Nicholas McGee investigates the transnational campaign by Cantonese-speaking Chinese South Africans to disrupt efforts to bring indentured Chinese workers to the British-ruled Transvaal colony in the early 1900s. Also covering transborder connections defying colonial structures, Jilene Chua shows how inter-island trade and Chinese migrants in the Southern Philippines evaded US colonial border controls from the 1910s to the 1930s. Helena Lopes recovers the crucial role of multilingual Chinese women working abroad in wartime cultural diplomacy in support for Chinese resistance in World War Two. Looking at diplomatic engagements in a different time of conflict, Jian Ren foregrounds the role of Chinese migrants and restaurants in Latin America as vital hubs of transnational exchange and cooperation during the Cold War.

Taken together, our papers examine ways migrants endeavoured to build connections with each other, with other communities, and with their different ‘homelands’ in times of conflict and restriction. They highlight ways in which marginalised people sought to subvert or skirt systems of knowledge, authority, and mobility control upheld by empires, nation-states, and political blocs in times of conflict.