This article provides an introduction to the two articles in this Special Theme on education, labour, and discipline in colonial Asia. It offers a brief historiography of education to indigenous children in the colonial context provided by non-state as well as state actors. We argue that while many studies have separated the motives behind, and actions of, these different actors in relation to education and “civilizing missions”, it is worthwhile connecting these histories. Moreover, apart from looking at motives, the articles in this Special Theme aim to show the value of studying educational practices in a colonial context. Finally, this introduction identifies several opportunities for future – comparative as well as transnational – studies into the topic of education, child labour, and discipline.

I examine the two-level utilitarian case for humane animal agriculture (by R. M. Hare and Gary Varner) and argue that it fails on its own terms. The case states that, at the ‘intuitive level’ of moral thinking, we can justify raising and killing animals for food, regarding them as replaceable, while treating them with respect. I show that two-level utilitarianism supports, instead, alternatives to animal agriculture. First, the case for humane animal agriculture does not follow from a commitment to two-level utilitarianism combined with a commitment to respecting animal lives. Second, the two-level utilitarian case falls prey to a compartmentalization problem and cannot uphold both respect and replaceability. What I call ‘humane lives’ are not appropriately valued by the lights of two-level utilitarianism itself.

The tadhkira (biographical anthology) represents one of the most prolific and prevalent categories of texts produced in Islamicate societies, yet few studies have sought to understand the larger processes that governed their production and circulation on a transregional basis. This article examines and maps the production, circulation, and citation networks of tadhkiras of Persian poets in the 18th and 19th centuries. It understands tadhkiras of Persian poets as a transregional library that served as a repository of accessible and circulating texts meant to be incorporated, reworked, and repackaged by a cadre of authors separated by space and time. By relying on a macroanalytical approach, quantifiable data, and digital mapping, this article highlights the overall construction of the transregional library itself, the impact of state disintegration and formation on its constitution, and the different ways authors on opposite ends of the Persianate world came to view this library by the end of the 19th century.

During the Kenyan Emergency of 1952–1960, one of the most violent episodes in the history of the British Empire, humanitarian organizations colluded with the colonial state to shore up British power. This article examines how aid agencies that claimed to exemplify the progressive internationalism of the postwar period participated in colonial violence. Far from condemning the brutality of the imprisonment and torture during the Kenyan Emergency, aid organizations were deeply implicated in parallel projects for women and children that sought to achieve the same objectives: the remaking of Kikuyu hearts and minds and the weakening of anticolonial resistance. Far from acting as a check on colonial violence in an era of burgeoning rights discourses in 1950s Kenya, self-proclaimed “impartial” internationalist organizations, while claiming to uphold values of universal humanity, worked as auxiliaries to the colonial counterinsurgency. Taking their cue from military counterinsurgency in 1950s Malaya, humanitarians sought to win “hearts and minds” and undertook material provision for imprisoned anticolonial activists and their families on behalf of the colonial state. They did so by importing new humanitarian expertise developed in wartime Europe and adapting it to fit within racist, colonial norms. In providing this allegedly impartial expertise, humanitarian organizations lent credence to the myth that rehabilitation in Kenya was a progressive program enacted by a liberal empire to modernize its subjects, rather than a ruthless attempt to stymie anticolonial resistance by any means necessary. In this case, postwar humanitarian internationalism did not challenge colonial brutality but enabled it.

This article compares queer social scenes in the 1960s in three English towns and cities: Brighton and Plymouth on the south coast and Manchester in the northwest. It considers how queer experience in these places was affected by local identities, demographics, geographies, and socioeconomic circumstances and so demonstrates how and why the local matters to queer scenes and lives, even in the midst of wider burgeoning mass and connective cultures. A focus on London has dominated analysis of both the “Swinging Sixties” and queer lives in England; this article shows how different queer experience outside that city could be. Despite multiple resonances and connections, London's queer story cannot stand in for that of other places.