Essays appearing in this issue, authored by scholars who gathered at the University of Coimbra in 2021-22, display a range of approaches to historicizing the emergence of the global Portuguese empire in the passage from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The present introduction contextualizes their contributions by tracing a shift in the Portuguese and international historiography over the last half century. By and large, scholars have moved away from narratives of exceptionalism concentrated on elite figures such as King Manuel I of Portugal, and gravitated instead to grappling with how the early modern Portuguese empire was co-created with the wider world through vectors of violence, exchange, and reciprocity. These new scholarly imperatives prompt an adoption of novel spatial and disciplinary frameworks for tracing critical transformations in early modern global history.

This special issue seeks to probe the nature of the ostensible transition from ‘anticolonial’ to ‘postcolonial’ and its implications, focusing on historical actors who sought to remobilize across multiple political and spatial scales: that is, actors who thought and acted locally and globally. It asks: What discontents did decolonization bring in its wake, and what opportunities persisted for political activism across borders as the world shifted from one of empires to one of (nation-)states? It traces transformations – of imaginaries and networks, of ideas and modes of mobilization – that occurred alongside or because of the formal transfer of power and explores how this transition reshapes the interplay between different scales of decolonization. In other words, how did actors attempt to operate in, and stitch together, international, regional, national, and local spaces in the postcolonial era, and what new limits that they find themselves up against?

This article argues that West Papuan independence activists reveal the limits of decolonisation as a universal project of self‑determination. It shows how sub‑state actors were squeezed between transnational anticolonial solidarities and an international order increasingly structured around nation‑states. Focusing on the 1960s, it traces how West Papuan leaders sought to turn a territorial dispute into a people‑centred claim to self‑determination by mobilising race‑based transnational networks that linked Melanesia to a wider Black International. Drawing on the personal papers of Nicholas Jouwe and West Papuan petitions to the United Nations and the Organisation of African Unity, the article reconstructs efforts to enlist African and Caribbean diplomats as advocates in debates over the New York Agreement and the 1969 Act of Free Choice. It shows that, while Papuan activists strategically racialised themselves as Black and Melanesian to articulate decolonisation’s unfinished business, Indonesian diplomats and many postcolonial states activated civilisational hierarchies and the discourse of development to deny their claims and close off alternative futures. By following Papuan actors across local, regional, and global arenas after formal empire, the article demonstrates how decolonisation’s discontents arose not only within new nation‑states but also from the international norms that purported to universalise self‑determination.

This article examines the role of Dutch merchants, entrepreneurs, and artisans in the circulation of technological knowledge, skills, and commercial expertise between the Low Countries and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in the early seventeenth century. Focusing on projects promoted under Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici, it analyses attempts to introduce sugar refining, salt processing, and mill technologies into the port of Livorno. Rather than treating innovation as a simple transfer of techniques from one place to another, the article shows how technological circulation depended on the mobility of skilled actors, the mediation of commercial networks, and the support of political authorities. At the same time, it highlights the fragility of these processes: even under favourable legal and economic conditions, migrant ventures could fail or remain incomplete. By reconstructing the interactions between Dutch entrepreneurs, intermediaries, and Medici officials, the article argues that early modern technological innovation emerged from negotiation, adaptation, and the practical use of embodied expertise in a new environment. In this way, the Livorno case shows both the opportunities and the limits of migrant-driven innovation in the early modern Mediterranean and contributes to a broader understanding of how mobility shaped technological circulation on the ground.

This article illuminates the variety and diversity of mechanisms and strategies of (European) identification that were used by Ranga Reinhardt Kaundinya. The Indo-German was born into a German Indian (Brahmin) family in service of the Protestant Basel Mission from Switzerland. Having spent his youth in India, Germany, and Switzerland, he later became a planter in India before managing a cotton plantation in German East Africa (GEA). Producing his identity in a visual source and two German publications released during WWI, the examination of Kaundinya’s sources offers a perspective on how an individual developed an (European) identity in colonial frameworks and dynamics of power across three continents and two empires. In the field of tension between race, class, gender, and religion, he drew on the image of a virile, white colonial hunter and on the self-image of an experienced colonial planter. He further attempted to distance himself from his Brahmin descent and to exploit the Christian part of his family history instead. Moreover, he criticized British colonial rule of India. He even envisioned his own European identity and a vague Indo-German alliance. Amalgamating major ideas of Orientalism, racist thought, and geopolitical theories prominent at the fin du siècle, he called this alliance ‘Indo-Germania.’

The Rwenzururu movement was a secessionist movement that originated in western Uganda during the colonial era but whose claims for recognition gained traction in the independence period. It sought to secede from Uganda after decades of discriminatory treatment by the British colonial administration, the Toro group, and eventually an independent Ugandan state. Aware of the role of the United Nations (UN) in facilitating decolonisation across the African continent from the 1950s onwards, the Rwenzururu movement sought to insert itself in this epoch of decolonial changes. The movement was led by Isaya Mukirane, whose vision of internationalising the Rwenzururian campaign for self-determination initiated a series of petitions to the UN between 1962 and 1976. Petitions were brimming with hope in the 1960s and became more incendiary in the 1970s as the world’s power brokers did not respond to Rwenzururian appeals. The article traces how the movement adopted different methods, from waging a guerrilla war to diplomacy, to achieve self-determination and recognition from the international community. It connects the Rwenzururian struggle for autonomy to the contestations of minority rights at the UN. The article also highlights how the Rwenzururu movement still exercised agency by practising self-determination within the borders of the Rwenzururu Kingdom, even as it did not have multilateral engagement or attain official recognition from the UN.

European expansion from the fifteenth century onward triggered the global movement of numerous materials and objects, including Christian relics, which were crucial to missionary work. Nearly all ships departing Europe carried relics, which were essential for consecrating new churches in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Portugal, needing many relics for its overseas churches, sourced many of them from Cologne, home to the relics of Saint Ursula and her 11,000 virgin companions. These relics were particularly suited to the needs of the Portuguese due to their symbolic ties to long-distance travel, missionary work, and martyrdom— paralleling the activities of early modern missionaries. The abundance of relics from Ursula’s group allowed for widespread distribution, facilitating a shared religious calendar across vast regions. Additionally, and this is what this article argues, the kinship connections among Ursula’s companions symbolically reinforced political unity across the Portuguese empire. The article also argues that images of saintly noble women filled a void in the Estado da India, as women from Europe very rarely traveled or settled there. This article brings together and analyzes the surviving pictorial evidence of the Ursula cult from the Estado da India.

Drawing on sources produced in the Spanish Caribbean and Canary Islands, this article reconstructs the chronology of the earliest known slaving voyages from Arguin, São Tomé, and the Cape Verde Islands to the Americas. As a corrective to narratives characterizing the early Atlantic slave trade as an exclusively “Portuguese” enterprise driven largely by the priorities and directives of Iberian monarchs, it argues that the incipient traffic from Africa to the Caribbean may also be viewed as an adaptation of older Mediterranean and trans-Saharan slaving practices; as a key component of a broader slaving industry centered in the Gulf of Guinea; and as a manifestation of integrated maritime circuits linking Portuguese and Castilian archipelagos in the North Atlantic. Peninsular Iberian monarchs and financiers benefited substantially from the early sixteenth-century traffic and attempted to control it, but closer attention to Spanish Caribbean and Luso-African contexts reveals the multiple genealogies of the Atlantic slave trade.

Mobility has become a central focus of research into material culture. We chart the life-cycle of one mobile object: a painting commissioned in 1790s Peru by an indigenous man, painted by an indigenous artist, and intended for the king of Spain. Its history demonstrates the importance of exploring not simply the fact that objects moved around, but the particular reasons why they were in motion, and the particular ways in which they circulated. In the case of this painting, its creation, trajectory, disappearance, and afterlife were determined by two forms of damage characteristic of the eighteenth century: colonial violence and imperial warfare. These forces set objects in motion, and they conditioned the ways in which this painting was repeatedly reinterpreted and physically rearranged. Its history exemplifies the interconnections between imperial and colonial conflict, and the mobility and reception of artworks in this globalising era. Warfare and violence, we show, were powerful, and overlooked, factors that shaped the meanings and changing materiality of objects as they circulated.

In a historical-anthropological approach, this text aims to demonstrate the role of the indigenous peoples of Portuguese America in the processes of conquest and occupation of the region in the 16th century. The interdisciplinary analysis of the contact relations between indigenous peoples and Europeans shows the influence of their actions on the Portuguese indigenist policy. Although constructed during the reign of King João III, this policy developed from the challenges imposed by the native peoples since the first contacts, still during the reign of King Manuel I. By highlighting how the political actions of indigenous peoples and their complex interactions with the colonizers gave limits and possibilities to the decisions of the Metropolis regarding the policies of conquest and formation of colonial societies in America, this text contributes to the current historiographical debate that questions the centrality of the Portuguese empire, valuing local dynamics that include the actions of subaltern peoples for the analysis of policies, laws and power relations between the colony and the Metropolis.

With the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, thousands of people sought refuge in neighbouring British Jamaica, or ended up there as prisoners of war. This contribution examines how colonial authorities responded to a mass influx of people in a time characterised by political uncertainty. It sheds light on a system of registration employed in 1790s Jamaica to manage refugees and to gauge who would be entitled to assistance. This system was built on surveillance, categorisations of people, and a language of deservingness, made use of both by colonial administrators, on whose deliberations access to support effectively depended, and refugees in their own narratives. The article shows how refugee registration was not a top-down process but rather one that was actively influenced from below, as refugees themselves made use of the unclearness of categorisations and hijacked the system in order to gain access to specific sets of relief funds.

The objective of this study is to examine the policies of the Russian Empire and Persia regarding the election of the Catholicos of All Armenians. The expansionist ambitions of the Russian Empire in the South Caucasus led to confrontation with Persia, and within this context the cultivation of a pro-Russian worldview among the Armenian population became a priority for Russian authorities. Consequently, the Catholicosate of All Armenians—the most influential Armenian institution of the period—emerged as a target of both Russian and Persian intervention.

The election of the Catholicos thus became a primary foreign policy issue for the two empires. The electoral process itself reveals divisions within the Armenian clergy, as rival factions sought to establish a Catholicos under Russian or Persian patronage. Taking advantage of these circumstances, Tsarist authorities actively intervened, promoting their preferred candidates and thereby breaking with the traditional practice of autonomous election.

This study draws on archival documents from the Catholicosate of All Armenians, which provide the basis for a comprehensive analysis of the election process, the responses of the Armenian clergy, the manifestations of Russian-Persian rivalry, the resulting diplomatic confrontations, and the involvement of the Ottoman Empire. By systematically reconstructing these events from original sources, the study highlights the ways in which imperial rivalries directly shaped Armenian ecclesiastical life, offering new insights into the intersection of religious authority and regional power politics in the South Caucasus.

This article explores the career of Aruna Asaf Ali, (1909-1996), a prominent figure on the Indian Left in the first two decades after independence. Tracing her path from ‘Congress socialism’ to communism, it examines the development of her thinking and how it impacted her work as a journalist and an activist in transnational networks such as the peace movement and the Women’s International Democratic Federation. Aruna saw domestic and international issues as intrinsically linked and believed that the Soviet Union was both a model for and guarantor of Indian postcolonial freedom. However, this article resists the framing of Aruna’s career as a Cold War history instead arguing for the significance of anti-colonial principles and domestic priorities in shaping her interventions. This enriches the historiography of the Left in postcolonial India and contributes to a decentred global history of decolonisation that is shaped, but not determined, by the priorities of Cold War power blocs.

This research article examines the role of immigrant labour and micro-innovations in transferring glass-making knowledge in early modern Britain. It argues that immigrants played a crucial role in adapting European products to local conditions by providing new recipes and access to trade routes. Furthermore, it emphasises the significance of mobility and secrecy in knowledge transfer. Immigrants created innovations through mobility by tailoring their roles to encourage movement and maintaining the confidentiality of their skills. The article also examines the demands of local settings and conditions for integrating new technology.

Recent scholarship has emphasised the central importance of cultural contact and global knowledge circulation for technological innovation; however, this connection remains understudied in the global early modern world. This introduction highlights the importance of combining migration history and the history of technology to shed new light on the roles of migrants in technological innovation from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. The seven articles presented in this issue offer a range of studies spanning four continents, encompassing a wide range of migrants. Gathered together, they outline the multitude of factors that allowed migrants to become integral parts of technological dialogue. Hence, this introduction presents the methodological and conceptual foundations to unearth the common processes that linked the migration-innovation nexus across the early modern world.

In the Early Modern period, many Chinese people undertook temporary or permanent overseas migrations from the Qing empire (1644-1911) to labour and trade. These circulations were almost entirely organized by translocal kinship networks with little to no involvement from the imperial state itself. In fact, in its earlier years the Qing Dynasty actively sought to prevent or delimit the activities of these migratory networks. Not surprisingly then, the relationship between these networks and the Qing state has often been framed as inherently antagonistic. In this paper, I explore the evolution of this relationship over the 17th and 18th centuries, with particular consideration towards the ways it influenced and was influenced by the circulation of technologies. I argue that as the dynasty expanded and its security anxieties declined, it increasingly found a place for diaspora within the framework of the Qing’s nebulous claim to rulership over ‘all under heaven’. I find that the state was forced at times to collaborate with migrant networks in the construction of a quasi-protectionist system that met key needs for both. This transformation had important consequences for technology transfer, especially in the fields of ship-building, cash crop agriculture, and mining.

In 1793, during the Haitian Revolution, the burning of Cap-Français led to the flight of thousands of people across the Atlantic World, many of whom ended up in French port cities. The French government decided to grant them financial relief, in the form of monthly amounts of money. However, the administrative category “colons de Saint-Domingue réfugiés en France,” depending on the period considered, did not encompass the same populations. This contribution examines how the requirements for relief evolved between 1793 and 1802, when Napoleon sent the Leclerc expedition to reassert his domination over Saint-Domingue. It shows the passage from legislation that granted relief to all the displaced imperial populations, including former slaves, to a more restrictive law focusing on property owners only during the Directory (1795–1799), and then to a racialised relief prioritising white owners at the end of the Consulate (1802). These restrictions were linked to the sacralisation of private property during the French Revolution, but were also symptomatic of the permanence of a colonial relation between Saint-Domingue and its metropole, leading to the creation of an “imperial nation” in which white owners were considered full citizens, whereas people of colour were relegated to the margins of the empire.

This article studies how the International Court of Justice handled disputes on decolonization through the jurisprudence of Judge Wellington Koo of China. The Court served as a space for ongoing decolonization contestations and as a venue of last resort for those dissatisfied with how the end of imperial rule unfolded. A former statesman, Koo brought to the bench not only his expertise in international law, but also his political experience in shaping the postwar international order. The article follows the perspective of a judge who was himself often discontented, specifically with the Court—he often found himself writing either separate or dissenting opinions—but also with decolonization at large. It does so through examining a series of “edge cases,” ranging from Cambodia to South West Africa, that did not fit neatly with how the UN envisaged decolonization would manifest into discrete nation-states. This article argues that Court had an aversion to these exceptions and refrained from ruling in a way that would disrupt the dominant mode of decolonization. At the same time, looking at how Koo approached these “edge cases” shows how actors viewed the possibilities of decolonizing international law and the uneven legacy that the Court left for the international system.