In the summer of 1916, the British Salonica Army and the Cyprus colonial government established the Cypriot Mule Corps (officially called the Macedonian Mule Corps), composed of mostly of Christian (Eastern Orthodox, and smaller numbers of Catholics, Armenians, and Maronites) and Muslim Cypriot muleteers and interpreters. These men served mostly in Salonica during the war and in Istanbul after the armistice. Although given the title of “Macedonian” Mule Corps, it was almost exclusively Cypriot in composition, with a staggering enlistment of about 12,000 Cypriots from every religious group in Cyprus. This article explores the formation of the corps, muleteer numbers, and recruitment strategies. It argues that there were both push and pull factors in understanding the striking enlistment of between 20 and 25 per cent of peasant and labouring men aged between 18 and 39.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the first Muslim rulers of Mysore—Haidar ‘Ali (c. 1720-82) and his son Tipu Sultan (c. 1750-99)—were amongst the first South and West Asian rulers to unleash a process of administrative, socio-economic and military protomodernisation. Haidar, a rather cautious and pragmatic autocrat who could neither read nor write, ruled within the framework of the traditional Mughal system of governance. Highly skilled in administrative, military and diplomatic realms, he initiated the proto-modernisation of the army and took some important measures towards the establishment of a central state. In turn, Tipu was an educated autocrat, fond of administrative, socio-economic, military, and technological inventions and innovations which he intended to use in the struggle against the British occupying forces in South India. In the extant literature, Tipu is either being idealised as an “enlightened” ruler or described as a pre-modern despot. Few scholars have given a balanced account of his rule by depicting both his autocratic style of leadership, as well as the pragmatic features and proto-modernising aspects of his rule. This article is concerned with the biographic and historical background of Haidar ‘Ali and Tipu Sultan and aims to furnish a concerted account of their rule by consulting fresh printed and unprinted primary sources in English, French and German.

On 17 April 1946, seven Australian war crimes investigators left the military perimeter British troops were maintaining around the city of Batavia and travelled into an anarchic, lawless Javanese hinterland, rife with different Indonesian revolutionary militants fighting the Dutch and each other. As they entered the kampong of Tjaringin, north of Bogor, automatic rifle fire hit their car. Two men died immediately; a third was found days later in a nearby ditch, shot in the back of the head. Amid outrage in the Australian press, External Affairs Minister H. V Evatt announced he was sending an Australian judge, Richard Kirby, to investigate the killings. This article analyses Kirby's trip to Indonesia and his approach to the task of locating and bringing to trial the murderers.

Kirby's task was a microcosm of the challenge the West faced in responding to the nationalist uprisings that convulsed postwar Asia. Those uprisings, at times marked by violent antiforeign sentiment, raised for Western nations the spectre of permanent instability and anarchy impeding their interests and influence: O.S.S. officer Peter Dewey's murder in Vietnam the year before had similarly encapsulated this issue for the United States. Yet by the end of the 1940s, Western policymakers had for the most part moved from supporting formal colonialism to supporting the formation of independent states run by Asian nationalists. Australia's support for the Indonesian Republic in its struggle against Dutch rule was an early example of this shift. It so happened that Kirby's 1946 Java mission coincided with a period of backtracking in Australia's progressive attitude to the Indonesian question: indeed, Kirby's minister at times expressed qualms with Kirby's approach.

In Latin America, where British imperial expansion had left little administrative trace, Argentina was nonetheless profoundly affected by British investment and imported British technical expertise. Among the more modest examples of British expansionism in Argentina was the arrival, from 1865 onwards, of Welsh immigrants eager to establish a colony in Patagonia isolated from the seemingly unstoppable progress of Anglicisation by an overwhelmingly hegemonic Victorian England. By the time of the First World War, however, the Celtic character of the colony could no longer be taken for granted: Argentine government pressures had already meant that the Welsh-speaking colony was now more firmly integrated into the nation-building process. Friction which then developed between the Welsh community and the Argentine government acted as one of the push factors which sent Welsh Patagonians back to Wales and on to Australia, for example…To this process of integration the Great War added new pressures in the form of the question of loyalty to Britain during the conflict. Those who stayed in Patagonia during the war often expressed views which were pro-British and the Argentine province became a source of recruitment for the British armed services…Using a range of sources, this paper attempts to show that the Welshness of the Patagonian colonists had not destroyed their British patriotism: the latter survived and even came to the fore during the conflict of 1914-18.

Even before signing the pact between Japan and Germany, Japanese musicians performed in the concert halls of the Third Reich. In particular, there was an active demand due to propagandistic performances such as German–Japanese concerts or concerts for German soldiers on the Eastern front or occupied territories. This study describes the activities of two “Japanese” conductors who became members of the Reich Chamber of Culture and performed with the Berliner Philharmonic orchestra: Ahn Ekitai (Iktae) from colonial Korea and Konoye Hidemaro, a high-ranking Japanese peer. Extracted from documents of the German–Japanese Society at the Federal Archives Koblenz (Germany), this article explores the cultural and political functions that these conductors faced in terms of German war propaganda and how their different musical compositions, both named “Etenraku”, related to propagandistic values. This essay further shows that Ahn, whom Koreans considered a patriot and fighter against Japanese colonial power in Europe for a long time, was active as a Japanese conductor in the Third Reich, calling Konoye's assertion that he was pursued by the Nazis into question.

The Allied expedition to Salonika was a controversial campaign of the First World War that diverted French and British resources away from the Western Front. To sustain this expedition without depleting existing forces, the Colonial Office approached the High Commissioners of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand and requested that each dominion consider raising a Serbian military contingent for service in Salonika. In the decades preceding the outbreak of war, South Slavs had settled in each of the dominions and the War Office hoped to exploit nationalist aspirations for a pan-Slavic state and mobilise South Slavs in the dominions. In raising these contingents, dominion governments weighed between fulfilling a demand of the Imperial war effort and jeopardising domestic stability by empowering a culturally-distinct minority that was the object of public paranoia. This article will examine how the legal status of South Slavs changed in the three dominions as a result of these recruiting efforts along with the conditions under which South Slavs were able to volunteer for service in Salonika. A comparative approach reveals how Southern Slavs were defined and how they defined themselves as they navigated the categories of enemy aliens, friendly allies, and subjects of the British Empire.