Between 1918 and 1923, Istanbul was the capital of a defeated empire and occupied by the “interallied” forces composed of Britain, France, and Italy. Notwithstanding, or precisely due to, these conditions, it functioned as a vibrant hub of global communist militancy. This article explores the brief history of occupied Istanbul and discusses different agents and aspects of communist network-making. It underlines the agency of two neglected actors: a multinational body of communist sailors who connected Istanbul and its communists to European, Middle Eastern, and Soviet ports; and European and colonial soldiers stationed in Istanbul, who counterintuitively contributed to these connections. Finally, it shows how Istanbul, as the multiethnic and multilinguistic soon-to-be-former capital of the Ottoman Empire, provided a fertile ground for communist connections.

The article sheds new light on colonial encounters in eighteenth-century Luzon by viewing them through the lens of mobility. Historical actors—both Spaniards and indigenes—created and sustained ties with each other through reciprocal visits punctuated by feasts. Encounters were not singular events but rather pertained to a series of multiple mobilities and multisited celebrations. The very act of travelling transformed the visitors’ identities, which became ever more entangled with their hosts’. In the colonial context, encounters did not involve a simple unilateral or unidirectional penetration and conquest of the island's interior on the part of Spanish missionaries and officials. They were embedded in a combination of Spanish and indigenous practices of reciprocal mobilities.

The emergence of two states in Indonesia in the aftermath of the Second World War, namely the Republic of Indonesia and the Netherlands Indies Civil Administration, instigated a war that imposed citizenship, which schoolteachers had to choose carefully. By examining the quest for professional trajectories of Dutch and Indonesian schoolteachers during the 1945–1949 period, this paper argues that expanding citizenship fostered decolonisation through the teachers’ detachment from a shared dream of social mobility. The post–World War II reconstruction project, which is largely depicted as narratives of state building in many of the existing bibliographies, reflected a growing discontent in teachers’ expectations for economic reestablishment at the personal levels. The teachers’ detachment from a shared dream of social mobility reflected the dissolution of an imagined community where transnational cultural identities had met and melded in the early twentieth century. In contrast to the emerging historiography that emphasises atrocities and violence, this paper offers a perspective on the soft process of decolonisation.

The kingdoms of Kandy (now Sri Lanka) and Ayutthaya (now Thailand) were briefly connected across Indian Ocean waters in the mid-eighteenth century by Dutch East India Company (hereafter VOC) traders, leading to the importation of valuable Siamese Buddhist monks and their ordination lineage to the island. Two series of events related to the VOC's search for and delivery of these monks demonstrate that the patronage of connected religious dynamics—not just the contingencies of trade, land, labour, and statecraft—was an essential aspect of Company business. At the same time, mediating Buddhist connection was a dangerous, sometimes perilous undertaking. Analysing VOC records alongside Laṅkān and Siamese historical chronicles and travelogues reveals that what were initially friendly connections at first necessitated, and later intensified certain forms of danger. We begin with perilous shipwrecks and diplomatic impasses across monsoon waters that eventually led to the restoration of an important but defunct Kandyan Buddhist ordination lineage, and conclude with the aftermath of a failed assassination attempt in 1760 against the royal patron of that lineage transmission. I advance the notion of “dangerous friendships” to characterise how Buddhist courts and European traders worked together to first generate, and then exploit, friendly religious connections.

Societal debates about climate change have rekindled interest in environmental history approaches. This review article considers three recent books in African environmental history, on the Kruger National Park, the East African Groundnut Scheme, and on infrastructure in postcolonial Dar es Salaam. Why is it important to study the empire–environment nexus? How do African experiences relate to discussions on the Anthropocene? Taking environmental dynamics into account enriches understandings of social, political, and cultural relationships and sheds light on imperialism and its complex legacies. This article makes the case for the importance of environmental history as a category of analysis, encouraging other scholars to think “with” the environment in broader debates concerning power, identity, and social change.

This article posits that friendship has been a particularly fertile and creative category against the backdrop of imperial expansion and consolidation in the Himalayas. As a small but strategically perceived sovereign Himalayan country, Bhutan's history through the last centuries has been marked simultaneously by imperial and post-colonial asymmetries of power. The term “friendship” is deployed as a key diplomatic category in Bhutan's most significant relationship, that with its much larger neighbour India. However, the origin of this friendship is always traced back to the mid-twentieth-century post-colonial period. In contradistinction to this, I constellate a much longer history of this friendship with a special focus on the landmark 1910 Treaty of Punakha between Bhutan and Britain, which was a key turning point in Bhutan's relations with its southern neighbour (British India at the time). Scholars typically state as a matter of fact that in the year 1910, with the initiative of Political Officer Charles Bell, a treaty was signed between Britain and Bhutan that placed Bhutan's external relations under the guidance of Britain. This present work is situated within the oeuvre of critically rereading imperial sources and evaluating their historical legacies, and is the first detailed scholarly analysis of why this treaty was significant and how it came to be signed. I identify the factors that were at work in how and why the 1910 friendship treaty was realised for imperial British purposes—the interpersonal friendships fostered by the British Political Officers; the threat of China as an Other; and the representation of material and ideational advantages from associating with an imperial power. In making this argument, I analyse the role played by the vocabulary of friendship and draw upon primary archival sources to illustrate the factors that were at work as well as the dissonance between the archival and public rationales provided by Political Officer Bell. The 1910 treaty was signed at a watershed moment after the then-recent installation of a monarchy in Bhutan in 1907, and against the great game backdrop of Qing activities in Tibet and British interests in the region; throughout the twentieth century, the impact of this friendship treaty was of paramount significance, and its shadow continues into the twenty-first century.

Chartered companies provided one solution for the problems posed by long-distance trade in the early modern world. Accordingly, these organisations have been studied exhaustively. Yet the field is by no means depleted, as the books reviewed here attest. These six books cover questions ranging from whether the chartered companies acted as real business organisations or rather as appendages of state power, the relations between companies and states, the institutional development of the corporate form, and the nature of some of these companies as “company-states.” In addition, two edited volumes deal with specific aspects of the chartered companies and with noncorporate forms of merchant organisation. The works raise new questions and engage in ongoing debates. The review also raises a number of issues which could be addressed in future research, including the dominance of the East India Companies in our understanding of the corporate form as a whole.

Historians working on slavery always must perform a balancing act between narrating the atrocities of oppression and the possibilities of resistance to and escape from it. The three books under review all do a wonderful job in showing us a way out of this conundrum. Jessica Johnson and Sophie White do so by analysing the intimate lives of enslaved women in early modern New Orleans and West Africa (Johnson) and enslaved women and men in Louisiana (White), while Stella Dadzie looks at the means of resistance taken by the enslaved in the British Atlantic world. Their work allows us to better understand the historical reality of slavery as it applied to at least 15 million people, while stressing the notion that the historical actors whose voices were recovered, were first of all humans, all of them different, and all of them, in their own way, able to deal with the horrors imposed on them – by being intimate with their peers, by running away, or by fighting their oppressors.