Colonies and mandates, along with protectorates, belong to the wider group of ‘dependent’ territories. Colonies were under the total control of a foreign power which decided all aspects of the administrative, executive and legislative organisation. Public international law was mainly relevant for slavery, forced labour and ‘open-door’ policies. The mandates system was certainly inspired by colonialism, especially in the eyes of contemporaries, for whom colonialism was the ‘white man’s burden’ for the benefit of ‘uncivilised peoples’. However, it also had fundamental structural differences: their purpose – the ‘civilising mission’ – and the triangular relationship (League of Nations, territory, mandate), stand in sharp contrast to the colonial institution. In addition, the mandatory power was not the holder of sovereignty over the mandated territory. The triangular relationship refers particularly to the control that is supposed to embody it. The control exercised by the League marks a notable difference from the colonial system, establishing for the first time in the history of international relations a sophisticated form of indirect international administration of territories.

Chapter 6 turns to the attack on the Whig view of the state, and especially to the rejection of the Whig contention that no arbitrary or despotic power is any longer being exercised. The chapter focuses on two major challenges to this complacency. One line of criticism pointed out that, with the creation and rapid growth of the national debt, enormous sums were now being paid directly to the crown, thereby bringing an obvious danger of despotism. The second and epoch- making challenge came from the American colonies. When the British government resolved in 1764 to tax them directly, the colonists denounced this innovation as an obvious act of despotism. They argued that, because they had no representation in the British Parliament, they had no means of expressing or withholding their consent. They were thus being subjected to a wholly arbitrary form of power, and were consequently being treated as slaves. The chapter traces the development of this patriot case in the writings of Otis, Hopkins, Dulany, Dickinson, Jefferson and other colonists, and concludes with the defence of the patriot cause by Price and Paine and the publication of the Declaration of Independence.

With the foundation of Imperial Germany in 1871, Berlin became capital of an enlarged and increasingly significant Empire, or Reich. Unification precipitated an economic boom, soon followed by a crash; but industry continued to expand rapidly, with an exponential growth of the population through immigrants seeking work in the city. In the half century following unification the population quadrupled, from around one million in 1871 to nearly four million in the expanded metropolis of Greater Berlin in 1920. New forms of transportation altered the dynamics of the city, while adequate housing and public health became matters of growing concern. In an era of competing nation states, Imperial Germany too began to acquire overseas colonies, including in southwest Africa and eastern Africa (today’s Namibia and Tanzania) as well as elsewhere in Africa and the Pacific. But defeat in the First World War shattered the dreams of the newly rich, the imperialists and colonisers, those who trumpeted racial superiority and dreamed of world mastery.

This chapter draws attention to the curious ways in which rights and liberty did – and did not – overlap in the context of eighteenth-century abolitionist movements. Many eighteenth-century anti-slavery activists initially focused on improving enslaved people’s condition through legal rights rather than granting them liberty. In Spanish and French empires, there were fairly elaborate legal codes restricting slaveholders from exercising especially cruel and arbitrary punishments or practices. The British Empire was in fact an outlier in its lack of any such restrictions. At the same time, slavery was increasingly regarded as unnatural and a violation of natural rights, a view that triumphed in Somerset v. Steuart (1772). Emancipation in the northern United States also granted some rights before liberty. Conversely, the Haitian Declaration of 1804 spoke of liberty, but not rights, and even liberty was a collective, rather than individual good.

This chapter calls attention to the dream world of aesthetic representations that almost immediately engulfed the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, as well as its 1793 successor. These representations played an important political role, notably by legitimating and disseminating the foundations of the new regime. This visual language, widely viewed as more popular and (after 1792) republican, also influenced the meaning of the Declaration, by emphasizing both its universal applicability to all (including, eventually, enslaved) peoples, and its “lethality” for both internal enemies and foreign tyrants.

Tracing the trajectory of journalism fields in Africa from the 1700s to the early to mid-2000s, this chapter highlights the tensions between the political and journalism fields in postcolonial Africa. It focuses on the numerous ways political fields sought to assert control over journalism through colonial-era laws and using their financial muscle to cajole the fields. It shows that ideas about the role of journalism fields were contested both within and outside the field, with some in the field agreeing with the political field with regard to a limited approach to journalistic freedoms. It shows how political elites were keen on controlling journalism fields upon independence primarily because they were aware of the fields’ enormous potential to challenge their legitimacy after using them to push for independence.

As soon as World War I broke out, American citizens established an important wartime relief organization that was effective in providing refuge to child war victims from France’s northern and eastern regions. The Committee Franco-American for the Protection of the Children of the Frontier (CFAPCF), the first Franco-American response aimed at ensuring the protection of France’s children, provided financial and material assistance to rescue, shelter, heal, and educate displaced, injured, ill, and orphaned children. It collaborated with groups of nuns who ran some of the colonies, with teachers in charge of schooling and with American health experts overseeing provisions of sanitary conditions and hygiene. American women traveled to France and worked in the Franco-American colonies. In addition to caring for the children, they taught them about their friendly nation whose people were helping to ensure their survival. Running a network of colonies across France required considerable human and material resources, and the CFAPCF drew on social networks of wealthy French citizens and American expatriates eager to shield France’s children from hunger, destitution, and death. Shipments of clothing, garments, books, toys, and other gifts from the United States signaled the Americans’ mobilization to save France’s orphans.

This chapter brings readers’ attention to the fact that throughout United States history, government has been an active and necessary part of building the country. In the colonial period, for example, laws regulating taverns and other businesses proliferated. After the Founding, under the leadership of Alexander Hamilton and the federalists, the central government was seen as the necessary force needed to support an economy that then enabled the country to participate on the world economic stage. The anti-federalists, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, aceded to the need for the government to support the economy in the ways proposed by the Federalists.

Irish poets wrote as much about love and beauty, memory, God and grief as their French, or English, or Dutch counterparts, but viewed in the round Irish literature, in Irish and English, is indelibly stamped by the cultural and political experience of colonisation. From the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bards’ and chroniclers’ literary record of a distressed Gaelic civilisation and of the depredations of foreign heretics, to the nineteenth-century novelists wrestling with the concept of ‘national character’ as destiny in the age of union, Ireland’s British Question could not, it seems, be avoided.

Chapter 5 turns to the economic sphere, with special attention to the emergence of the modern economic corporation, as a competitor par excellence. I examine its origins in medieval antecedents, how post-revolutionary US was the ideal environment for its initial cultivation and elaboration, and its subsequent development in Europe and beyond. The economic firm is in many ways the ‘ideal type’ of the modern corporate actor, but I am concerned to show in the next two chapters that new corporate actors in the political and ideological/cultural spheres are also crucial to the general domestication of competition in liberal societies.

The conclusion argues that U.S. analysis on France reveals the complex relationship between intelligence and the formulation of American foreign policy in the early Cold War. It contends that a transnational and at times transimperial web of French factions and informants was largely responsible for shaping these views through their frequent informal and formal exchanges with American diplomats and intelligence officials, and they did so with their own political agendas and interests in mind. Through their U.S. contacts, they directly contested images of France, demonstrated legitimacy and outmaneuvered rivals, and played a fundamental role in shaping American perceptions and policy. This chapter also shows that the narrative of French weakness and communist intrigue began to unravel under the scrutiny of analysts who understood its provenance and questioned its basis. In fact, there were a myriad of other explanations for seemingly nefarious communist activity in France, ones for which emotionally driven and depleted observers failed to account.

This final chapter uses the shift metaphor to suggest that change might be limited if not explicitly anti-racist. In the absence of this consciousness, a shift can be sidewards rather than forwards. I argue that empirical studies in EU law can only take a shift forwards when the principle and practice of decolonialism is embedded in it. This requires recognition of Europe's colonial past as well as racism in the present. The assumption that all Europeans are White, and all Blacks are migrants has to be debunked – Black European scholars need to be encouraged to take their place in the field and given access to resources to ensure that empirical research in EU law also focuses on experiences important to their lives.

The beginning of the twentieth century saw the end of Ottoman rule in Palestine. It was also a period of urbanization and modernization cut for a while by the outbreak of the war. The war caused famine, expulsion by the Turkish governor but also brought hope for a different future under the new rulers. These hopes were shattered when the British gave the Balfour Declaration in November 1917. Such clear support gave a new focus to the already existing Palestinian national movement.

This introductory chapter examines the archive of Thomas Hodgkin and its value for understanding British humanitarianism and activism on behalf of indigenous peoples, and particularly the activities of the Aborigines’ Protection Society. It considers the history and historiography of humanitarianism and indigenous protection. It also explores scholarship on settler colonialism, imperial networks, critical indigenous studies and new imperial histories, before presenting the book’s argument.

This chapter investigates two episodes in which humanitarian objectives clashed with liberal economic orthodoxy. The British India Society broke away from the Aborigines’ Protection Society in 1839. It linked ‘Justice to India’ with ‘Prosperity to England’ and ‘Freedom’ to American slaves, but its supporters were divided over the first Opium War and its campaign was derailed by the decision to prioritize Corn Law repeal over Indian reform. The relationship between ‘free trade’ and ‘free labour’ was also a focus of the campaign waged by the West India Association, in which Dr Thomas Hodgkin was prominent, to maintain tariff protection for British West Indian sugar against that produced by slaves in Brazil and Cuba. The Association prioritized free colonial labour over free trade, even though a more ethical British stance would come at the expense of British workers. The chapter reveals tensions between London and the British provinces, and within liberal imperial policy, as well as contradictions within humanitarian circles.

North America was a key nineteenth-century battleground for indigenous rights. The Aborigines’ Protection Society followed US developments keenly; derided and despaired of the rule of the monopolistic Hudson’s Bay Company in Rupert’s Land; and hoped that the Canadian colonies could lead the way in recognizing indigenous rights. This chapter considers the society’s championing of indigenous rights in British North America at a time of imperial withdrawal. It explores the emphasis placed by the Aborigines’ Protection Society on ‘civilization’, and how this was shaped by Thomas Hodgkin’s encounters with four indigenous activists from British North America. The Ojibwa chief and missionary, the Reverend Peter Jones and his niece, Nahnebahwequa, protested the theft of their land and advocated for indigenous education, representation and legal rights. Alexander Isbister and his uncle, William Kennedy, spearheaded the campaign in Britain against the Hudson’s Bay Company. The chapter explores how indigenous interlocutors’ engaged with British humanitarians; how their authority translated to the metropolitan context; and how this translation jeopardized standing at home.

The parlous situation of indigenous peoples in Southern Africa and New Zealand deteriorated even further in the 1850s and 1860s. The Aborigines’ Protection Society tried to promote indigenous rights in these regions to increasingly hostile and independent settler polities and to persuade the imperial government and metropolitan Britons of their continuing responsibilities to indigenous subjects. Ever more conscious of the gap between its programme of securing indigenous land and autonomy and colonial policies of (coercive) ‘amalgamation’, the society made little headway. Dr Thomas Hodgkin tried to mediate between indigenous leaders, missionaries and activists, settlers, and colonial and imperial governments during conflicts in Lesotho and New Zealand, focusing his efforts particularly on the powerful architect of ‘humane governance’, Governor Sir George Grey. These years, however, revealed the society as at odds with both metropolitan and colonial power brokers, patronizing towards its indigenous and missionary allies and impractical in its plans.

Chapter 1 provides an analysis of the status and position of enslaved women during the eighteenth century. The daily and seasonal work of enslaved women determined the boundaries within which women had to resist their bondage and their opportunities to do so. This chapter provides a broad understanding of enslaved women’s labor in the Southern and Northern colonies as a basis from which to further examine enslaved women’s fugitivity in subsequent chapters. This chapter demonstrates the diversity in enslaved women’s experiences during the eighteenth century and the gendered resistance strategies they pursued to contest their bondage. Despite the limitations placed on enslaved women’s resistance, they were able to contest their bondage through the liminal spaces of slavery. This contestation had significant consequences for their mobility and the actions that they pursued as slavery became entrenched during the eighteenth century.