This article examines how Britain, Canada, and Australia managed the political and moral challenges of Hong Kong's impending 1997 handover through migration policy. Drawing on archival sources and recent scholarship, it situates Hong Kong's emigration debates within the broader contexts of decolonization and evolving Commonwealth relations. As Britain negotiated the Sino-British Joint Declaration and faced mounting anxiety among Hong Kong's population – particularly after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre – it sought to reassure the colony's residents while avoiding large-scale immigration to Britain. Britain's 1990 Nationality Scheme, which granted citizenship to only 50,000 Hong Kong families, reflected this constrained strategy. To mitigate the risk of mass migration, London turned to its Commonwealth partners, urging Canada and Australia to share responsibility. Yet both governments responded according to national interests: Canada upheld its universalist immigration principles, and Australia exercised selective flexibility to attract skilled migrants. Together, these measures transformed migration into a form of geopolitical management rather than imperial obligation. By tracing these negotiations, the article reveals how post-imperial states used immigration policy as a pragmatic tool to navigate the end of empire – not through sovereignty transfer alone, but through the bureaucracies of migration and belonging.

This article revisits the US transition to peacetime after the Second World War from a bottom-up perspective. While postwar America is often portrayed as a unified society led by returning veterans who seamlessly reintegrated into civilian life, this account obscures the uneven, prolonged, and often exclusionary nature of that transition. Drawing on recent historiography and highlighting understudied groups such as female veterans, veterans of color, conscientious objectors, war brides, prisoners of war, and civilians caught in the machinery of war, the article emphasizes the multiple and often overlapping timelines through which Americans ‘exited’ the war. It also explores the blurred boundaries between wartime and peacetime, especially for those veterans who reenlisted, served in occupation forces, or carried their struggles into the civil rights movement. The article argues that 1945 should not be seen as a clean break but rather as one among many possible endpoints in a much longer process of demobilization and reintegration. In doing so, it not only calls for a more inclusive history of the postwar years but also invites a broader reflection on how national memory elevates some veterans while rendering others invisible.

Existing scholarship on the emergence of Franklin D. Roosevelt's new deal slogan is inconsistent and incomplete. This article constructs a revised history of the phrase by scrutinizing the contradictory stories of its origin. The investigation initially establishes the historical context by examining the phrase's trajectory prior to Roosevelt. It then considers the various accounts of those who have been credited with coining the slogan on his behalf. Finally, the article recovers the indispensable contribution of Charles R. Macauley, who has become the forgotten man in debates over new deal 's murky beginnings.

At the end of the Second World War, Allied-occupied Austria and Germany became places of transit for hundreds of thousands of displaced persons (DPs) and refugees, as well as sites of employment for various internationally composed teams of relief workers. Through its analysis of personal documents produced by both United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and Quaker relief workers, administrative correspondence by UNRRA and later the International Refugee Organization (IRO), organizational bulletins, as well as the diary of a DP, this paper shows how DPs themselves played an active part in the postwar rehabilitation of displaced people. Their duties within the camps and their close collaboration with non-DP relief workers highlight various forms of refugee agency. This paper further examines what UNRRA and the IRO gained through their collaboration with DPs, as well as to what extent DPs could themselves benefit from this. Despite the hierarchies embedded in the labour policies of UNRRA, the IRO and the Allied occupation forces, this paper demonstrates that focusing on refugee workers and the diverse ways in which they utilized their skills to administer relief measures and sustain camp life reveals the interrelation between refugee agency and the agency of non-DP relief workers.

This article examines the early conscientious objection to military service by Jehovah's Witnesses in Spain during the Civil War (1936–9) and the first two decades of Franco's dictatorship (1939–59). While previous scholarship has primarily focused on secular and political forms of objection arising in the 1970s, this study foregrounds an earlier, religiously motivated resistance that has remained largely undocumented. Drawing on military records, oral testimonies, and denominational religious publications, the article reconstructs the moral reasoning, legal consequences, and lived experiences of ten Jehovah's Witness objectors. It identifies two key phases: isolated wartime refusals under conditions of extreme repression, including the execution of one objector, and a renewed pattern of objection in the 1950s, marked by imprisonment, psychiatric diagnoses and chained sentencing. The analysis is further situated within a comparative international perspective, contrasting the Spanish case with other national experiences in both democratic and authoritarian contexts. The findings demonstrate that religious conscience played a significant role in shaping early conscientious objection and non-violent dissent in Spain. The study contributes to the historiography of civil resistance, religious persecution and human rights under authoritarian regimes, calling for broader integration of religious actors into the analysis of pacifist movements in twentieth-century Europe.

This article explores the underappreciated roles of the International Tracing Service and the United Restitution Organization as vital bureaucratic and legal agents of postwar restitution. Initially focused on humanitarian tracing activities, the International Tracing Service gradually transformed into a central archival and administrative authority within the complex reparations landscape. Concurrently, the United Restitution Organization emerged as a crucial advocate, guiding Holocaust survivors through legal compensation claims. Analysing intersections and tensions between these institutions reveals deeper bureaucratic and ethical challenges in postwar justice. This study contributes significantly to Holocaust historiography by emphasizing how institutional practices shaped collective memory, victim narratives, and broader understandings of justice, agency, and historical repair.

Angola and Mozambique became independent from Portugal in 1975, after a decade of guerrilla fighting. During the wars of independence, liberation movements created medical services for guerrilla fighters, refugees across borders and the population of the liberated zones. They counted on extensive networks of support from socialist countries, western progressive organisations, religious groups, and the international Red Cross. These groups supplied liberation movements with medicines and medical supplies, blood donations, sent medical professionals, trained health workers, and received patients for treatment. In the years following independence, the memory of health workers from western countries was made more visible in both countries and was celebrated through books and articles. Socialist aid, albeit present in local newspapers at the time, seems to have been forgotten, as local actors or the press ensured that it was less visible. This article will interrogate this paradox of sources and narratives around the medical aid provided to Angola and Mozambique before and after independence, and how this aid contributed to the establishment of health systems after independence. Drawing upon multi-sited archival research and oral history interviews, the article examines the diversity of support networks and interrogates the reasons behind the visibility and invisibility of health aid.

This article examines the significance of respect and equality in international relations, focusing on the 1947 Geneva tariff negotiations between China and the United States. Driven by its interest in China's vast market, the United States aimed to reduce China's tariffs. In contrast, China, newly empowered after the Second World War, sought to assert its great power status and national rejuvenation, prioritizing industrial protection over tariff liberalization due to its underdeveloped economy and dependence on tariff revenues. The asymmetry in objectives led to prolonged and contentious negotiations. Initially, China offered only minimal concessions and delayed agreement. Unable to push China for further tariff reductions, the United States aggressively demanded a reduction on wheat flour tariffs, ignoring China's domestic realities, which resulted in a breakdown of talks and a vigorous Chinese backlash. China felt disrespected by the American failure to negotiate on a reciprocal basis. After 5 months, a limited agreement was reached, with the United States retreating from many of its initial positions. The outcome, falling short of American expectations, highlighted key postwar diplomatic dynamics: the significance of national constraints, the limits of coercion, and the necessity of reciprocity. This case demonstrates that equitable, context-sensitive engagement is crucial for durable international cooperation, benefiting both nations.

For many years, the Allied occupation of West Germany was seen as an unqualified success. Although in recent years scholars have cast a more critical glance at denazification practices, the country's transformation into a liberal, parliamentary democracy continues to be viewed as nothing short of a miracle. But histories of the period tend to focus on elite policymakers: Allied officers, American experts, and German politicians. The views of ordinary Germans are put to one side, as is the fundamental paradox of democratization, namely that democratization is necessarily an undemocratic policy. This paper relies on a host of different sources, from Allied polling to oral histories to German government memoranda, to analyze how and why ordinary Germans engaged with practices of democratization in the postwar years. It hypothesizes that democracy came to mean a hollow set of political rituals to ordinary Germans. While Germans did develop democratic habits, those habits were not filled with democratic meaning, which would take much longer to develop. Ultimately, this article contends that ordinary Germans were content with a ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ approach to democratization, bootstrapping themselves into a democratic habitus in the years after the Second World War.