Opiate smuggling has found increasing scholarly attention. Legal distribution however remains largely a blind spot. Against this background, I follow in this article some of the traces it has left in Switzerland. I ask not only how it was regulated, but also where the drugs came from and how and by whom they were sold. In the first section, I examine the trade in the opium-based panacea theriac in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At that time, pharmacists were increasingly successful in claiming the exclusive right to sell remedies. When powerful industrial opiates gradually replaced the early modern artisanal goods in the nineteenth century, it was they who benefited most. As I argue in the second section, this line of business came under pressure when the use of opiates increasingly faced criticism in the last third of the century. However, as I show in the third section, legal provisions were only reluctantly enforced and followed. A fundamental shift only occurred in the 1960s when, in the context of the cold war, the Americanisation of international crime control and the “war on drugs” led to a repressive turn in law enforcement.

This article explores the multidimensional issue of drug policy in Turkey during the interwar era and its intersection with economic policy, public health concerns, and psychiatric discourse. As one of the world’s leading producers of opium, Turkey resisted international opium control conventions until the 1930s, viewing them as a means of Western economic domination. Parallel to this, domestic public debates increasingly framed addiction in medical terms, through the lenses of eugenics, nationalism, and racialized rhetoric. The article highlights the pivotal role of the psychiatrist Mazhar Osman in shaping these discourses, particularly through his reports to the League of Nations. In these reports, Osman portrayed addiction as a symptom of moral decay and presented Turkey’s repressive minority policies as a success in combatting the illegal drug trade. Drawing on archival materials, including government documents, medical literature, and contemporary newspapers, this study argues that Turkey’s opposition to international drug conventions was rooted not only in economic self-interest, but also in broader struggles over national sovereignty, modernity and the racialized construction of addiction as a social threat.

Historian Alfred Crosby developed the concept of “portmanteau biota”—the organisms that accompany a human migration—to analyse European expansion in the Atlantic World. This concept has not been used to understand enslaved African migrations. I identify elements of the portmanteau biota of people whom slavers called “Congoes.” At least five other organisms accompanied these people from Central Africa: Cannabis, manioc, cattle, the tsetse fly, and the trypanosome that causes African sleeping sickness. Based on how these organisms affected social-ecological resilience for the “Congo” migration, I describe four ways to characterize elements of portmanteau biotas. Some organisms negatively impact social-ecological systems in which they were previously unknown; I call these “novel antagonists.” In contrast, “familiar antagonists” negatively impact social-ecological systems in which they were previously known. Other organisms, which I call “mutualists,” enhance social-ecological resilience, differing by whether they were familiar or novel in those systems. The role of any organism is context-dependant, and not categorical. Cannabis, for example, had mutualistic characteristics as it enhanced resilience for African social-ecological systems, and antagonistic characteristics as it enhanced the capacity of overseers to extract labour within plantation capitalism. Applied in this way, the portmanteau biota concept underscores the ecological complexity of human migrations.

Refugee and forced migration studies scholars largely ignore the early modern period when they discuss modern refugee crises, thus overlooking the transhistorical, cultural origins of refugee identity formation. Following Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, around 200,000 Huguenots fled France for the wider diaspora. Often depicted as republicans, if not anarchists, bent on the destruction of Christianity and the French sacral monarchy, Huguenots sought refuge for their own safety and in the process reimagined themselves first as religious refugees and then as political ones. As religious refugees, Huguenots like the theologian Pierre Jurieu donned the mantle of the Ancient Israelites, as a means to maintain their community against French purgation of the Calvinist sect. As political refugees, Huguenots like Rabaut Saint-Étienne developed several strategies at courting the favor of the Bourbon monarchy, many of which challenged the French sacral state to imagine itself in secular terms. In developing a political refugee identity, these Huguenots created the empathetic, cultural refugee, which could transcend religious affiliation in favor of promoting a national identity.

Compared to most other cases of independence, the creation of Libya is generally regarded as a conservative outcome. Rather than being founded on a nationalist impulse, the United Kingdom of Libya derived its legitimacy from Islam, specifically following the path of the Sanūsiyya—one of the key symbols of anti-colonial resistance—whose religious leader became the first king of the new state. As a primarily religious movement, however, the Sanūsiyya’s influence was unevenly distributed across the country. Consequently, when Idris al-Sanūsī ascended the throne, his political legitimacy was not universally acknowledged. Within this context, both history and historiography played a strategic role in the construction and contestation of political legitimacy. This paper aims to analyse historiographical narratives produced during the 1940s and 1950s, viewing independence as a process that transcends the moment of its formal proclamation. The objective is twofold: first, to investigate the construction of a “Sanūsī epistemological sovereignty” through historical revision and the promotion of a pro-monarchist historiography; and second, to examine its role in legitimising the new state and in fostering a shared sense of identity and nationhood.

This paper examines the history-making of the first two Raffles Professors of History at the University of Malaya, C.N. Parkinson and K.G. Tregonning, to demonstrate the impact Malaya’s decolonisation had on the historiographical practices of the university’s History Department. It argues that both historians, animated by Malaya’s decolonisation, attempted to re-frame Malayan history – through adopting a ‘world-historical’ and ‘autonomous history’ framework respectively – to meet what they perceived were the needs of a post-independence multiracial Malaya. Although both historians claimed to be producing histories for an independent Malaya, and while their frameworks were indeed methodologically innovative, both historians ultimately produced histories that continued to frame Malayan history using western frameworks. They were thus partially decolonised historians writing partially decolonised histories for a partially decolonised Malaya.

Scientific and technological revolutions, including the isolation of alkaloids and the invention of machines, allowed the mass production and long-distance distribution of drugs from the early nineteenth century onwards. At the same time, drugs were found to keep industrial work processes going, by cutting hunger and fatigue and other conditions associated with the industrial lifestyle, including chronic pains, coughs, asthma, and depression. The seven chapters of the issue show the neglected relationship between drugs and the industrial situation, by combining different spatial scales: by zooming in on factories and other enclosed spaces, such as slave ships, colonial hospitals, laboratories, as well as the suburbs and garden plots that made up the everyday lives of drug-using working classes; and by zooming out to transnational business connections, resource-providing agricultural areas, and licit and illicit trade routes across national borders and continents.

Building on untapped archival documents and press reports, I explore a seeming contradiction underpinning the Israeli authorities’ War on Drugs from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. While the state authorities clamped down on local cannabis users, it was heavily invested in covert cannabis trafficking operations into Egypt, its main enemy at the time. The primary targets of the domestic clampdown were the country’s Jewish consumers of the drug, mainly first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa (collectively known as Mizrahim). Provoking latent class, racial, and gendered anxieties, the state authorities used hashish to further marginalize and criminalize Mizrahim in Israel. However, while the state cracked down on Mizrahi hashish dealers and users, the Israeli military was directly involved in large-scale hashish trafficking operations to Egypt. This enterprise aimed to immerse and immobilize the Egyptian population generally—and the Egyptian armed forces specifically—with hashish.

The History of Mankind-project (HoM) was carried out from 1944–76 under the auspices of UNESCO with the aim of producing a non-eurocentric history of the world from prehistory to the present. The article analyses how the mid-century wave of independence changed the HoM-project. In hindsight a trajectory can be identified from decolonisation as a marginal concern to a new situation where decolonisation as political process and epistemological agenda influenced the HoM with respect to its political aims, organisational structure, the selection of authors, and the narrative of world history it presented. As such it is a clear story of how the end of empire altered how world history has been conceptualised and written. The article explores this theme across four HoM volumes and breaks fresh ground by investigating the agency of individual author-editors and the actual historical narratives they produced in the published volumes. We argue that the approaches and the organisation of the HoM were challenged as anti-eurocentrism in history writing became coupled increasingly to decolonisation and the quest for epistemological sovereignty.

We carried out research into nineteen century Dutch logbooks, especially a series of naval logbooks kept at the National Archive in the Hague. It is voluminous archive, with its 500 metres containing an enormous amount of data. Our initial concern was meteorological data recorded in logbooks. We have digitized part of the archive, for six ships with a duration of about one hundred months, in order to reconstruct the climate of the past. Also in the process of this archival research, we became gradually aware of much wider and various implications this archive has as historical material. We decided to make our preliminary digitization open-access at the JCDP (Japan-Asia Climate Database Program) website. We hope that this will be more widely used by those who have historical concerns about maritime history, the history of environment in Asia and around Japanese seas, Dutch-Japanese relationships, and Dutch overseas history.

In this article I discuss the issue of place in the creation of decolonised historiography and argue that the location from where a historian produces historiography matters in terms of both conceptual and ideological influences as well as in regards to material circumstances. Making use of a case-study on the UNESCO General History of Africa Project (1964-1998), I bring postcolonial critique on the conceptual nature of academic history writing into conversation with a study of the scholarly practice of the UNESCO project to show that conceptual critique has its limits if it does not take material circumstances into consideration. Political decolonisation in Africa was connected to history writing, thereby blending conceptual and material considerations. Secondly, I look at some of the discussions that were ongoing within the UNESCO project to show that the historians working on it discussed these issues amongst themselves and were aware of critique levelled against them. In doing so I argue that decolonisation of knowledge production as a result of becoming politically independent is a multivarious and ongoing process which has to take into account all these different elements.

This special issue analyses how formal independence from colonial rule has impacted institutions and epistemologies of history writing in different parts of the world after 1945. The integrated collection of articles focuses on the transitions and ruptures of knowledge production taking place in the wake of states gaining their formal independence. It explores how different types of decolonisation led to different engagements with history writing, and by doing so we provide fresh perspectives on processes of knowledge decolonisation. In this introduction we situate the special issue in two bodies of literature: firstly, decolonial and postcolonial debates about history and epistemology, and secondly, the literature on the decolonisation process with a specific focus on memory and commemoration. We argue that a fuller understanding of the similarities and differences between knowledge decolonisation then and now requires solid historical contextualisation of the mid-century ideas and vocabularies.

The public sphere burgeoned in Korea with the country’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, but it took South Korean intellectuals almost two decades to begin questioning the vision of Korean history formed under Japanese influence. This article explores the decolonisation of Korean historiography as reflected in the leading intellectual magazine of the time, Sasanggye (1953–1970). The analysis demonstrates a rapid substitution of the Japanese knowledge system with the American one and a more gradual change in Sasanggye contributors’ attitudes toward history, from the unconditional application of Western standards to a desire to write a “subjective history” of Korea from their own perspective. Still, the epistemology remained only partially decolonised as many epistemes of the colonial era persisted in the circumstances of colonial education-induced myopia, overwhelming American influence, national division and rivalry with North Korea, as well as the even more partial decolonisation of politics, economy, and diplomacy.

Hong Kong’s history remains contested during its decolonisation. The colonial government of Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and historians at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) all attempted to interpret the past in their own right. This article argues that the contest for epistemological territory between the Chinese and British colonial governments led to the fragmented accounts of Hong Kong history in official curricula. Unlike other cases, Hong Kong’s decolonisation did not result in independence. Instead, the United Kingdom transferred the colony’s sovereignty to the PRC in 1997. Both sides attempted to showcase their right and ability to shape the colony’s past. Instead of having an ultimate “winner,” both occupied a share of the epistemological territory regarding historical knowledge, producing fragmented accounts of the past. The article also recovers and examines the agency of locally trained historians. These people of Hong Kong did not have any chance to produce their own “autonomous history” precisely because of the impossibility of independence. This process resulted in the partially decolonised yet censored historical narratives that persist in Hong Kong under Chinese rule. Through this case, this article calls for further discussion of what ‘decolonisation’ meant for actors beyond the state.

This article considers the ambivalence of late colonial race politics in France and French Africa through the life and work of celebrated ethnographic filmmaker and pioneer of cinéma vérité, Jean Rouch (1917- 2004). Part of a special issue on late colonialism in Africa, this study shifts the focus from the continent itself to the legacies of late colonialism in Africa for race relations in postcolonial Europe.

‘Late colonialism’ is a widely used concept in African, colonial, and imperial history and neighbouring fields. It evokes a particular chronological moment, but also suggests distinctive, novel processes of colonial governance. The concept has been used to interrogate and explain different trajectories of late colonial governance and decolonisation, addressing distinct chronologies and specific, but comparable, historical dynamics associated with the political disintegration of European colonial empires. What – if anything – characterised ‘late colonialism’ across Africa? What were the roots and genealogies of late colonial ideas and practices? And what were the connections and variations between late colonialism within, and across, African territories and regions? How can we think about them in a comparative, meaningful way? This special issue seeks to interrogate and elucidate the concept of ‘late colonialisms’ in Africa, contributing to debates around these questions. Engaging with varying chronologies, geographies, themes, and case studies, this collection of texts explores the plurality of idioms and repertoires that shaped late colonialisms in Africa, from political and cultural imaginaries and practices to security and developmental policies.

This article suggests that the ‘self-destruct’ phase of the late-colonial state was marked by rival projects to construct a durable political settlement in the face of the divisions wrought by development initiatives and security policy. A triangular contest between outgoing colonial administrators, a new generation of educated moderate nationalists, and those the colonial state pejoratively called ‘bush politicians,’ marked the twilight years of colonial rule. As the case of Nyeri District in Central Kenya, still reeling from the Mau Mau Uprising, indicates, these conflicts regularly concerned the meaning of post-conflict justice and the terms on which a community could be reconciled. The work of the Nyeri Democratic Party is illustrative, resisting disempowerment in the transition to independence and demanding that much more be done to heal the breaches wrought by colonial violence. This period laid the groundwork for a competitive post-colonial political arena, albeit underpinned by the sometimes dangerous rhetoric of ethnic unity. Using official documents from Kenyan and British archives, especially those in the previously closed Migrated Archive, this article illustrates the mutual bargaining that formed the political settlement in post-colonial Central Kenya.

This article looks at the final years of French colonial rule in Dahomey through the lens of development policies concerning the territory’s main resource: the oil palm tree. It examines how the Dahomean leaders dealt with the issue of development once the Loi Cadre allowed them to have a say in the matter. I argue that the Dahomeans were crucial in finding new development strategies even before formal independence. It also tries to assess the extent to which these solutions followed or departed from previous colonial attempts. The article therefore first describes the main features of colonial oil palm development in Dahomey since the end of the Second World War. Second, it depicts how Dahomean leaders rethought the development approach and why they found in the “syndicate association” the institutional tool to implement it. Finally, it argues that this solution, which combined features of Soviet and Israeli cooperatives with approaches specific to African socialism, was different from any other option previously considered by the colonial administration. By analysing late colonialism from a non-French perspective, this article argues that the Africans were no less crucial actors than the Europeans in the making of the late colonial state.

The fourteenth century Indian Ocean world saw a rapid increase in seaborne trade, which led to developing port cities and new centres of power. These port cities sometimes became the capitals of emergent states which broke away from the traditional pattern of landed states and established their own spheres of influence over land-and-sea realms. One such emergent state was the polity centred on Raigama and Kotte in southwestern Sri Lanka, which gained prominence in the region thanks to the port policies followed by its rulers, the Alakeshwara family. This research analyses the rise of this state in the context of the Indian Ocean custom of the ‘right of the port,’ which allowed merchant groups like the Alakeshwaras to establish taxation and sovereignty over an area. This also presents an alternative perspective from which the politics of the kingdoms of Sri Lanka can be reframed and understood, breaking away from the internal logic of ceremonial succession and historical inevitability.

This article discusses how the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) shaped notions of rural life, rural community, and social reform in the context of South and Southeast Asian decolonisation. Building on scholarship analysing rural development either in term of continuities from the colonial era or as the result of specific circumstances after the Second World War, the argument here is that we can understand approaches to rural welfare after 1945 as the historical intersection of three factors: the rural specificities of decolonisation related to violence and mass displacement; FAO seeking relevance and legitimacy in the post-war order; and urban and rural elites objectifying rural life as a cornerstone of post-imperial nation-building. Empirically, the article analyses two (former) British colonies that experienced two different forms of decolonisation: territorial partition and imperial warfare. It relates these modes of decolonisation to the early formations of FAO’s rural expertise and argues that decolonisation was a structuring event for both local rural policy-making and the evolving international (rural) development agenda.