The history of the indigenous militia and its role in consolidating the native elite's place in the seventeenth-century colonial Philippines is an understudied topic. This paper addresses that gap. Using lists of media anata payments gathered from the Contaduría section of the Archivo General de Indias for the province of Laguna, this paper examines the beginnings of the native militia and the positions that the native elite occupied. Based on the corresponding media anata tax that these positions required, the author has listed the military ranks that native Filipinos assumed from 1633 to 1700. The Spanish government relied heavily on native arms to support Spain's expansionary agenda, especially in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Moreover, foreign threats, the Spanish-Dutch wars, and the challenges posed by hostile indigenous groups in the Philippines left the Spaniards with no choice but to rely on native arms to defend their position. As the native militia developed and became a permanent feature of the seventeenth-century Philippines, it gave rise to a space for the indigenous elite to exercise their roles as soldiers, encomenderos, and conquistadores in territories which remained on the periphery of the Spanish empire in which they carved their niche.

In the 1750s the Danish kingdom and the Moroccan Empire came into contact, and concluded a bilateral treaty. As part of the accord, a Danish chartered company was established. The company was short-lived and the “special relationship” between the two powers soon withered. A result of this episode was a handful of texts that sought to describe Morocco to a Danish audience—an adventure tale, a captive narrative, an orientalist chorography, and a biography of the emperor—which sought to produce truths about the Danish encounters with Morocco, but also truths about the place and the peoples of Morocco. The article discusses these texts, where they originated, to whom they circulated, and what they had to tell about Morocco.

In mid-1851 a civil war erupted in Chile following a presidential election in which Manuel Montt defeated José María de la Cruz. Many of Cruz's supporters were sent to the distant penal colony of Magallanes. In November 1851, Lieutenant Miguel José Cambiaso, who was part of the garrison, was jailed for insubordination and subsequently led a bloody mutiny disguised as a revolt by Cruz's supporters. The mutiny is familiar to historians of the period, but what is less well known is the key role played by the British in suppressing it. Contrary to previous historiography, the Chilean government pleaded for British intervention. Given the poor state of the Chilean navy and the precariousness of communications with the penal colony, the Chilean government had no option but to resort to British naval forces. This incident illustrates a new dimension of Anglo-Chilean relations during the mid-nineteenth century which cannot be defined solely as imperialistic; Chilean authorities actively sought cooperation from the British. It also highlights the fragility of the process of state formation in a republic long praised as an example of successful political transition from colony to republic, as well as the lack of commitment of the Chilean government to shoring up state power in Magallanes.

Based on bankruptcy and inheritance files and on population and business registers from Ruanda-Urundi, this paper reconstructs the local and long-distance professional and affective relations of Indian and Arab merchants operating in and around Bujumbura in the two decades before and after the Great Depression (1920s–1930s). The story complements the historiography on Asian diasporas in East Africa by going beyond the Indian Ocean coast, beyond the precolonial period, and beyond British-governed territories. Looking at different spheres of life and scales of action and assessing both commercial success and failure, this article makes a case for the importance of local dynamics and the relevance of cross-community relations within the relatively small foreign trade sector in the region. The reliance on “home” and kin remained important as mutual insurance at times of arrival and misfortune: firmly established first-comers assisted their relatives upon arrival, while at times of bankruptcy, death, or old age, long-distance family ties proved vital as well. However, facing discriminatory colonial measures, the Arab and Indian merchants were gradually relegated to the role of intermediaries in long-distance trade. Consequently, day-to-day business relations were increasingly a local, cross-community, and above all, precarious affair.

By focusing on the individual trajectory of Albert Charton (1893–1980), a French educationalist and civil servant who was active in West Africa and Indochina during the 1930s and 1940s, this article offers an original approach to the analysis of knowledge production and circulation in relation to the colonial world. More specifically, the study of Charton's involvement in several imperial, international, and interimperial bodies allows for a new understanding of the evolution of discussions concerning the content and aims of colonial education, including its growing importance within development paradigms. Such a micro-historical perspective also reveals the mechanisms and sometimes contrasting (political) rationales of the process of internationalisation of educational knowledge, thus providing new insights into the interconnections between imperialism and internationalism.

As soon as the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was formed in 1953, disgruntled white settler politicians in the new polity pushed for the reconfiguration of its borders. Driven by decolonisation struggles across Africa and a surge of anti-colonial nationalism in Nyasaland in particular, these debates were particularly vibrant among the political establishment in Southern Rhodesia, the Federation's dominant constituent. The question of Southern Rhodesia's relationship to the Federation became divisive in right-wing circles as African decolonisation unfolded. However, as the pattern of imperial retreat solidified, the right wing abandoned interest in a reconstructed Federation and unified around a “Southern Rhodesia First” mantra. The “centrist” ruling party, entangled by the Federation's extant scaffolding, was forced to eventually embrace a partition plan which closely resembled the ideas traditionally espoused by the opposition. The process of this ideological realignment had important ramifications for Southern Rhodesian politics. In particular, it facilitated the reunification of the right wing and the embrace of unilateralism that manifested most dramatically in Southern Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965.

Using archival oral history interviews with ex-colonial officers from the Scottish Decolonisation Project and the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection, this article examines the intimate lives and domestic spaces of white expatriates in Britain's African colonies during the postwar period, often described as the “people's empire.” In doing so, it seeks to better understand the socio-historical construction of imperial whiteness. It argues that the boundaries of the expatriate home acted as the “internal frontiers” of whiteness, insofar as racial difference was constructed through habitual bodily and domestic discipline concerning cleanliness, child-rearing, social interactions, and sex, which was monitored and enforced within expatriate social circles. Oral testimonies from white expatriates who lived and worked in colonial Africa highlight the contradictory nature of the discursive construction of whiteness, as both culturally distant from the African peoples over which it claimed racial superiority and dependent on operations of care and nurture provided by indigenous Africans. This article explores the ways in which Africans forged relationships with white expatriates as servants, lovers, and friends in order to examine how these ambivalent intimacies coexisted with, and were constitutive of, unequal racial hierarchies.

The dominions, political strategies, and diverse lifeways of Indigenous peoples in the early modern Atlantic world have been treated generally as rural and terrestrial—ending at the shore—while European supremacy over the high seas has been taken for granted. These conceptual assumptions have extended into methodological approaches to encounters between Indigenous polities and European empires that emphasize borderlands, frontiers, and middle (or native) grounds. Four recent monographs depart from such framings by focusing on Indigenous actions in cities such as Lima, Madrid, and London, travel across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and exertions of naval supremacy on the sea. In doing so, they provide new vantage points for reconsidering the meanings of freedom and slavery, diplomacy, trans-oceanic legal networks, and piracy.

These four new books on whiteness show its continuing vitality as a scholarly field, while broadening its purview to encompass North America, Africa, India and Australia from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Thematically they draw together the Enlightenment, intellectual and affective history, gender, economics, the field of international relations, labour and immigration. All will help us to combat white supremacy.