This paper explores how global intellectual history can serve as a critical method for rewriting the histories of internationalism. Far from being neutral, the historical discipline has been deeply involved in the construction and maintenance of empire, and even after formal decolonization, the study of intellectual history has largely preserved a Eurocentric vision of the world. In the last twenty years, scholars have challenged these entrenched narratives by showing that modernity—characterized by the rise of capitalism, the nation-state, and internationalist ideas—was a co-constructed, global process. By decentering Europe, this approach allows historians to rethink the intellectual and political exchanges that shaped internationalism and to highlight the contributions of colonized and marginalized peoples in shaping modern ideas of political freedom, equality, and justice. Through this lens, anti-colonial thinkers and movements appear not as isolated or reactive phenomena, but as central to the development of modern political thought, particularly in their efforts to theorize and realize alternative forms of internationalism beyond the imperialist framework.

Building on this methodological shift, the paper will address Joan Scott’s question of not just where marginalized peoples are in the historical record, but how and why they were systematically excluded. By positioning global intellectual history as a critical tool, this paper argues that we must not only expose the intellectual roots of eurocentrism but also interrogate how imperialist frameworks continue to shape contemporary international relations and global hierarchies. Ultimately, the paper will advocate for a historiographical agenda that confronts how imperial ideas of racial and civilizational superiority, along with the notion of the inherent higher value of Western lives, not only persisted through the twentieth century but have been continually reconstituted in our present moment; while recovering radical potential of anti-colonial, socialist, and feminist internationalisms as forces that sought to redefine global solidarities in opposition to empire.

This paper takes as its starting point the ‘World Congress of Intellectuals’ that took place in Wrocław, Poland in August 1948, as the first large-scale, international gathering of intellectuals, artists, writers and scientists since the beginning of the Second World War. The Congress set in motion a number of new peace campaigns and organisations, many of which operated, by the time of the follow-up conference in Paris in spring 1949, under the umbrella of the newly created, Soviet-dominated World Peace Council.

The Wrocław congress was widely discredited in the extensive American and British press coverage at the time, and scholars quickly followed suit. Historians writing about the congress in English have almost universally dismissed it as a Soviet propaganda vehicle with the primary purpose of disseminating Soviet attacks on Western culture and imperialism. However, when understood merely as an early Cold War vehicle, the Wrocław congress appears as little more than a caricature. Using a global history lens instead, in this paper I will examine the nature of the different forms of internationalism on display at the congress and key items on the agenda of mid-century internationalist campaigns. By taking seriously both the setting of the congress and the networks and connections that brought such a heterogeneous set of people to Poland in 1948 (as well as those that stayed away), a very different timeline of internationalism is revealed, which has the power to change our understanding not just of the Cold War but of post-war history at large.

The International Geophysical Year (IGY) was billed as a genuinely global undertaking, one that would ambitiously build and expand on the long-term legacy of the two International Polar Years, held in 1882–83 and 1932–33, respectively. It was to be global in scope, aiming to gather readings and study a wide range of geophysical phenomena stretching from pole to pole and from the sea floor up to near-Earth orbit. In doing so, the IGY would bring together the world’s geoscientific communities under the coordination and leadership of a special committee International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), involving individuals and organisations with a wide range of disciplinary orientations coming together in an undertaking that would transcend the Cold War politics then shaping the contours of international scientific exchange and cooperation. Across these multiple dimensions and in its ambitions and rhetoric, the IGY was a prime example of post-Second World War scientific internationalism in action on a global scale.

Just as discussion of scientific internationalism has invariably tended to primarily consider and to therefore centre the ‘Global North’, so too has the 1957–58 International Geophysical Year invariably been seen through a similar lens despite its global pretensions - and dimensions. This paper aims to therefore reconsider the scientific internationalisms at play in the IGY from the vantage point of multiple actors from its ‘Western Pacific Region’, especially the ways the IGY intersected and interacted with the range of political actors, agendas, currents, and cross-currents present there. From ideological divides, contested legitimacies, and asymmetries to colonial, anti-colonial, and post-colonial agendas, the Western Pacific provides an ideal case through which to discuss key dynamics running through the IGY as a ‘global’ exercise in scientific internationalism.

In the 1920s, there was a degree of agreement among African and Asian trade unionists on the principles of free movement and internationalist solidarity. As unemployment soared and trade unions collapsed amid the global depression, however, a new consensus emerged about the function of colonial borders, state economies and the position of immigrant workers. Many established trade unionists in colonial Colombo, Durban and Yangon adopted ethnic nationalist rhetoric and were leading promoters of a new anti-immigrant politics, at the same time as a new generation of radical, ‘non-racial’, ‘anti-colonial’ trade unions also called for migration controls on the basis of building solidarity between existing workers and strengthening workers’ power. Notably, the only trade unionists to reject controls appealed to earlier colonial migration regimes and explicitly organised ‘Indian workers’ as ‘civilised’ and ‘efficient’ agents of economic development. Qualifying literature on anti-colonial, nationalist and internationalist movements through everyday experiences of the ‘global’ among trade unions and workers, this article explores how solidarity operated through increasingly divergent registers across the Indian Ocean world in the 1930s and 1940s, as many calls for migration controls were explicitly framed as ‘anti-colonial’ and “radical’, while those demanding continued free movement were denounced as ‘capitalist stooges’.
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