The resettlement of Hungarian refugees who had fled the Soviet invasion in 1956, from Austria to the United States, is generally perceived as a success story. Austria received extensive international support and most of the refugees were integrated quickly into American society. This great willingness to help is usually explained by reference to the Cold War dichotomy. But beyond political considerations, a close look at the admission processes also reveals that economic interest and labour power were significant factors that favoured reception and integration. And, although religious relief organizations played a major role in co-ordinating the resettlement process, religion was not a main criterion for emigration to the United States. This article looks at the process of resettlement of Hungarian refugees from Austria to the United States in 1956–7. It thereby locates the movement of Hungarians within the broader context of Cold War history, economic growth, labour demand, and international relief.

This article addresses the process of decolonization carried out by wartime Japanese occupation authorities, exemplifying how it played out on the ground in 1940s China with a focus on the ‘uprooted elite’ – that is, the former Western colonists of the treaty ports. After the outbreak of hostilities in December 1941, these civilians were haphazardly categorized as ‘enemy nationals’ and subjected to enemy alien regulations. This culminated in a far-reaching general internment policy from early 1943 until mid- to late 1945, when a bittersweet Allied liberation shut Japan’s ‘Civil Assembly Centres’ down. Despite Western imperialists’ desires to resurrect racial privilege and recapture a modicum of their colonial possessions, the process of ethno-political and socio-economic relegation and replacement initiated loosely under the political schema of Imperial Japan’s ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ proved to be largely irreversible as post-imperial domestic regimes advanced nationalization agendas. The uprooted elite were not merely passive objects enduring racial upheaval, removal, and ‘repatriation’. They navigated a complex and changing reality, exercising what rights they could in order to try to improve their lot. They benefited from humanitarian aid, administered by neutral Swedish and Swiss consular networks and the International Committee of the Red Cross operating on a global scale.

The three decades spanning the 1930s, '40s, and '50s witnessed the birth of the modern global state system, characterized by a protracted and tortuous transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states. The demise of Nazi, British, and Japanese empires emancipated millions of people across the world. However, as old empires dissolved, new post-imperial states continued older colonial-origin forms of ethno-religious discrimination and ruling-class dominance, or invented novel hierarchies. Hence, this epoch was marked by catastrophic outbursts of racial violence, sectarian war, and genocide. If majoritarian nation-states were the privileged offspring of this transformation, then refugees were the unwanted issue. The national citizen and the refugee were co-created. Against their forced displacement and subalternization, refugees re-politicized their selves. We define this as ‘the refugee political’: refugees constructing themselves as political beings and building wide-ranging alliances – with churches, politicians, and entrepreneurs; with peasants, industrial workers, and feminists. They became ‘subaltern internationalists’, linking the Dachen Islands to the United States, and maritime Southeast Asia to India; connecting central European Jews to Australian women, or impoverished Indians to Soviet and Chinese communists. They created new forms of ‘refugee polis’ – political communities which were simultaneously local and daringly transnational.

The arrival of an English translation of The structural transformation of the public sphere in 1989 set anglophone historians about revising Habermas’s original explanation of the development of the public sphere in the eighteenth century. In particular, his ‘model case of British development’ came under fire. Notably absent from these many critical appraisals is consideration of the wider British empire. Herein lies the problem that this article addresses: the rise of a ‘British public sphere’ has been described in national terms, and as a result those communities that were living beyond the realm have been left out of the discussion. In essence, the dominance of the nation-state in historical studies has obscured another transitional phase through which a British public sphere began, and in the end failed, to integrate political communities in Ireland and the American colonies in the evolving political structures of the imperial state. By recovering the features of this ‘imperial public sphere’, and the colonial presses that brought it into existence, we can begin to transcend national frames of analysis and reassess where the national stories we have inherited fitted into the larger story of what was really still an age of empires.

This article investigates the writings of three German-Jewish intellectuals: Kurt Grossmann (1897–1972), Hannah Arendt (1906–75), and Günther Anders (1902–92). It argues that all three thinkers dealt, in their lives as well as their writing, with the construction of a common refugee polis. Yet this engagement was limited by a political-existential predicament that, through their attempts to reclaim their agency, turned their historical and philosophical works into a renegotiation of their own biographies. The article focuses on key chapters in Arendt’s The origins of totalitarianism, in conjunction with her essay We refugees; on Grossmann’s books The Jewish refugee (co-authored with Arieh Tartakower) and Emigration: the history of the Hitler-refugees 1933–1945; and on Anders’s essay ‘The emigrant’. As victims of National Socialism who fled from Nazi Germany to the US, these authors represent a distinctive view of the transition from the Second World War to the era of the Cold War. Reclaiming agency served as a way to resist subjugation by Nazi race ideology, yet it also circumscribed their belief in the radical potential of the political refugee, resulting in Arendt’s focus on totalitarianism, Grossmann’s limiting the refugee polis to Jewish refugee organizations, and Anders’s inward existential gaze.

This article sheds light on the political thought of prominent authors belonging to Baltic German aristocratic families, examining their responses to the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of the Third Reich. Focusing on the writings of authors such as the international lawyer Mikhail von Taube and the philosopher Hermann Keyserling, it examines the peculiar combination of uprootedness and cosmopolitanism which characterized the political thought of these unmoored elites. Lacking a definite attachment to specific post-imperial successor states, these authors demonstrate a recursive loyalty to their own family history. An elite group among the diverse sets of people and nationalities fleeing the Russian empire as it descended into revolution and civil war between 1917 and 1922, including Jews, people from the Caucasus, Poles, and many other nationalities, the Baltic German nobility stood out as representatives of an ethnic and religious minority whose ancestors had settled on the Baltic littoral long before the Russian empire or other states in the region had emerged. The article contributes to a new approach to the intellectual history of refugees from a global perspective, which emphasizes the importance of language, faith, nationality, and social class as factors shaping ideas about political attachment among displaced intellectuals.

Forced displacement brings with it the loss of property, belonging, and identity. Objects encode the nexus between citizenship, property, and sense of belonging/emotional attachment. The article explores the connection between citizenship and property and thereby highlights the agency of victims and their refugee’s polis. This case-study focuses on Jewish Austrian citizens who fled from Austria to Shanghai during the Nazi occupation era, expelled by the Nuremberg racial laws. During this racial persecution, they lost their citizenship and subsequently all their assets, with most of their belongings stored at the port of Trieste. Surprisingly, even after the end of the Second World War and Nazi occupation, it proved very difficult for Jews to regain their citizenship and property, for reasons highlighted in this article. The post-war nation-state could not deliver justice to actors whose economic, social, and cultural lives had been shaped through forced migration. Following scandals like the ‘Woman in Gold’ dispute concerning the return of a painting by Klimt in 2006, legal transformation in the fields of monetary compensation and citizenship laws was only brought about by resolutely transnational political-legal activism.

The British Raj formally ended on 15 August 1947. In the years following the bifurcation of British India into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, between 11 and 18 million people migrated to escape sectarian pogroms at the hands of the majority population. By 1950, many South Asian – specifically Bengali – refugees were radically critiquing decolonization. Theorizing from their experiences of proletarianization, East Bengali refugees argued that decolonization had been incomplete. The postcolonial Indian state was a neocolonial state allied to Western imperialism. Refugees imagined themselves as part of a worldwide struggle between Anglo-American imperialism and Sino-Soviet-led socialist anti-imperialism. Refugees assembled in hundreds and thousands across the Indian state of West Bengal to overthrow regimes of big private property. They condemned the operations of money economy. They aimed to overcome capitalism. Inspired by Chinese communists, they built a vast confederal democracy uniting refugee camps and colonies – a ‘refugee polis’. This article offers a socially-contextualized intellectual history of this epic transformation, which delegitimized the postcolonial Indian state and dramatically drew the country, through struggles waged by refugees, into the tumult of the Cold War. The article prompts us to visualize the subaltern origins of the Cold War in India.

In historical global refugee studies, the voices of migrants and their agency have become of growing interest. As recent research shows, migration is a complex process that is not simply obstructed by states but rather negotiated between different actors. Within these processes, migrants play a vital and active role as so-called ‘agents of experience’. This article analyses how specific migration processes have been negotiated by exploring the agency of German-speaking refugees from the Holocaust in wartime Australia with a particular focus on the negotiation of citizenship legislation. Relying on social cognitive theory, it focuses on actions taken at an institutional level of refugee agency. This allows for the understanding of how refugees have organized themselves and reveals what they did at an institutional level to become a point of reference for the Australian government and to influence its decision to introduce the new legal term of ‘refugee alien’.

This article studies two refugee political communities, the Indian National Army (INA) and Faridabad, during the 1940s. It follows two Indian women who supported the refugees: the captain of the INA’s women’s regiment, Lakshmi Sahgal (née Swaminadhan, 1914–2012), and the socialist freedom fighter Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (1903–88). Indian and Chinese anti-colonialism and working-class protests in Malaya inspired the INA’s war against British rule in India and Southeast Asia. This article conceptualizes the INA as a refugee polis, comprising Indians displaced by Japanese and British imperialism. Uprooted by the Partition of India, the refugees in Faridabad brought practices of state evasion from the Indo/Pak-Afghan borderlands. Kamaladevi and the Indian Cooperative Union helped organize them into a refugee polis. Thus, the INA and Faridabad, shaped by imperial crises and decolonization, emerged as two refugee poleis. They embodied political alternatives to the nation-state as an outcome of decolonization. The refugees advocated direct democracy, egalitarian redistribution of land, and co-operative economic management. The postcolonial Indian state saw this as a challenge. It transformed refugees into workers, whose labour would generate profits for the state. Although the refugees protested through unionization, strikes, and civil disobedience, ultimately, the Nehruvian state brutally suppressed these refugee poleis.

Are refugee ‘return’ and ‘repatriation’ the same thing? This article investigates the mid-century emergence of these two key concepts in the context of the entangled histories of post-1945 displacement and resettlement in Palestine/Israel, which has long had the dubious distinction of serving as a central site of international experimentation vis-à-vis modern questions surrounding mass expulsion and the possibilities of return. Despite the deeply interwoven nature of Palestinian and Jewish displacement, scholars have generally accepted these histories as distinct and segregated national memories. Such accounts actively ignore a crucial set of actors in the making of these forced migrations and their aftermaths: the ‘international community’, made up mainly of the victorious Allied powers, who constructed the framework within which such nationally bounded interpretations could be perpetuated and sustained. This article therefore aims to bring the international dimension to the forefront and to combine it with the history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) to examine how the concepts of ‘return’ and ‘repatriation’ evolved – and diverged – in the aftermath of the Second World War, in the context of an emerging modern international refugee regime designed primarily to serve superpower interests.

During the First Taiwan Strait Crisis, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the evacuation of 18,000 local fishermen and their families from the Dachen and other offshore islands in Zhejiang Province. The resettlement to Taiwan was assisted by the US Seventh Fleet. In mainstream historiography, the evacuation is treated as an unimportant sideshow to the Strait Crisis. Little is known about the people who were displaced. This study explores the experiences of Dachen refugees using recently declassified archival documents and oral history. It argues that, despite the refugees being praised as model anti-communist citizens or ‘righteous compatriots’ by the Nationalists, the Nationalist–US resettlement programme in Taiwan failed miserably, due to its ‘wartime developmentalist logic’. The logic considered displaced people not as deprived human beings who needed assistance but as human resources to be utilized by the state for developing sparsely populated regions. This article also argues that the Dachen refugees were not just powerless victims of powerful nation-states. They were active agents in their own story, trying to make the best of difficult circumstances by constantly protesting and petitioning for better treatment. In doing so, they took advantage of their special status as Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s ‘righteous compatriots’.

During the First World War, British military bands went on tours to Paris (1917) and Italy (1918) to generate support for the Allied war effort. These ‘propaganda tours’ marked the culmination of a trend that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century when military musicians assumed the role of cultural envoys of the state. With retreat from ‘splendid isolation’ at the turn of the century, the nascent entente cordiale witnessed a burgeoning relationship between British and French military bands. While the impetus for these tours came from outside government, the Foreign Office’s cancellation of a tour to Germany in 1907 against King Edward VII’s wishes shows that these activities were considered more than benign gestures of international musical co-operation. After over two years of war, professional propagandists harnessed the mass appeal of military music by organizing concerts designed to reverse dwindling morale and present a unified Allied war effort. Although it is hard to assess their effectiveness, contemporary accounts and similar missions in the interwar period suggest that they met their objectives. By consulting a wide range of materials, from concert reviews to diplomatic correspondence, this article aims to bridge the gaps between political, military, and cultural history by showing the relevance of military music to all three sub-fields.

This article offers the first comprehensive history of Anglo-American married couples who co-published together, c. 1870–1939. It departs from the tendency to solely focus on the detrimental impact of marriage on women’s professional lives and the framing of middle-class women as simply either marrying or working as ‘spinsters’ before the Great War. It instead centres couples who together carved out enviable new positions, arguing these endeavours should be recognized as a growing socio-cultural phenomenon of this era. Moreover, it unpacks the significance of the prominent public discourse circulated to readers across the English-speaking world about such relationships. The most ‘popular’ partnerships were celebrated as simultaneously ‘exceptional’ collaborators and ‘ordinary’ married couples. Their dual-working lifestyles and intellectual compatibility was held up as holding the key to unlocking greater marital happiness. However, invested in carving out their roles in a deeply hierarchical, capitalist world, ‘popular’ couples often remade and propagated regressive ideas about gender, class, and racialized difference. Still, the article contends that the paradoxes in this discourse facilitated the creation of an imaginative space where readers could explore and self-actualize new perspectives about the ways they, and those around them, might partake in work cultures and intimate relationships in twentieth-century society.

In eighteenth-century south-western Europe, actors involved in local conflicts reshaped both their views of corrupt behaviours and their political practices. While these historical phenomena occurred simultaneously, their relationship is far more complex than a straightforward cause-and-effect dynamic. Through four local case-studies, this article examines the multiple connections between changing perceptions of corrupt practices and political reform. New evaluations of abuses and frauds spurred reforms in some cases; in others, corruption was redefined once the reforms had been implemented, to justify those reforms (or their failure, if they did not succeed). Some case-studies show that there was no link between the two processes, while others reveal that the logics of the political changes prevented tackling practices which had started to be seen as corrupt. The article demonstrates that there was a transformation in the evaluation of certain practices that began to be classified as corrupt, and establishes links between these changes and the reforms implemented from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. Additionally, by placing south-western European regions within a broader framework, it challenges deeply rooted assumptions about the backwardness of these polities and their former colonies as a consequence of failed transitions to modern notions of corruption.

This article investigates the personal history of Luo Longji, a distinguished Chinese liberal in the twentieth century. A controversial figure, Luo has two contradictory images in history: a democratic warrior and an enemy of the people. The two contrasting images, this article argues, reveal a fundamental dilemma of twentieth-century Chinese liberalism, which tries to reconcile the tension between the protection of individual freedom and a quest for a strong nation-state based on popular sovereignty. Defining himself as a disciple of Harold Laski, Luo reinterpreted the latter’s political ideas in a new historical context. On the one hand, Luo applauded individual disobedience of the despotic state and protested Chiang Kai-shek’s autocracy in favour of human rights and freedom. On the other, Luo’s nationalist fervour deeply shaped his liberal programme, hoping for a democratic nation-state as the guardian of people’s rights and freedom. This national liberalism led him to cast aside Laski’s anti-statist pluralism and instead exalt state sovereignty to represent the Chinese people’s general will. As a result, Luo was made an enemy in the 1950s by the democratic and constitutional polity he actively helped to build. Chinese liberalism was thus defeated by its own logic in Mao’s China.

Throughout the early modern period, the Dutch States General, as if it were a natural person, frequently stood godfather over foreign children. Based on innovative archival research, this article investigates this unknown phenomenon as ‘corporate godparenthood’ and argues that it was an important tool of republican diplomacy in the Protestant society of princes, particularly in the Holy Roman Empire. Corporate godfatherhood allowed the Dutch Republic to partake, and assert its presence, in familial princely spheres to which it did not otherwise have access. The cultural practices of baptism, including the right of the godparents to name a child and baptismal gift-giving, allowed the States to form lasting kinship relations of mutual obligation in an economy of affection. Corporate godfatherhood had important and long-lasting effects: many of the dynasties with whom the States entered into a kinship relation remained allies for several generations, and supplied the States’ army with troops and officers, while the States assumed the role of benefactor, protector, educator, executor, or legal guardian of various of its princely godchildren.

Passions and affections, notwithstanding their potential and capacity for disorder, were fundamental to the workings of the early modern world and lay at the centre of ethical life. Yet, most scholarship ignores the inseparability of emotion and ethics for early modern society. This article reviews the current state of scholarship in three fields: history of philosophy, history of emotions, and English society and governance, highlighting the assumptions and arguments which have led to the mistaken severance of affect from morality, the exclusion of ethics from histories of emotion, and the omission of emotion from studies of English power and authority. It argues that this separation is anachronistic and impairs our ability to understand governance in early modern England. This was a world of fused affect and morality which underpinned particular notions of power and authority. That governance was located within an ethical/emotive paradigm has been given insufficient attention.

The English protectorate began in 1653 with a conspiracy of politicians, army officers, and religious leaders against a theocratic strain of puritanism. Among the plotters was John Owen (1616–83), the leading religious authority of the Interregnum, vice-chancellor of Oxford University, and the ‘Cajoler of Cromwell’. When amid a military and republican coup parliament was dissolved and Richard Cromwell removed in 1659, Owen was again at the heart of events. But the narrative became that this time he had used his influence to oppose the Cromwells. As minister of a congregation at the centre of the nation’s halls of power composed of the military and political elite, Owen became seen as Richard Cromwell’s ‘instrument of ruine’. This article challenges that narrative and its appearance in histories of early 1659 and of Owen’s biography by utilizing new sources and re-evaluating known evidence within the broader context of religious and political divisions at the end of the protectorate. Owen supported whatever political form could best preserve the long-term safety of the English commonwealth and godly rule against the Stuarts. Yet Owen’s legacy became contested among the godly after the Restoration, as the agent of the protectorate’s fall and the failure of puritan politics.