence as a process that transcends the moment of its formal proclamation. The objective is twofold: first, to investigate the construction of a “Sanūsī epistemological sovereignty” through historical revision and the promotion of a pro-monarchist historiography; and second, to examine its role in legitimising the new state and in fostering a shared sense of identity and nationhood.

Scientific and technological revolutions, including the isolation of alkaloids and the invention of machines, allowed the mass production and long-distance distribution of drugs from the early nineteenth century onwards. At the same time, drugs were found to keep industrial work processes going, by cutting hunger and fatigue and other conditions associated with the industrial lifestyle, including chronic pains, coughs, asthma, and depression. The seven chapters of the issue show the neglected relationship between drugs and the industrial situation, by combining different spatial scales: by zooming in on factories and other enclosed spaces, such as slave ships, colonial hospitals, laboratories, as well as the suburbs and garden plots that made up the everyday lives of drug-using working classes; and by zooming out to transnational business connections, resource-providing agricultural areas, and licit and illicit trade routes across national borders and continents.

This paper examines the history-making of the first two Raffles Professors of History at the University of Malaya, C.N. Parkinson and K.G. Tregonning, to demonstrate the impact Malaya’s decolonisation had on the historiographical practices of the university’s History Department. It argues that both historians, animated by Malaya’s decolonisation, attempted to re-frame Malayan history – through adopting a ‘world-historical’ and ‘autonomous history’ framework respectively – to meet what they perceived were the needs of a post-independence multiracial Malaya. Although both historians claimed to be producing histories for an independent Malaya, and while their frameworks were indeed methodologically innovative, both historians ultimately produced histories that continued to frame Malayan history using western frameworks. They were thus partially decolonised historians writing partially decolonised histories for a partially decolonised Malaya.