WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

This session is meant to be an introduction to, and discussion about, Cambridge University Press' forthcoming volume called Explaining International History, edited by Erez Manela, Elisabeth Leake, and Heather Salter. Its purpose is to understand and explore the emerging field of international history. While top universities in the United States and the United Kingdom offer Ph.D., M.A., or undergraduate programs in the field and university presses in North America and Europe have established flourishing book series devoted to it, until now there has been no comprehensive, up-to-date guide to the central concepts, approaches, and methods that make up this rapidly expanding field. This volume, written by leading scholars of international history whose expertise spans a variety of specializations, is the first of its kind. Its twenty-four essays explore how the recent scholarship on international history has reshaped once-dominant narratives in the field; how new perspectives and approaches have opened a whole range of new historical questions; and how historians might imagine the future of the field. Given the field's close relationship to the field of World History, its authors and editors are eager for a World History audience to weigh in on the project. This session features two of the volume's editors (Manela and Salter) and two of its chapter authors (Louro and Salter), including the author of the chapter on World History itself (Salter).

This panel asks what happens when we the Second World War by foregrounding perspectives that sit at the edges of empire, nation, and historical memory. Together, the papers trace how people far from the well-known narrative epicenters nonetheless experienced the war as an intimate, dislocating, and world-shaping event. One paper examines British efforts to mobilize West African troops for the Burma Campaign, revealing a web of contradictions: African soldiers trained for desert warfare but deployed to jungles; colonial racial hierarchies so rigid that exiled Polish officers were drafted to lead them; and a conflict imagined for the Sahara that unfolded in Southeast Asia. A second paper widens the lens across West Africa, showing how both soldiers and civilians encountered shifting imperial loyalties, coercive mobilization, and new political ideas that unsettled colonial authority. A third paper shifts to rural north China, where locust plagues, famine, and fractured occupation regimes forced communities into parallel wartime struggles largely absent from global narratives. The final microhistory follows three Polish-Jewish-South African brothers whose wartime service shaped their contested positions within apartheid’s racial order. Together, these papers illuminate WWII as a genuinely global war—one lived and interpreted from profoundly liminal and marginalized spaces.