Atlantic history has become fashionable as a way of linking the histories of Europe and the Americas. However, much work in Atlantic history does little to challenge the national biases of traditional colonial and imperial history. This article argues that gender provides an important conceptual tool for a trans-imperial and comparative exploration, just as it provided important conceptual structures for all the peoples of the Atlantic world. An examination of the research on two gendered issues – work, and family and sexuality – demonstrates that while Europeans attempted to impose their ideas on the various societies that they encountered in Africa and the Americas, such attempts were rarely successful. Gender not only provides the basis for a trans-imperial analysis of the Atlantic world but also enables us to reorient our scholarly perspective in the Atlantic, highlighting the agency of non-European peoples and exposing the limits of European patriarchy.

Although the Philippines is hardly known for sending out migrants prior to the twentieth century, and even among seafarers only the galleon age is remembered, this article provides evidence of transcontinental maritime movements from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century. These migrants were known in the English-speaking world as Manilamen. Most were seafarers, but some became involved in pearl-shell fishing, while others engaged in mercenary activities. They settled in key ports around the world, their numbers in any one location fluctuating in response to changing circumstances. Despite relocation to distant places, the difficulties of communication, and the impetus toward naturalization, Manilamen seem to have retained some form of identification with the Philippines as homeland, no matter how inchoately imagined.

British clubs and societies spread around the English-speaking world in the long nineteenth century. This article focuses on one particularly large friendly society, the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows (MU), which by 1913 had more than a thousand lodges around the world, especially concentrated in Australia and New Zealand. The MU spread so widely because of micro-social and macro-social forces, both of which this article investigates. It also examines the transfer of members, funds, and information between different districts of the society, and argues that such transfers may have smoothed internal and long-distance migration.

This article explores the global dimension of communism during the interwar period. It criticizes a literature that either depicts communist parties as small ‘red armies’ obeying any order from Moscow, or focuses exclusively on the local level and ignores any international aspects. The article first discusses attempts of communist leaders to create a ‘world party’ based in Moscow. It next analyses the conflicts between a globally acting communist leadership and rank-and-file members concerned about their local circumstances. Finally, it highlights the role that internationalism played on the local level. Such an approach – which locates ‘the global’ on the local level, both in terms of how internationalist ideas informed people's behaviour in local contexts and in terms of how they resisted forms of globalism – might provide a means for bridging the gap between global and local histories.

South African state policy in the 1940s moved in significantly new political directions that were not simply the prelude to apartheid. This shift, under the leadership of Jan Smuts, towards a welfarist management of black urbanization, can only be understood by focusing on transnational dimensions of the period that have been neglected by historians of South Africa. The reorganization of the state was made possible as a consequence of the business of fighting a global war. South African policy changes were intimately linked to the evolution of British colonial policy. And the South African interventions in world politics to support the creation of the United Nations and to reconfigure the southern African subcontinent were to have drastic and unforeseen consequences.

As the Second World War unfolded and became global, intellectuals of various backgrounds turned their minds to the problems of peace. Internal persecution bred external aggression, some believed. States had to be tamed. Such reasoning led the American Law Institute (ALI) to try to draft a globally acceptable bill of rights. Although originating in the USA, the project was essentially a transnational one. The ‘Statement of essential human rights’ became the most elaborate code created up to that point, in both scope and detail. Completed in the early winter of 1944, it was promoted by the Panamanian delegation to the 1945 San Francisco Conference, and used extensively by the UN Commission on Human Rights. Refuting suggestions that human rights originated in the 1970s, the ALI project reveals the great depth of the transnational conversation on human rights during the early 1940s, and even before.

Drawing on the increasingly important insights of historians concerned with global and transnational perspectives, in this article I argue that Du Bois' international activism and writings on global oppression in the decades following the Second World War profoundly shaped the ways in which people in the United States engaged with race as a concept and social practice in the mid decades of the twentieth century. Du Bois' efforts to bring his insights on global racism home to the US domestic legal arena were to a large degree thwarted by a US foreign policy focused on Cold War politics and interested in pursuing racial equality not on the basis of universal human rights principles but as a Cold War political strategy. Nonetheless, I argue that Du Bois' writings, which were informed by a new rhetoric of global responsibility and universal citizenship, had unpredictable and significant consequences in shaping the direction of US racial politics in the civil rights era.

This article explores the symbolic appeal of Che Guevara within radical Left circles of the 1960s and 1970s. Che's importance as a shared political reference offers a unique window on aspirational symbols and the desire for meaningful transnational solidarity. By tracing Che's resonance in Latin America, western Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, the article brings into conversation the study of post-war radicalism, political iconography, and the cognitive dimensions of interconnectivity. As a means of understanding Che's appeal to both protest movements and guerrilla organizations, the article develops the notion of a ‘transnational imagination’, or mode of perception that frames local circumstances in a world historical trajectory and thereby affects collective aspirations and actions.