Disorderly white communities, which elites associated with crime, poverty, and the transgression of racial boundaries, were often perceived as a destabilising force in the colonial world. Drawing upon the life history and the 1926 fraud trial in Shanghai of a multiply marginal woman named Edith Brentnall, this article explores three key dimensions of the British consular management of colonial criminality on the China coast: concern about the mobility of marginal Europeans and Americans, the ambiguity of national status in the extraterritorial environments of the treaty ports, and a preoccupation with female “delinquency.” Using Brentnall as a common thread to explore the varied textures of “white” criminality in the treaty ports, this article contends that marginal Britons’ misbehaviour took on a heightened significance on imperial peripheries, where patchwork consular justice systems and mobile, cosmopolitan populations impeded monitoring “undesirable” behaviour. Moreover, the management of marginal mobility, which often took the form of circular journeys between East and Southeast Asian port cities, was an overarching concern in British consular excavations of white criminality. The fragmented biographies of individual “undesirables” demonstrate how marginal British subjects exploited gaps in colonial administrative and justice systems, resisted consular intrusions, and actively shaped their life stories’ written records.

Americans living in nineteenth-century Hong Kong and China's treaty ports encountered a contradiction. The British dominated elite foreign society, their political, social, and cultural agendas often setting the pace for life within the community. But as citizens of a country that had recently wrested its independence from its one-time imperial overlord, Americans arriving in China were ostensibly averse to imperialism and the culture of empire. They maintained a belief that theirs was a benevolent republic that championed international amity and self-determination. Still, as Elisa Tamarkin notes, if Americans were wary of the British Empire, many found the spectacle of it appealing—a tendency evident in Hong Kong and the foreign enclaves along China's coast. Americans eager to enter elite foreign society proclaimed newfound sympathies for British belligerence in China, in turn developing increasingly prejudiced opinions about their Chinese neighbours and staff. Their derisive expressions of racial difference reinforced efforts to reconcile Anglo-American cultural incongruities. Such sentiments reflect the entangled processes through which extraimperial groups such as Americans fashioned themselves as members of the colonial elite. I argue that through such processes, the British and Americans subordinated national rivalry in the interest of entrenching racial divisions between white and non-white communities.

Rahmah bin Jabir (c. 1760-1826) is one of the most frequently mentioned persons in British sources from the Gulf in the first decades of the nineteenth century. He is also found throughout important Arabic-language chronicles. Despite his prominence in the sources, however, scholars have paid him relatively little attention, in either English or in Arabic. Though often cast as a pirate, this article argues that Rahmah bin Jabir was a political entrepreneur critical to shaping the international order of the Gulf in the first half of the nineteenth century. Reading against the grain of the colonial archive and synthesizing British sources with Arab chronicles, this article brings to life a textured political imaginary of the Gulf in the global age of revolutions, using Rahmah to weave overlapping political agendas between different emerging states, including the Omanis, the Saudi-Wahhabis, the Bahrainis, the Qataris, and the British. I suggest that Rahmah stands as one figure through whom historians can continue piecing together an age of revolutions in the Gulf that is more than Europe's emergence into modernity, one that highlights a complex and vibrant history of negotiation, endurance, and resiliency.

The history of European overseas expansion has traditionally been studied from a national perspective. However, the rise of Atlantic history, global history, and a revitalized maritime history has prompted scholars to question the rigidity of Early Modern borders assumed by these conventional national or imperial frameworks. In parallel, researchers have contested the state-centric viewpoint by advocating for an actor-focused approach to Atlantic System history, emphasizing the role of private merchants and their informal, international networks. These approaches have uncovered the involvement of entrepreneurs belonging to polities without a formal empire in the colonial ventures of other nations. This paper examines one such trans-imperial enterprise: Romberg & Consors, a firm operating from the Austrian Netherlands. During and after the American War of Independence (1775–83), Romberg & Consors leveraged evolving Spanish attitudes toward the slave trade and the establishment of neutral trade to organize slave trade expeditions to Cuba. By closely analyzing the operations of this Imperial firm, this study illuminates a decisive phase in Spanish imperial history while contributing to the often-overlooked Atlantic history of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Austrian Netherlands.

The 1943 Tour of Eight West African editors to London formed a major event in World War II United Kingdom–West Africa relations. The tour is often understood in terms of the symbolic importance of Azikiwe's landmark Memorandum on the Atlantic Charter. This article argues that we should reappraise our understandings of the tour and pay closer attention to African actors and networks beyond the Colonial Office. We must understand Britain as a periphery to a West African social, cultural, and political centre. The tour reveals how Britain was mediated in West African terms. Existing historiography focused on Azikiwe's Memorandum or decision-making within Whitehall has ignored both the importance of the tour in West Africa and the diversity of Africans in Britain involved in the tour. The present article focuses on African responses to the tour and, drawing on the historiography of print culture and wartime African mobilities, prioritises African-authored sources. Cumulatively, it situates the tour within an evolving historiography of global mobilities in WWII Nigeria. Rather than simply seeking to unite the metropole and colony in a single field, the article suggests that we must consider more deeply the ways that Africans provincialized the metropole, while centring African colonies.

Ragionamenti del mio viaggio intorno al mondo [Chronicles of my voyage around the world] by Francesco Carletti (1573–1636), a Florentine slave merchant and the first private individual to circumnavigate the globe, is a rich source of information about human trafficking from Africa to Spanish America. Carletti writes in detail about his encounters beginning in 1594 in Africa, America, and Asia, including the Philippines, Japan, Macao, Malacca, and Goa, before returning to Europe via the Cape of Good Hope in 1602. But what makes Carletti's record extraordinary are his reports about the sexuality of the peoples he observes in these locations. Following the publications of earlier Italian travel writers Niccolò dei Conti (1395–1469) and Antonio Pigafetta (1491–1531) about the practice of Asian men purposely piercing their genitalia to insert studs and other objects to gratify their female sexual partners, Carletti investigates this phenomenon, concludes its verity, and attributes its existence to the dominance of women's agency in Asia. Carletti's recollections of his voyage are testimony to how exploration during the early modern era catalyzed a transformation in racial discourses and the appreciation of erotic desire in foreign cultures.

The present article studies the foundation of San Juan de la Frontera de Paspaya in the jurisdiction of the Real Audiencia de Charcas in the second half of the sixteenth century, framing the event as part of the wider process of incorporation of new geographies into the Spanish monarchy. The documentation analysed describes the complex negotiations among various agents organised around networks of patronage and hierarchies, including Spanish frontier captains and their men as well as the Andean indigenous communities of San Lucas de Payacollo and the Guaraní-speaking Chiriguanaes. The article provides some insights into the manner in which frontier spaces of the Catholic monarchy were politically constructed and equipped with relations and institutions in the late sixteenth century.

Caroline Dodds Pennock, Ned Blackhawk, and Esteban Mira Caballos published three paradigm-shifting works in 2023 that flip deeply ingrained narratives of Indigenous Americans’ presence at home in the hemispheric Americas and abroad in Europe. Pennock's book introduces scholarly shifts towards a global Indigenous presence and reframes Europe On Savage Shores where Indigenous travellers arrived on their own accord in largely forgotten encounters; Blackhawk reimagines official United States history which often omits Indigenous peoples by making them its moving force in The Rediscovery of America; and Mira Caballos conversely breaks down stereotypical attitudes toward Indigenous travellers in Spain by evincing their transatlantic journeys to Iberia in El Descubrimiento de Europa (The Discovery of Europe). All three works are mutually reinforcing in their mission to dismantle popular beliefs rooted in imaginative, racist, and antiquated narratives rather than historically verified reality. They are critical for both the academic and public transformation of the history of Indigenous peoples in Northern Europe, Iberia, and the United States. They propose a necessary and well-founded revision of their respective historiographic traditions, all originating from models predicated upon the paradigm of European discovery which these authors successfully turn on its head.

The field of Atlantic history initially focused exclusively on the Anglo-American North Atlantic, largely ignoring the South Atlantic and Africa. This approach, dominant after World War II, portrayed a “Western civilization” based on North Atlantic liberal values, akin to a postwar Mediterranean. Over time, historians of the Anglo-American Atlantic criticized this narrow focus, recognizing the broader interconnectedness of the Atlantic world. Recent decades have seen a shift, with more historians acknowledging the Atlantic as a complex, interconnected space involving four continents. Particularly notable is the rise of studies on the South Atlantic, especially regarding science and empire in the Iberian world. These studies highlight the significant role of Spain and Portugal, challenging the previously North Atlantic-centered narrative. This research has revealed that the Atlantic world was as much, if not more, shaped by Spanish and Portuguese influences as by English ones. The reviewed works exemplify this shift, focusing on the South Atlantic's imperial entanglements and the African diaspora in the Caribbean.

Logwood, a dyestuff extracted from its namesake tree native to the Yucatán Peninsula, was a commodity valued in the textile centres of early modern Europe. The trade in logwood began as an extractive endeavour attempted by merchants and former pirates on the margins of Spanish colonial authority, but by the late eighteenth century it had expanded to become a wide-reaching activity with connections to broader trends on both sides of the Atlantic. In the New World, the trade's growth fuelled Anglo-Spanish imperial rivalries and led to the introduction of slave labour to harvest dwindling logwood stands. The ecological consequences of human exchange also spread logwood's range to Caribbean islands, turning a frontier trade into a domesticated plantation industry. In the Old World, logwood was a versatile dye source that contributed to a range of hues. Initial regulations to protect consumers eased as dyers improved the quality of logwood dyes. The logwood trade expanded global textile supply chains and brought innovation to Europe's proto-industrial textile industry. It gave the continent's dyers new ways to meet consumer demand and spurred the development of mechanical methods to expedite refining.

This article describes the evolution of the commercial connections between China and the southern Sulawesian port of Makassar from the beginning of the seventeenth century until 1669, when the Dutch Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie conquered Makassar. It attempts to show that these connections went through several transformations. Initially direct Chinese shipping supplied Makassar with Chinese goods, but this direct trade lasted only about a decade. However, commerce carried by Macanese ships and trade in Indochinese ports that were frequented by both Sulawesian and Chinese vessels maintained the commercial connection. This connection in its different forms allowed Makassar to act as an entrepôt that supplied Chinese goods and Japanese copper to more distant parts of Southeast Asia, especially those in the eastern Indonesian archipelago. The article concludes by arguing that after the conquest of Makassar, Banjarmasin in southern Borneo developed as a new regional entrepôt connecting China to the eastern archipelago.