Since the sinking of SS Arandora Star 84 years ago, the memory of this tragic wartime incident has been strongly held and developed within the British Italian community, moving through several phases, from oblivion to recognition and commemoration to a more recent growing awareness in a wider mnemonic community of interest. The aim of this special issue is threefold: to raise further the profile of the Arandora Star; to consolidate and secure the uncertain historical foundations of the event; and to advance the historiography by introducing new facts and perspectives and uncovering previously hidden or unknown aspects both of the past and the continuing afterlife. The six articles presented move logically through the history and stages of memory evolution and its manifestation – internment and deportation, the sinking itself, material, cultural and political aspects of the deathscape, oral histories, the multimedia ‘archive’, with finally, an embarkation listing to plug a serious knowledge gap.

On 2 July 1940, the ocean liner SS Arandora Star was torpedoed and sunk by German submarine U-47, with the loss of around 805 lives; over half of these were British-Italian civilian internees. This article approaches the event from the arena of Second World War military history, contextualising the sinking within the early Battle of the Atlantic. In so doing, it shifts the customary focus away from government internment policy and discussions of cultural legacy towards examining British and German naval strategies and realities. Tactical and logistical considerations of the conflict are investigated, the explication of which allows more detailed discussion of the sinking controversies and enables delivery of ‘answers’ to the persistent ‘questions’ of why Arandora Star was sailing unescorted and without Red Cross insignia. The broad perspective offered engages with transgression and culpability, and overall the article seeks to advance Arandora Star scholarship with its distinctive maritime focus.

Historians have long known that leaders of the American Revolution looked to the law of nations for insight into the rights and obligations of independent states. In so doing, Americans relied largely on the writings of European legal theorists, such as Hugo Grotius and Emerich de Vattel, whose treatises on the law of nations are regarded today as having laid the foundations of international law. As this article demonstrates, however, early modern statesmen did not base their conduct on such treatises, but on a customary law of nations that they derived from precedent and the text of earlier treaties. This article elucidates the distinction between the customary and theoretical branches of the law of nations. It then goes on to examine the law of nations’ impact on revolutionary-era diplomacy, drawing particular attention to a series of wartime negotiations over rights to the Mississippi River. As the article shows, most American emissaries lacked experience with the customary laws of diplomacy and struggled to use that law effectively in their negotiations. The most serious consequences were averted due in part to French legal advice, and because one American, John Jay, acquired enough competence in customary law to guide his colleagues toward an effective negotiation of peace.

Together Cæsar and Cotton left an immense trove of English state papers on all matters of subjects. While Cæsar spent much of his lifetime as an officer of state, e.g., Master of the Rolls, they both devised innumerable works of great value. For instance, both he and Cotton expounded upon the issue of the post-nati and other arguments made in the conferences on the union with Scotland in Parliament. With their cessation in 1607, Cæsar undertook his most significant follow-up work: “That neither any General Statute nor Nativity only make a Man (whose Parents were Strangers) to be a Natural Subject in any Country.” Later duplicated by Cotton in Titus, F. IV., the intricacies of its two pages remained long-guarded in the private possession of such great men as Lords, Secretaries of State, and Prime Ministers. Only two centuries after Cæsar commenced its work did it come full circle to the British Museum—itself, ironically, formed from the seized library of Cotton. As for legal precedent, it is unique in that its broad historical scope predated the complexities of England's permanent royal colonies in America. During this period, every regnant—except for Charles I and James II—would assent unto major naturalization or alien statutes during their reign, all of which remained common law throughout England, the Empire, and America until, at the least, 1863.

The period of struggle over hydrocarbon sovereignty in the Arab world –the 1950s-1970s– saw a spate of periodicals in Arabic about oil. These included periodicals produced by the public relations departments of Euro-American oil companies, as well as monthlies, weeklies and quarterlies produced by Arab journalists, experts, and former oil revolutionaries in Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut and Kuwait. This essay argues that the trajectory of these latter publications –both their context and content– traces the massive political transformations that saw a shift of power in the region, alongside a radical transformation in the representation of oil from a public good into a private property.

In 1923, Haudenosaunee leader Deskaheh Levi General traveled to Geneva and launched a campaign for Indigenous statehood at the League of Nations. Drawing on a not-so-distant imperial past, the campaign was a novel attempt to use international law to assert Indigenous sovereignty. The Haudenosaunee claim hinged on a seemingly impossible conceit: that an independent native polity might persist within the borders of a settled state. The League of Nations’ primary institutional frameworks for grappling with other such problematic sovereignties were minority treaties and the mandate regime. But the Haudenosaunee case, which hinged on the persistence rather than the novelty of sovereignty, fit within neither paradigm. Their campaign illuminates a larger crisis of legal legibility that characterized Indigenous-settler relations from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. By reading Indigenous history into international legal history, this paper shows how Haudenosaunee people leveraged older norms of imperial relationality in their engagements with international law. In doing so, it revises a persistent genealogical account of the history of Indigenous human rights in favor of a more capacious narrative of Indigenous internationalism.

Formal membership in a state has been an essential political status for well over a century. It is typically gained at birth, either jus soli or jus sanguinis. Jus soli assigns nationality by birth in a nation's territory; jus sanguinis assigns children their parents’ nationality. This article provides an alternative intellectual history of the modern dominance of these principles for attributing nationality. Contrary to prior scholarship, soli and sanguinis were not restatements of existing principles. The soli/sanguinis binary was a nineteenth-century invention. Old-regime European empires attributed membership in the community under one or another single natural law principle. Parentage and birthplace were mostly evidence of conformity. In the early nineteenth century, officials in multiple jurisdictions began prioritizing positive law above natural law and transformed parentage and birthplace into competing principles for assigning nationality. This movement crystallized in 1860 when Charles Demolombe introduced jus soli and jus sanguinis to nationality law as competing, ostensibly ancient legal traditions. The framework spread quickly because it was a useful way to assign nationality despite states’ conflicting approaches to political membership. Yet, as its role in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) helps illustrate, the invented tradition has also obscured our understanding of more complex historical dynamics.

This article republishes a series of documents concerning citizenship rights for African Americans who were abroad. Twice during the 1850s the U.S. Secretary of State (William L. Marcy) issued instructions to consuls where he spelled out the relationship between race and citizenship for individuals who were beyond the borders of the United States. Because citizenship was not clearly defined the antebellum period, either in law or practice, the Secretary's guidance offers an important set of documents that scholars from a variety of fields can incorporate into their scholarship and teaching.

In January 1935, Palestinian Islamic thinkers, in conversation with counterparts elsewhere in the Middle East and South Asia, concluded that those who sold or facilitated the sale of land to the Mandate Jewish community must be excommunicated. This article explores the emergence of such religious excommunication (takfīr) in Mandate Palestine between 1929 and 1935 based on a wide range of periodicals and pamphlets from this period. It argues that, far from a story of an underlying “Islamic radicalism” which reemerged in a time of pressure, this is a case in which internal and external political and economic pressures necessitated a drastic solution which could distinguish Muslims committed to the Palestinian nationalist project from those who were not. In doing so, the article contributes to scholarship on both Modern Islam and Mandate Palestine.

After an absence of more than fifteen years, Russian and Soviet themes began to reappear in contemporary Arabic fiction around 2005, as Russia started to regain prominence in Arab politics and Arabic writers began rediscovering some of the transnational entanglements that the Cold War’s unipolar ending had largely occluded. Contemporary Arabic fiction writers have put Russian and Soviet material to many uses; this essay focuses on four: satirizing Soviet internationalism through depictions of dormitory racism; mocking the gender assumptions behind Arab nationalism and internationalism; humanizing jihadi fighters; and speaking beauty to power. The sheer diversity of these uses (and of others not covered here) shows that “How has Russian literature influenced Arabic literature?” is the wrong question. Future research should ask, rather, what local hungers the Russian/Soviet legacy has fed, what artistic and rhetorical resources it has offered, and how Arab writers have reimagined it.

In 1901, Cemaleddin Dağıstani, a newly enrolled student at a madrasa in Bursa, sent a letter to his family in the district of Quba (now in Azerbaijan) in the Russian Empire. He excitedly shared what he had witnessed during his journey to the Ottoman Empire. Upon crossing the Russo–Ottoman border from Batum (now Batumi, Georgia) to Rize, he was met by Ottoman officials who registered him as a muhajir (refugee or immigrant). Alongside other muhajirs from Russia, including Circassians, Dagestanis, Tatars, and Muslim Georgians, he boarded a state ferry to Istanbul. In seven days, he arrived at the Ottoman capital. He recalled meeting Muslim refugees from Bulgaria, Greece, and Habsburg-occupied Bosnia, and Muslim subjects of the British, French, and German colonial empires. The lion’s share of muhajirs, however, like Cemaleddin, were former Russian subjects. In his letter, Cemaleddin marveled that at times of need Muslims from all over the world sought and found refuge in the Ottoman domains.1

In 1788, Andrew Jackson acquired an enslaved woman named Nancy. According to most accounts, Nancy followed Jackson from Jonesborough, Tennessee to Nashville and lived out the rest of her days at the Hermitage. Except she did not. A close review of the legal record suggests that Nancy never made it to Nashville and either left Jackson somewhere along the Wilderness Road or died at his hands trying to escape. Her act of resistance, this article posits, may have profoundly affected Jackson's views of race and sex on the southern frontier.

In 1926, an official delegation of prominent Muslim scholars from the Soviet Union visited Mecca. The delegation came to the holy city just a few months after the Soviet Union had become the first country to recognize the rule of ʿAbd al-ʿAziz ʿAbd al-Rahman al Saʿud (1875–1936; Ibn Saʿud) over the Hijaz. The delegation’s members attended an international Muslim congress, met with Saudi officials, and performed the hajj. Before departing they issued a statement supporting Saudi sovereignty, noting that Ibn Saʿud had “purified the [Islamic] holy lands” from the rule of the Hashemite dynasty (r. 1916–24), the Saudis’ predecessors. The Saudi state warmly welcomed this Soviet support, publishing the delegation’s statement in Umm al-Qura (est. 1924), their official weekly.1

Knowledge of the Arandora Star is no longer limited to members of the UK's historic Italian community but is shared by a much larger constituency thanks to the greater accessibility of historical documents relating to the sinking of the ship, and to the substantial volume of new creative work inspired by it. This article examines this expansion of historical memory by following two discrete but entangled strands. The first follows the construction of the Arandora Star archive, starting from the author's chance personal encounter with a photograph. The second involves a close reading of Francine Stock's A Foreign Country (1999) and Caterina Soffici's Nessuno può fermarmi (2017), two novels that explore how people outside the historic Italian community recognise their implication in the sinking and its aftermath. Both foreground the intergenerational and transnational transmission of difficult memory and the ways in which the Arandora Star functions as an unstable point of historical knowledge and ethical judgement.