Japan is ringed by a number of remote oceanic islands whose economic, strategic and symbolic significance is entirely disproportionate to their tiny size. Yet today they are uninhabited, populated primarily by birds. Historically, these islands and the oceans that surround them have formed a borderland between Japan, Hawai‘i, the United States, Britain and China. First targetted for their supplies of plumage and guano, they later became launchpads for empire and landing strips for bombers. Many have now been transformed into nature reserves.

What chain of events led people to set foot on such remote spots in the first place? How did they go about claiming the islands and the birds that nested on them? What kind of human settlements once existed there, and what happened after they were abandoned? What does the history of bird islands say about Japanese imperial and post-imperial power, and about the web of political, economic and ecological connections between insular and oceanic space? And what does all this say about the relationship between sovereignty, territory and environment in the modern world?

The Introduction lays out the context, the motives, and the main features of the reinvention of Roman property in nineteenth-century Europe. It introduces the global professional network of elite liberal jurists who embarked in this ambitious project and explores the reasons of their attraction to Roman propert and their committment to changing ideas of modernization. Further the introduction examines the conceptual structre of modern dominium.

This overarching chapter offers a comprehensive overview on how history is dealt with in International Relations (IR) and presents a conceptual framework for the study of history in IR based on the concept of historicity. The chapter also makes the case why looking at imperialism – the cross-cutting theme addressed in every chapter in this book – is a particularly fruitful way for both tracing the role of history in international politics and making use of the concept of historicity. The chapter introduces in particular six modes of historicity which shape its core argument on the centrality of history for a better understanding and better analyses of international politics.

Scholars of international political economy (IPE) often locate the origins of their field in the contested nature of the world economy of the early 1970s, but many of its early proponents drew important inspiration from political economists who had an international focus from the pre-1945 period. This chapter summarizes the book’s analysis of the field’s pre-1945 roots, an analysis that challenges conventional depictions of this history in two ways. First, the book embraces a more global conception of the field’s pre-1945 roots by highlighting many contributions made by thinkers from outside Europe and the United States. Second, it shows that discussions of the international dimensions of political economy before 1945 involved much more than a debate between the three perspectives of economic liberalism, neomercantilism, and Marxism. This introductory chapter also highlights some limitations of the analysis as well as some of the motivations behind the project.

The end of the ’spirit of Bandung’ in the late 1960s coincided with the passing and retirement of most of the key UN officials involved in the development of the peacekeeping project. By 1971, the Cold War obstructed the UN forums from authorising any new armed peacekeeping missions. Weaving together the contributions of previous chapters, the conclusion reiterates the how UN peacekeepers’ racial prejudices and technocratic logic perpetuated international hierarchies of power, colonial structures, and further suppressed the self-determination of peripheral or minority populations. It addresses the role of the UN peacekeeping missions in supporting - if not, openly enabling - the United States’ anticommunist aggression across the Global South during the decolonisation period. Rather than being passive in this process, however, this book has demonstrated how the UN officials agreed that anticommunism was a peacebuilding strategy for global security. Ultimately, peacekeepers’ unique role in the field shaped the formation of the post-colonial international order, embedding uneven hierarchies of race, expertise, and diplomatic power within newly independent nations and populations.

The introduction makes a case for addressing the ‘break-up of Britain’ as a problem of global history. For decades, historians of remarkably diverse leanings have thrown their intellectual weight behind a presumed connection between the historical burden of imperial decline and the slow depletion of shared British sentiment since the Second World War. Yet invariably, the end of empire tends to be framed as an abstract tipping point, with little sense of its real-life interactions or everyday consequences - as though its mere dissolution were causation itself. But if social identities are inherently relational, arising out of intricate patterns of material and cultural exchange connecting peoples across wide distances, then focusing solely on the ‘British of Britain’ can provide only a partial and incomplete perspective. By incorporating the fate of Britishness in the many corners of the world where it has long since ceased to command any popular allegiance, the diminishing strength of unitary sentiment in the contemporary United Kingdom emerges in a whole new light. The argument, structure and empirical range of Untied Kingdom all proceed from this fundamental premise.

The conclusion recapitulates the argument and offers some perspectives about the unfinished business of the end of Britain. Superficially, the persistence of the Union in the face of decades of gloomy prophesy might be viewed as a sign that the UK is somehow uniquely resilient — still standing more than half a century after the bell first tolled. But shared categories of belonging rarely permit clear-cut patterns of ‘closure’. That the end itself is incomplete and indistinct is entirely in keeping with the many offshore encounters examined here, where enduring dilemmas and loose ends abound.

From Tanganyika’s independence in 1961 to the collapse of the Portuguese empire in 1974, Dar es Salaam was an epicentre of revolution in Africa. The representatives of anticolonial liberation movements set up offices in the city, attracting the interest of the Cold War powers, who sought to expand their influence in the Third World. Meanwhile, the Tanzanian government sought to translate independence into meaningful decolonisation through an ambitious project to build a socialist state. This chapter explains how the lens of the city reveals the connections between the dynamics of the Cold War, decolonisation, and socialist state-making in Tanzania. It locates this approach among new approaches to the history of the Cold War, decolonisation, and global cities. Scattered across continents, the postcolonial archive offers the potential for exploring the revolutionary dynamics which intersected in Dar es Salaam.

The Introduction to Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet outlines large themes in the 6,000-year story of how cities gave humans the power to dominate Earth. Our Urban Planet is at once a plural and a singular phenomenon. Its diversity reflects the many birthplaces and birthdates of cities on six continents over six millennia, yet it has become a connected city-enabled habitat of a single species on a single planet. Cities – compact built spaces that rely on many other, dispersed ones – allowed us to harvest enough energy from the Sun and Earth to create the political communities, institutions, wealth, and ideas we needed to act on a global scale, to build an Earth-encrusting habitat, to impact all other parts of our planet’s biosphere, and to face the consequences. The life of Earthopolis exists in space and time. As our urban harvests of natural energy transformed throughout global urban history, from river valleys to the world ocean, and then to hydrocarbon, the geographic extent of our Urban Planet’s four defining realms – of human action, habitat, impact, and consequence – expanded and retreated across Earth. Now our Urban Planet puts us in perilous command of our host planet’s entire halo of life.