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This article explores the creation and operation of the Comintern's Far Eastern Bureau (FEB), which existed from 1928 to 1934 and was headquartered in Shanghai, China. It investigates why the FEB was organised, who was involved in its operations, and what its agents were doing at a
time when communism had been declared illegal by the Guomindang Party. It also offers an assessment of the FEB in terms of its impact on China and the wider region, especially on whether or not the FEB's existence influenced the development of the Chinese Communist Party and other communist
movements in East and Southeast Asia. Finally, this article assesses the level of threat the FEB posed to the Chinese Guomindang Party and to the various colonial regimes in the region, as well as its successes and failures. Its purpose is to renew interest in the FEB and to prompt a more
sustained discussion about its composition, activities, impact and legacies.

In June 1931, British authorities in Singapore arrested a Comintern operative using the name Joseph Ducroux. An address book found on his person then led the Shanghai Municipal Police to Hilaire Noulens and his wife, both Comintern agents, who were collectively in charge of funneling all monies and communications between the Comintern, the Chinese Communist Party, and Communist organizations throughout East Asia. The arrest of the Noulens, and the material found in their apartments, compromised hundreds of Communists and their international networks in East and Southeast Asia. The case materials themselves, found in British, French, and Dutch archives, expose the ways the Comintern's Far Eastern Bureau used Soviet capital and an international cast of characters to combat European imperialism in East and Southeast Asia during the interwar period. Although these efforts suffered from serious weaknesses, European colonial administrators nevertheless worried constantly about the specter of an all-powerful Soviet machine bent on world domination. Their response was cross-colonial collaboration to undermine and destroy the Comintern's activities in the region. This article explores the circumstances surrounding the Noulens Affair, as it came to be known, to argue that the global struggle between communism and anti-communism that marked the years of the Cold War after 1945 cannot be adequately understood without reference to this earlier, interwar period.

This article explores the little-known Singapore Mutiny of 1915 as a case study demonstrating the permeable nature of colonial boundaries in Southeast Asia, and especially the multiple influences at work on colonies in the region outside of their relationships to their respective metropoles. It argues that despite the relative insignificance of the mutiny to larger historical narratives, seemingly local events like this allow a glimpse into the concrete ways larger intercolonial and global connections informed the beliefs and actions of ordinary people. The article begins by exploring the causes of the mutiny and argues that its outbreak cannot be understood without attention to networks and ideologies that crisscrossed the world in 1915, especially with regard to pan-Islamism and radical Indian nationalism. It then explores the responses to the mutiny by a multiplicity of actors, and argues that larger global conditions, alliances, and rivalries fundamentally shaped both official and nonofficial responses to the mutiny, even as they highlighted strong preexisting official networks between colonies and independent nations all over Southeast and East Asia.

This volume is the first to explore transnational anticolonialism as a general global phenomenon that spanned the entire twentieth century. Its collected essays model both a broadening of the issues under consideration and the collaboration necessary to do justice to the scope of this vibrant field. They showcase new work by scholars who explore the anticolonial transnational in multiple geographical regions, from a variety of perspectives, and at many different times across the long twentieth century. Revealing that anticolonial movements everywhere in this period were invariably transnational in terms of their imaginaries, mobilities, and networks, these essays also demonstrate that centering transnational connections can change our understanding of the anticolonial past. The legacies of transnational anticolonial strategies and networks fundamentally shaped the present. Together, these essays present a fresh, kaleidoscopic view of the geographical, chronological, and thematic possibilities of the global anticolonial transnational

This is the first volume to explore transnational anticolonialism as a global phenomenon spanning the entire 20th century. Leading scholars demonstrate that anticolonial movements everywhere in this period were invariably transnational in terms of their imaginaries, mobilities, and networks, and that their legacies fundamentally shaped the present.

The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives explores the dramatic and engaging story of a global institution that brought together activists across geographical and political borders for the goal of eradicating colonial rule worldwide. The League against Imperialism (LAI) attracted anticolonial activists like India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesia's Sukarno, and Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, as well as prominent figures such as Albert Einstein, Ernst Toller, Romain Rolland, Upton Sinclair, Mohandas Gandhi, and Madame Sun Yat-Sen. This volume is the first to capture the global history of the LAI by bringing together contributions by scholars researching the movement from various regions, languages, and archives. Told primarily from the perspectives of those on the peripheries of empires, the volume argues that interwar anti-imperialism was central to the story of transnational activism during the interwar years and remained an inspiration for many who took on leadership roles during decolonization across the global south.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: On the Inadequacy and the Indispensability of the Nation -- 1. Nations, Empires, Disciplines: Thinking beyond the Boundaries -- Rethinking British Studies: Is There Life after Empire? -- Transcending the Nation: A Global Imperial History? -- Empire and ''the Nation'': Institutional Practice, Pedagogy, and Nation in the Classroom -- We've Just Started Making National Histories, and You Want Us to Stop Already? -- Losing Our Way after the Imperial Turn: Charting Academic Uses of the Postcolonial -- Rereading the Archive and Opening up the Nation-State: Colonial Knowledge in South Asia (and Beyond) -- 2. Fortresses and Frontiers: Beyond and Within -- Unthinking French History: Colonial Studies beyond National Identity -- Notes on a History of ''Imperial Turns'' in Modern Germany -- After ''Spain'': A Dialogue with Josep M. Fradera on Spanish Colonial Historiography -- Making the World Safe for American History -- Asian American Global Discourses and the Problem of History -- Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport -- 3. Reorienting the Nation: Logics of Empire, Colony, Globe -- Periodizing Johnson: Anticolonial Modernity as Crux and Critique -- The Pudding and the Palace: Labor, Print Culture, and Imperial Britain in 1851 -- Double Meanings: Nation and Empire in the Edwardian Era -- The Fashionable World: Imagined Communities of Dress -- The Romance of White Nations: Imperialism, Popular Culture, and National Histories -- Britain's Finest: The Royal Hong Kong Police -- One-Way Traffic: George Lamming and the Portable Empire -- The Whiteness of Civilization: The Transatlantic Crisis of White Supremacy and British Television Programming in the United States in the 1970s -- Selected Bibliography -- About the Contributors -- Index