During the 1960s, the Malaysian prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, struggled to establish the ‘Muslim Commonwealth’, an organization of Muslim-dominated sovereign states. This international programme for Muslim unity was particularly significant because it offered an opportunity for an unexpected player from outside the Islamic heartlands of the Middle East and South Asia to seize the leadership of the global religious community. This article recovers the project’s genealogy, objectives, and reception. In the global context of decolonization and the Cold War, the Tunku looked to the British-led Commonwealth of Nations to model this pan-Islamic institution in an attempt to promote cooperation, development, and peace among Muslims. He deployed a range of idioms to broaden the appeal of the Muslim Commonwealth, drawing from different intellectual genealogies and from an international circuit of ideas prevalent during decolonization. The eventual failure of the Tunku’s project exposes the hierarchies and rivalries in South–South relations during the decade and reveals how Malaysian-led pan-Islamism remained bound to the post-colonial condition of the nation-state.

Examining an all-but-forgotten episode of large-scale protest at the 1970 annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Copenhagen, Denmark, this article asks how officials at the World Bank understood and reacted to such protest. How did they characterise the protestors’ demands in the moment? Why and how did they feel the need to respond, and what strategies did they use to do so? And what does that response tell us about how officials at the World Bank understood about the relationship between development and social upheaval? Using heretofore unexamined institutional records, this article argues that already in 1970, World Bank officials were deeply concerned with public opinion about their institutions in both the developed and developing worlds—and therefore found themselves having to reckon with the riots that threatened to derail not just their meetings, but their mission.

Folk magic practices were common across the early modern Spanish Empire, including in seventeenth-century Manila where dozens of Asian herbalists and other practitioners of magic offered magical solutions in affairs of the heart and matters of fortune and divination to their mostly Spanish clients. At the centre of these folk magic activities were a group of Ternaten captives of war, relatives of the Sultan Saïd Berkat Syah, who was taken hostage by the Spanish during their invasion of Ternate in 1606. While the capture of Sultan Saïd by the Spanish in 1606 is well known within the historiography of the Maluku Islands, the presence of the Ternaten hostages within Manila in the early seventeenth century remains absent from the history of the port city. This article explores the lives of these Ternaten hostages, arguing that their spellcasting activities represent a hidden transcript of politics and power among previously marginalised historical subjects.

This article examines a collection of colour portraits housed in the Archives de la Planète in Paris. The portraits depict a group of Indian pan-Islamists who spent several months in Europe in 1920 advocating for more lenient terms for the Ottoman Empire—the seat of the Caliphate—in the peace settlement that followed the First World War. Europe, and particularly Paris, provided these Indians with opportunities to encounter numerous other Muslims from across the so-called ‘Muslim world’, some of whom also sat for portraits that now form part of the Archives de la Planète. By drawing on recent scholarship on colonial photography, global embourgeoisement, and interwar world-making, this article contextualises these portraits within a broader historical framework. While surface similarities between the images might suggest this was a moment of growing convergence, the Indian pan-Islamists’ textual accounts of their European encounters reveal deep intellectual and political divisions. In this moment of heightened global mobility and connection, the Muslim world emerges as a heterotopic space, containing and reflecting a multitude of competing realities and intersecting subjectivities.