This article advocates for an entangled practice history of interwar anti-colonialism and youth by exploring the political and cultural significance of the Indian News Service and Information Bureau in interwar Berlin. It was a place where young socialists from the left wing of the German-Jewish youth movement mingled with Indian anti-colonial activists, as well as a space for international encounters more widely. But how exactly did this fusion between these different groups occur, in what practices did it materialize, and how did it impact on the activists‘ lives in the 1920s, but also beyond? One of the connecting lines that stretched from the left wing of the youth movement to the anti-colonial activists was a progressive, experimental approach to sexuality that aimed at the overcoming of class, racial, and religious boundaries. Mixed relationships between cosmopolitan men from Asia and independent young women from GermanJewish homes, who had grown up with and in the youth movement of the early twentieth century, had more than an erotic appeal, however. They were also a political statement, a lived rejection of the middle-class conventions of the prewar period and, from the perspective of the Indian activists, also a critique of colonial emotional regimes and the regulation of intimacy that often accompanied them.
This article addresses the problem of the ambivalent relationship that Global History has entertained with the Issue of the state. On the one hand, Global History is critical towards the “methodological Nationalism”, and therefore tends to devalue also the role of the state, as most global historians share a certain mistrust for conceptual abstractions and prefer making use of terms such as politics and government rather than that of state. On the other hand, however, even for Global History the use of a category like that of Empire is indispensable, and the latter requires a strong attention to the role played by state institutions in the construction of vast power systems on a global scale.
The article reconstructs the late emergence and politicization of colonialism as a term, distinguishing it from older notions such as colonization and imperialism and tracing its shift, especially after Bandung, into a condemnatory, activist category appropriated by both anticolonial actors and historians. It shows how colonialism became central in historiography only after decolonization, first in militant, Marxist-inflected narratives and then in more complex frameworks that provincialize Europe, recover subaltern agency, and embed colonial history within broader national and transnational histories. It reviews key trajectories in colonial studies—from Enlightenment reflections to twentieth-century typologies of colonial situations and states—highlighting their methodological sophistication and continuing relevance in the age of globalization. A substantial section analyzes how postcolonial theory, Atlantic and transnational approaches, and concepts such as “entangled empires” and “connected histories” have redefined colonialism as a plural, relational, and non-teleological field of inquiry. Through case studies of Bayly, Osterhammel, Subrahmanyam, Gruzinski, and Cooper, the article argues that some of the most innovative strands of global history in fact grow out of colonial and imperial historiography. It insists that global history is best understood as a perspective rather than a separate object, and that there can be no serious global history without a rigorous, historically differentiated account of colonialism and its legacies. In conclusion, the article stresses the analytical utility of colonialism for understanding contemporary phenomena—neocolonialism, environmental exploitation, global inequalities, racialization—and contends that far from being superseded by global history, the category remains indispensable for grasping both the historical formation and the present contradictions of a globalized world.
Between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a number of adventurers from the Italian Peninsula left the Old World and joined the struggle for the emancipation of New Granada. Motivated by a range of factors, they became involved in the pre-independence uprisings, enlisted in the ranks of the Ejército Libertador (Liberation Army), and participated in the consolidation of the new republics. Taking place within a broader transatlantic and revolutionary movement, their biographic trajectories influenced the course of independence in the territories of New Granada and the eventual birth of Gran Colombia.
During the 1850s, the Kingdom of Sardinia—while presenting itself as a champion of liberalism and constitutionalism on the Italian Peninsula—carried out the forced removal of political exiles: individuals arrested for participating in uprisings or deemed threats to public order. Between April 1853 and March 1855, three ships transported refugees from across the peninsula to the United States. These deportations aimed to reinforce internal security, silence dissent, and signal to Austria the regime’s determination to suppress revolutionary movements. Yet the arrival in New York of these refugees—none of whom had been formally charged or convicted—provoked diplomatic controversy. The episode raised pressing questions about international law, the legal status of the deportees, and US immigration policy. Critics accused Piedmont of attempting to turn the United States into a penal colony.
In the framework of global history, the nineteenth-century political Mediterranean has been the focus of a recently renewed historiography. The essay aims to contribute to this new research thread from a peculiar perspective, that of the articulation of the state in a Mediterranean dimension, investigated though a specific case study: the intelligence activity for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies carried out by the diplomatic mission in Constantinople. The latter turned out to be a crucial node of the Bourbon network of the state abroad as well as of an inter-state conservative network with the common aim of political surveillance. Moreover, the analysis sheds light on the intersection of state apparatuses with the network of exiles moving across the Mediterranean. Shifting the point of view from the national Italian movement to the modernization of one of the conservative states in the peninsula, framed in a transnational context, the article shows a more politically complex and plural nineteenth-century Mediterranean than usually outlined.
Der Artikel untersucht das freiwillige Engagement indischer Frauen, tätig in der Saroj Nalini DuttMemorial Association (SNDMA), bei der Organisation und Umsetzung ländlicher Aufbaupro-gramme für ihre subalternen Zeitgenossinnen. Im Fokus stehen der Handlungsantrieb sowiedie sozialen und politischen Rahmenbedingungen, die die Arbeit der in Bengalen ansässigenSNDMA von den 1920er bis in die 1970er Jahre prägten. Einerseits wird die Bedeutung freiwilliger Arbeit für die Schaffung von (Entwicklungs-)Expertise und für die Etablierung nachhaltigerKarrieren im Bereich der sozialen Arbeit diskutiert. Andererseits wird untersucht, inwiefern dieArbeit der Freiwilligenorganisation Frauen darüber hinaus in bezahlte Arbeit brachte. Der Bei-trag zeigt, wie der ländliche Raum durch die Arbeit der SNDMA zu einem wichtigen Ort für diegeschlechtsspezifische Ausgestaltung von Entwicklung wurde und wie indische Frauen sozialeDienste, die zuvor nicht vorhanden gewesen waren, über die Epochengrenze 1947 hinwegaufbauten.
Transimperial history is a vibrant emerging field that is rapidly maturing. However, for it to be-come a distinct approach, it requires more than just momentum; it needs its own method-ology—something transimperial history is still lacking. This article proposes the transimperialprism as an analytic tool to address this gap. A prism refracts the seemingly uniform narrativesof single empires into a spectrum of shared practices, revealing how empires were inextricablylinked through connectivity, cooperation, and competition. It centers mechanisms of powerover “flows” and rethinks historical directionality, rejecting teleological narratives of globaliza-tion. Addressing the question of whether transimperial history is “the new global,” we arguethat it is not a replacement but a necessary complement responding to the current “crisis of theglobal” and the resurgence of imperial thinking.
This article argues that the availability of statistical information on volunteering resulted froma variety of efforts to make previously obscured contributions to countries’ wealth and well-being visible as productive activities. Since the late 1960s, economists from the Global Southand feminists criticized international economic standards for their Western and male bias. Thesediscontents led to the introduction of unpaid work as a new category of international laborstatistics and umbrella term for very diverse activities, such as subsistence farming, housework,caring, and volunteering. This was the beginning of an epistemic revolution in data collectionwith far-reaching consequences. It changed the semantics of the concept of labor and en-hanced the visibility of women’s and volunteers’ contributions to societies’ well-being. But datacollection also made volunteering more susceptible to political management and economicexploitation, and its classification under the general category unpaid work tended to blur thedistinction between voluntary and involuntary activities.
his article uses a longue-durée approach to discuss volunteering as a practice in Slovenia sincethe mid-nineteenth century. It uses an example of volunteer fire departments, one of the old-est voluntary organizations in the country and asks what firefighters in Slovenia recognized asvoluntary work during the imperial, interwar, and socialist periods? The article looks at wom-en’s participation in fire departments to investigate whether the gradual inclusion of womenchanged perception regarding volunteer work? In particular, the article focuses on the periodof socialist self-management, during which the idea of volunteering was based on the partici-pation of people in voluntary actions to improve community life with a loose understanding ofindividual gains. The chapter argues that while volunteer fire departments notably diversifiedtheir membership, the meaning of volunteering remained linked to a national tradition rootedin an earlier era when departments consisted exclusively of men who viewed their participationas unpaid and honorable work.
