When considering the wave of forced migrations during the Second World War in Europe and Asia, and the international and institutional responses thereof, we can speak about the 1940s as witnessing the birth of a global refugee resettlement regime. Organisations including the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the International Refugee Organization (IRO), and eventually the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) placed refugee resettlement at the heart of constructing the postwar world order. This volume adopts a global optic to investigate the formation of this international resettlement regime in Europe and Asia, while also studying refugee camps and movements, agency of refugees and migrants, decision factors for resettlement, and the intellectual production of people on the move. A historicisation of the global resettlement regime of the long 1940s may well carry important political and ethical lessons for us today, if only to remind us of the connected fates of our common humanity, and the responsibilities we therefore bear towards our fellow human beings.

This article argues that massive human displacement was one of the defining factors in China's immediate postwar period (1945–49). It shows that at least three distinctive groups were dispersed during the wartime years and needed to be resettled after the war ended in August 1945: civilian refugees, administrators who had been relocated to the temporary capital at Chongqing, and troops transferred in anticipation of an upcoming civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. The article argues that China's new sovereign status in 1945 was paradoxically a source of weakness when it came to resettlement and reconstruction, as China sought international funds to undertake its own reconstruction, but could not demit responsibility to an external actor to organise matters as the United States did for western Europe. A growing sense of anomie and unsettlement prevented resettlement and China remained a zone in which international and domestic conflict came together. Both sets of factors shaped the dislocation that destroyed the possibilities of a stable resettlement in China after the great displacement of wartime.

This paper introduces an innovative method applied to global (economic) history using the tools of digital humanities through the design and development of the GECEM Project Database (www.gecem.eu; www.gecemdatabase.eu). This novel database goes beyond the static Excel files frequently used by conventional scholarship in early modern history studies to mine new historical data through a bottom-up process and analyse the global circulation of goods, consumer behaviour, and trade networks in early modern China and Europe. Macau and Marseille, as strategic entrepôts for the redistribution of goods, serve as the main case study. This research is framed within a polycentric approach to analyse the connectivity of south Chinese and European markets with trade zones of Spain, France, South America, and the Pacific.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, new patterns of knowledge, credit, and capital were created by global expansion. These, in turn, created new opportunities for groups of people who previously had little access to global trade. These individuals—women as well as men—increasingly engaged in commercial transactions, some of them relatively autonomous, others challenged and hindered by various forms of institutional control and constraint. Emphasising the intimate nature of networks means examining the quality rather than the quantity of certain networks, which ultimately facilitates a shift away from well-known historical agents such as influential merchants, powerful politicians, and various nobility and royals. The Gender, Intimate Networks, and Global Commerce in the Early Modern Period forum seeks to add to our knowledge of the diverse ways that intimate economic networks developed in both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, in Europe as well as en route elsewhere, among the well-off as well as the relatively poor, and among free people as well as the enslaved.

This article examines the legal and sociopolitical position that Scots held in the English Atlantic world from the union of the crowns in 1603 to the restoration of the Stuart dynasty in 1660. It demonstrates that Scots gained access to colonial opportunities through the royal patronage of James VI and I and Charles I. The policy of those monarchs also largely supported Scottish endeavours in the transatlantic arena: in land ownership, commerce, and colonial leadership. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate disrupted the colonial opportunities that were opened to Scots in the preceding decades. They lost their access to royal patronage, and the concept of Commonwealth subjecthood displaced the earlier concept of postnati subjecthood. By tracing how concepts of subjecthood developed in this period, the article contextualises the Restoration period when Scots were labelled as aliens in the English Navigation Acts to restrict their access to the English Atlantic.

Between 1947 and early 1952, the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which was established within the framework of the United Nations to “solve” the so-called European refugee problem after the end of the Second World War, resettled one million European refugees—victims of Nazism as well as East European refugees who escaped the Red Army—all over the world. The IRO's resettlement project is regarded as a blueprint for the establishment of the postwar international migration regime, and it was the predecessor of later initiatives such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

In this article I argue that the IRO's history as well as the history of the migration regime after the Second World War has, thus far, mainly been written from the perspective of U.S. American and European history. Northern nations are considered agents in this history, while southern countries are considered as passive “destinations.” In the case of Venezuela, the article argues that the Global South's active role in the migration regime must be taken into consideration to understand postwar migration. From the perspective of a connective approach to global history, it shows how Venezuela, as a political agent, was involved in shaping the migration regime; how it perceived itself as an agent within that regime; and how it intervened on a small scale to shape its form and function.

This article explores how women in England, using a range of economic and legal tools and methods, managed wealth and property in Barbados during the seventeenth century. Being distant from the colony had implications for how English women managed their property in Barbados, as direct oversight was impossible. Instead, women were forced to broker arrangements with overseers and agents who could act on their behalf. We can make sense of how they established these connections through the lens of women's intimate networks, as they appointed trusted friends, family, and associates to manage their affairs. Women's intimate networks are a lens through which we can explain not just how women acquired property, but also their continued investment in plantation economies and slavery during the first decades of English colonisation in Barbados.

At the end of the Second World War, millions of men, women, and children shared a similar experience: delousing, at the hands of Allied armies and relief agencies, to prevent the spread of infectious disease. The procedure lasted seconds. In studies of displaced populations in this period, its effects upon them are commonly presented as invasive, humiliating, and, for some, reminiscent of Nazi abuse. Adopting a wider lens, this article explores how events and developments in a global range of settings shaped demands for effective delousing as well as the character of measures devised to achieve it. Harnessing fresh perspectives on how delousing was managed, delivered, and experienced, the article also advances understanding of how refugees responded to it.

The underlying theme of this essay is how intelligence was gathered and expertise dispersed in an emerging colonial environment in Africa, and how that knowledge was captured, credited and distributed between local Africans and (largely) itinerant Europeans. It sets that discussion within a more recent debate on the mechanics of European exploration during the wider nineteenth century. The expanded population of Europeans (officials, merchants, missionaries) that arrived in the later part of that century to consolidate the colonial enterprise in German East Africa often moved with initial uncertainty through the landscape, triggering a demand for topographical knowledge to become commodified and commercialised, to become less dependent on the knowledge of individuals. This demand fuelled the production of an innovative series of standardised grid maps. At a time when slavery was still legal, when the local workforce was increasingly discussed in colonial circles in terms of unskilled plantation labour, our essay explores two case studies that demonstrate how certain African experts came to exert key technical and management influence within long-term scientific and commercial projects unfolding in the southeast corner of what is today Tanzania. The matter of water flows through this essay, and does so with deliberate intent.

This contribution to the forum Gender, Intimate Networks, and Global Commerce in the Early Modern Period follows the career of a single late seventeenth-century English East India Company ship and her crew, in order to challenge the claim that long-haul ships were isolated spaces. Specifically, it looks at the many kinds of connections —intimate and otherwise—that characterised early modern ships and their crews. These included connections between and among sailors themselves, between ships at sea, and between ships’ crews and the diverse communities from which they came.

There are still many historical blind spots in research on Europe's displaced persons (DPs) after the Second World War. In particular, there are relatively few studies that link microhistorical perspectives on repatriation and resettlement with global contexts. This essay addresses this gap, in empirical as well as methodological terms, by focusing on a group of DPs that hitherto has received little attention from scholars: former members of the Royal Yugoslav Army, whom the Nazis had taken to Germany as prisoners of war (POWs). Classified as DPs after 1945, they lived in camps administered by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the International Refugee Organization (IRO). Under the circumstances, they continued to maintain military-like routines and fiercely refused repatriation. This was partly an expression of loyalty to the exiled Yugoslav king, Peter II. But it also mirrored the fears of DPs about—and resistance to the idea of—being returned to their homeland in the context of the early Cold War. Using the example of a DP camp in Bad Aibling (Upper Bavaria), this article connects Yugoslav DPs, Allied DP politics, and the interests of Tito's government, as well as the interventions of international relief agencies. It shows how some DPs adroitly subverted the international logic of DP self-governance as promoted by UNRRA. A global microhistory approach thus reveals how local actors and sites are shaped by, but also foundationally constitutive of, global regimes of migrational self-governance.

Historiography on the extreme violence of fin de siècle colonial wars has often remained nationally fragmented or actively invested in theories of national exceptionality. Focusing on the British, German and Dutch empires, this article seeks to understand the extreme violence as a transimperial phenomenon and asks how we can conceptualise and give empirical substance to this transimperial dimension. First, I give some indication of the degree of transimperial connectivity in the field of colonial warfare, highlighting how intensive mutual imperial observation and the individual mobility of actors fed knowledge into what Kamissek and Kreienbaum have called an “imperial cloud.” Secondly, I argue that a transimperial body of thought behind the extreme violence can be discerned on the level of colonial warfare's racialisation and the resulting specific communicative and performative aspects. Drawing on fin de siècle manuals of colonial warfare and a selection of case studies, I take the transimperial notion of “moral effect” to demonstrate how such basic notions both generated and legitimised extreme violence in colonial warfare.

“Catherine Nicks's Intimate Economy” introduces an intimate network that spanned Europe and Asia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, underlining how women created opportunities for themselves and their extended network. Using the case study of Catherine Nicks, the article examines how a trading company's network, in spite of the company's desire for impermeable monopolies, lent itself to women and others who could form durable intimate networks underneath the larger corporate umbrella for personal and familial economic gains. It questions how the early modern maritime and global economy worked while also examining the nature of company monopolies.

This article deals with the practice of buying wedding jewellery and furniture for a new home during mercantile marriage initiation in the eighteenth century. At the centre of the paper is the act of marriage initiation between the Hamburg burgher's daughter Ilsabe Engelhardt and wholesale merchant Nicolaus Gottlieb Luetkens, who travelled France in the two years preceding his marriage. Luetkens postponed the marriage several times in order to finish business in France. As a compensation, Ilsabe Engelhardt instructed him to buy precious jewellery and valuable furniture. In order to comply with her requests, and to do so as quietly as possible, Luetkens had to mobilise their intimate network of close confidants in London and Amsterdam, who helped him to purchase the precious items.

Forced migration as a reaction to National Socialism represents individual as well as simultaneously collective, transnational, and global experiences. Not only identity-forming categories but also forms of knowledge are profoundly reshaped by processes of displacement and resettlement. The paper argues that the biography of the archaeologist Grete Mostny (1914–91) offers an exemplary case study of such processes of adaptation on individual, collective, and academic levels. Due to her escape from Austria to Chile as a persecuted Jew in 1938/39, Mostny's identity as a white European (female) scholar attained a whole new significance and became the door opener for her interdisciplinary career at the interface of archaeology and anthropology in her new homeland. Her research in Chile was a product of a global event—namely mass forced emigration from Europe—as well as of factors on the micro level, such as her European descent and her academic education, which gave her certain privileges in her new environment. When Mostny arrived in Chile in 1939, a new European and U.S. hegemony had already begun to dominate academia in the country, which was trying to modernise itself and move from the academic periphery closer to the centre. Mostny, the once racially persecuted scholar, fit well in this process by making use of her “European” knowledge and her networks. In 1954 she received international attention when she put together a pioneering interdisciplinary research team to study El Niño del Cerro El Plomo, a four-hundred-year-old Inca mummy found in the Andes five thousand metres above sea level. Nationally, Mostny's study contributed, beyond all measure, to the Andean state's identity, as it re-evaluated and enhanced Chile's prehistory. In a time of political and social tensions in Chile, the rediscovery of its Indigenous prehistory—even by a foreign white scholar—helped to overcome the old shadows of colonial historical research, perhaps because in the immediate present the Indigenous movement in Chile offered little potential for consensus. This article uses Mostny's transnational biography as a lens through which to detect these connected histories and entangled hegemonies in the fields of anthropology and archaeology, which have become instrumental in the formation of Chile's national identity. Moreover, the paper shows that the category of race played a central role in the field of knowledge production and career development, not only for Grete Mostny.

This paper focuses on the articulation between property, sovereignty, and the construction of new political subjectivities in post-Ottoman provinces. Drawing on the cases of British Cyprus, the Italian Dodecanese, and French Mandatory Syria, it shows that European sovereign claims on these territories were pursued through the perpetuation of Ottoman land laws and the reorganisation of the judicial system responsible for implementing them. Dictated by the enduring legal uncertainty regarding the international status of these three provinces, this peculiar path to imperium did not deter European officials from working towards the ambitious goal of creating a class of individual peasant-proprietors, protected in their rights by colonial courts. Acknowledging the differences between these projects, their mutual influences, as well as their relative failure, the article contends that they nonetheless impel us to envision the transition from “Ottoman” to “European” rule as a gradual, multilayered process, instead of a sudden break.

This essay advocates “refugee political thought” as an autonomous category which needs to be centre-staged in global intellectual history. I concretise this by studying Bengali Hindu refugees who migrated from Muslim-majority eastern Bengal (after the Partition of British India in 1947 part of Pakistan, and after 1971, the sovereign state of Bangladesh) to the Hindu-majority Indian state of West Bengal, and occasionally their descendants as well. By studying the transnational horizons of Bengali refugees from the late 1940s to today, I posit them as part of modern global intellectual history. Bengali refugees and their descendants connected their experiences with those of refugees elsewhere in the world, seeing themselves, for example, as “new Jews.” Later, some of them aligned themselves with the Palestinian cause. Refugee politics became enmeshed with Cold War revolutionary currents. European, Soviet, and Chinese Marxist theory—and latent Lockean assumptions—propelled the everyday politics of refugee land occupation. Marxism, sometimes with Hegelian inflection, nourished the East Bengali-–origin founders of Subaltern Studies theory and Dalit (lower-caste) thought. Ultimately, this essay shows how Bengali refugees instrumentalised transnational thinking to produce new models of democratic political thought and practice in postcolonial India. I describe this as “refugee democracy.”

This article looks at the specific early modern trade practice of the pacotille and at pacotille commercial networks, particularly of free women of colour, as a means of approaching female trade knowledge and intimate networks in the ancien régime Caribbean colonies. Surviving documentation of this flexible commerce allows us to approach women of highly different backgrounds as knowledgeable and skilled agents within the socioeconomic framework of eighteenth-century global trade, who combined their knowledge of the male-dominated trading spheres with their own intimate networks in highly profitable ways. This essay explores not only what these women knew about long-distance trade, but also how they used their local expertise (e.g., of time regimes, landscape, and people) as well as their intimate networks for personal gain in the eighteenth-century French colonial worlds.