Abstract From 1942 to 1945, the Indian National Army (INA) and its civilian wing, the Indian Independence League (IIL), operated in Japanese-occupied Asia to prepare for wars against Britain. Led by first Rash Behari Bose and then Subhas Chandra Bose, the INA recruited members from diverse Indian communities in Asia. This article examines the spiritual training that the INA launched in Malaya in 1943 to unite Indians outside the subcontinent. Through twenty-three lectures, the spiritual training taught a strand of Indian nationalism by creating a historical narrative, which helped reproduce the Indian National Congress’s vision for India. Contrasting with existing literature that attributes the lectures solely to Chandra Bose, this article traces the lectures to the works of Behari Bose, Mohandas Gandhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru. It further argues that Behari Bose’s leadership of the IIL and the INA and the spread of Nehru’s political ideas in Malaya shaped the lectures. Accordingly, the article restores the importance of the lesser-known Behari Bose in the INA and the Indian independence struggle. More broadly, it demonstrates the relationship between violent and non-violent movements, and questions the historical memory about the anti-colonialists who worked with the Axis powers.

Abstract Though historians have often traced the evolution of LGBT ‘communities’ in the United States, they have left the genealogy of queer ideas of ‘community’ underexamined. This article begins to address this lacuna by charting the bifurcated early history of these ideas in the nation’s ‘gay capital’, San Francisco. It identifies homophile activist José Sarria’s 1961 campaign for San Francisco city supervisor as the event that introduced the notion of a ‘gay community’ to lasting effect into local homophile organizing. Sarria’s camp mobilized the idea as a resistance tool for the fight against state repression. In the following years, the concept established itself across local homophile activism. Simultaneously with the rise of ‘gay community’, some homophile leaders also developed coalitional visions of ‘community’. These were inspired by Black freedom organizing and prioritized building community with other marginalized groups. Only a mid-1960s struggle over the orientation of the country’s first homophile community centre led to a lasting sidelining of this coalitional tradition. The reconstruction of this bipartite history challenges enduring myths of a monolithically conservative homophile movement, and helps explain the subsequent success of a homonormative gay politics in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Abstract The ability to control international flows of information constitutes one of the core elements of the soft power of any modern state aspiring to exercise some level of regional or global hegemony. This phenomenon has been previously examined by those who study long-distance communications mainly in the context of the nineteenth-century telegraph or the twentieth-century broadcast. However, inquiries focusing on the analogous historical role performed by the postal service during the early modern era are much more scarce. Building upon this premise, this study examines the strategic advantages gained by the Republic of Venice through its control of the mail exchange between Europe and the Middle East – a de facto postal monopoly established during the sixteenth century. Venice deliberately subsidized this service in order to prevent the rise of potential competition. Despite the substantial cost, this was seen as an effective investment through which the republic gained a set of tangible strategic advantages. In particular, it helped to extend Venice’s relevance on the European political scene long past the point when its traditional political, economic, and naval–military power was already fading away.

Abstract This historiographical review engages with recent works in British colonial and South Asian history that shed light on the emergence of the concept of ‘society’ or the ‘social’ in South Asia. The review explores three main areas for the study of the social concept including: scholarship on liberalism and colonial law; histories of colonial sociology and knowledge production; and materialist histories of political economy and concept formation. The review then outlines some avenues for further research, focusing particularly on questions of form, language, and translation that have largely been overlooked in existing scholarship. It suggests that while there are robust accounts of the uses of the social concept in South Asia, what is missing is a consideration of the vernacular histories of this concept, including how it came to be articulated in South Asian languages. Ultimately, the review makes the case that conceptual history must take into account both the historical transformations that produced certain concepts as well as the languages and aesthetic and documentary forms through which we come to know those concepts.

Abstract Arnold J. Toynbee is considered one of the most crucial figures in the historiography of twentieth-century world history. Although Toynbee’s reputation has significantly waned since the 1950s among many professional historians in the English-speaking world, especially in Britain, some renowned world historians, such as William H. McNeill and Jürgen Osterhammel, have reassessed Toynbee as a pioneering European historian who envisaged world history beyond Eurocentrism since the emergence of the field of global and world history in the 1980s. This article reconsiders the global meaning of Toynbee’s world history beyond this historiographical narrative on Toynbee in the anglophone context by revealing that influential Japanese historians had already found significant potential in his world history in the mid-twentieth century, almost three decades before his reassessment in English-speaking academia. In particular, the article demonstrates how Japanese historians, such as Suzuki Shigetaka, Eguchi Bokurō, and Uehara Senroku, received Toynbee’s idea of world history with various motivations and historical contexts. The research also argues that, despite the differences in their receptive intentions and backgrounds, they interpreted Toynbee as a significant European intellectual who made a self-critique of conventional historical studies in Europe and demonstrated the possibility of rewriting world history beyond Eurocentric assumptions.

Abstract The Franciscan Missionaries of the Divine Motherhood (FMDM) arrived in Ireland in 1942, to establish and run Portiuncula Hospital in Ballinasloe, county Galway. This was not without its challenges and this article explores many of those challenges in the context of the construction and management of the hospital between 1942 and 1970. FMDM sisters were women in a patriarchal church and needed to also negotiate their place within the similar frameworks of the medical profession, civil service, and government, while being subject to gossip as to the work they were doing. The article is a revealing case-study of some of the global changes in medicine that had been taking place since the 1920s. It is also an example of how modern methods of healthcare were having an impact on the Irish healthcare system, with medically trained Catholic religious sisters at the forefront. The story of women religious in twentieth-century global Catholicism is a relatively unattended one. This case-study allows historians of religion to better understand the internationality of Catholic religious congregations, examining concepts of unity and disharmony, and the various efforts they made to confront but also comply with the patriarchal structures in which they found themselves.