The Tang dynasty is the only period of Chinese history to which the word ‘cosmopolitan’ is now routinely applied in Western-language historical writing. This article traces the origins of this glamorous image of the Tang to the 1950s and 1960s, but also links its current popularity to a more recent increase in the appeal of the concept of cosmopolitanism, as well as the idea of a ‘cosmopolitan empire’ among Western intellectuals since the end of the Cold War. The article then proposes a less presentist and more critical and holistic reading of Tang ‘cosmopolitanism’ as part of a larger, interconnected, multi-centred, and changing medieval world of numerous coexisting cosmopolitanisms, and argues for recognizing the existence of a different but equally important mode of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in the Song.

The concept of tianxia (All-under-Heaven) has been described as a Chinese version of cosmopolitanism. However, tianxia is a hard-to-define term, with political, cultural, and geographic meanings. From the fifteenth century onwards, maps exist that claim to show tianxia, therefore allowing us to reconstruct how Chinese mapmakers understood tianxia’s geographic extent. Other terms in the titles of maps that show space beyond the borders of the Ming and Qing states include huayi (civilized and barbarian/Chinese and non-Chinese), wanguo (10,000 countries), and sihai (four seas). This article examines the geographic extent of these terms and changes in their usage between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that Ming Chinese mapmakers and scholars presented tianxia as equivalent to the Ming empire and used terms such as huayi and wanguo to advertise the maps as showing regions far away, like western Asia and the Americas. Jesuits in China, on the other hand, applied a broader meaning of tianxia, equating it with the whole globe. During the Qing, the extent of tianxia expanded to represent a cosmopolitan empire connected to a range of surrounding states, embedded in a wider world.

This article examines the translation of foreign films in cosmopolitan Shanghai from 1896 to 1949. Silent films were introduced to China at the end of the nineteenth century, and live narration was provided to allow Chinese audiences to better understand Western shadow plays. With an increasing number of foreign films exhibited in Shanghai theatres, distributors and exhibitors made printed film plot sheets and experimented with the use of subtitles. With the arrival of sound cinema, experiments with techniques such as simultaneous interpretation, voiceover, and dubbing were also conducted. At this time, Shanghai was a semi-colonial city, where the languages spoken included the Shanghai dialect, Cantonese, standard Mandarin, and English, among others, and where the written Chinese language was transitioning from classical Chinese to vernacular Chinese. Film translation is perceived as a space where the mediation between the foreign and the local is materialized. Using materials such as official regulations, newspapers, memoirs, and archives, this article examines various modes of foreign film translation in Republican Shanghai to demonstrate the ways in which the vibrant translation activities of early cinema mediated between languages and cultures, connected local audiences with the foreign, and constructed a cosmopolitan cultural scene.

Karakorum, in present-day Mongolia, was the first capital of Mongol empire and has often been portrayed as the cosmopolitan city par excellence of its era. This portrayal is primarily based on the description of the city as a multicultural community in a travelogue written by the Franciscan monk William of Rubruck, who spent some time there in 1254. This understanding of cosmopolitanism stems from a colloquial sense of the term and does not take into account its history and layered meanings. Based on a discussion of the term, this article presents an approach to cosmopolitanism suitable for archaeology, namely by examining the practices of ‘lived cosmopolitanism’. Taking the archaeological evidence from Karakorum as a case study, the author explores the cultural fields of city layout and architecture, cuisine, religion, and funerary rites to answer the question of whether and how the people of Karakorum were cosmopolitan. The discussion shows that it is of the utmost importance to distinguish between social groups and their status. While the Great Khans can be viewed as cosmopolitans of their time, the commoner population of Karakorum appears rather to have been segregated into different groups. The material evidence so far points to low degrees of engagement among different groups within the city. Yet, the discussion of cosmopolitanism reveals deeper insights into the social realities of the city’s inhabitants and unresolved questions in the study of this important city.

Qin imperial unification in 221 bce is often conceived of as the ‘unification of China’. Although from the long-term perspective of Chinese history this view is surely valid, it obscures some of the major trends of the Warring States period (453–221 bce). Back then, the Zhou (‘Chinese’) world was moving in the direction of the internal consolidation of large territorial states amid increasing political and cultural separation from their neighbours. This process unmistakably recalls similar developments in early modern Europe, where, as is well known, these resulted in the formation of nation-states. In China, by contrast, the development trajectory was markedly different. The potential transformation of the competing Warring States into fully fledged separate entities never materialized. The unified empire was eventually accepted as the sole legitimate solution to political turmoil, whereas individual states were denied the right to exist. Why, despite strong parallels, did the Chinese development trajectory ultimately diverge so conspicuously from what happened in modern Europe?

In search of an answer, this article focuses on the extraordinary role played by politically active intellectuals of the Warring States period. By prioritizing the common good of ‘All-under-Heaven’ over that of an individual polity, by denigrating local identities, and by rejecting the legitimacy of regional states, these intellectuals paved the way for the political unification of the Zhou world long before it occurred. This article addresses the idealistic and egoistic reasons for this choice and explores the cosmopolitan undertones of the universalist outlook of the Warring States-period intellectuals.

Street signs in Italian, Hebrew and Arabic, installed in the twenty-first century, mark Palermo's former Jewish quarter, over half a millennium since Sicily last had a substantial Jewish population. They recall a medieval Jewish minority, but also symbolise what some consider to be Palermo's essentially pluralistic character. What motivates this inchoate revival of ‘Jewish space’, and what does it mean for contemporary Palermo? ‘Rebranding’ Palermo as a crossroads of civilisations encourages tourism, but this alone does not explain the re-evaluation of its multi-religious heritage. Palermo is an often-overlooked case study for the contemporary emergence of Jewish ‘sites of memory’. Using a micro-scale ethnographic study to analyse a narrative rooted in history, I show how the ‘rediscovery’ of Jewish history can have multiple catalysts. In Palermo, these include a Europe-wide interest in ‘things Jewish’, and Sicily's increasing religious diversity in the present.

What explains voter attitudes toward immigration in Latin America? This article argues that increased refugee arrivals moderate the impact of social identities on immigration attitudes. We propose that informational cues associated with increased immigration make cosmopolitan identities less important—and exclusionary national identities more important—determinants of immigration preferences. Analyzing 12 Latin American countries from the 2017–2022 wave of the World Values Survey, we demonstrate that cosmopolitanism is positively associated with pro-immigration attitudes, but only in countries experiencing low-to-moderate refugee inflows. Conversely, nationalism is negatively associated with pro-immigrant attitudes, and increasingly so as refugee inflows increase. The uneven distribution of refugee migration has therefore reshaped public opinion in Latin America by moderating the effects of competing social identities (i.e., cosmopolitanism and nationalism). These findings contribute to broader debates on the behavioral impacts of immigration by highlighting an indirect mechanism by which increased immigration may generate anti-immigrant hostility.

In the 1920s, Ichikawa Sadanji and Morita Kanya conducted two rounds of kabuki tours in China, which clearly revealed the mechanism of misinterpretation and misplacement in the (re)construction of the cultural identities of Chinese and Japanese theatre. Both had been modelled upon each other in the context of intercultural communications in the early twentieth century. Some Chinese theatre critics indicated that Chinese xiqu should absorb the values of modernity identified by them in the Morita troupe’s kabuki performances. In contrast, Ichikawa Sadanji’s tours in Northeast China and his subsequent visit to Beijing inspired kabuki to imbibe a new spirit of the times from Chinese xiqu, an impure ‘Eastern Spirit’ paradoxically manifested in a ‘purified’ theatrical Chineseness. The positive aspect of ‘misplaced misinterpretations’ by kabuki and xiqu of each other’s cultural images and values lies in the fact that it afforded the two theatre traditions a huge momentum for assimilating each other’s ‘Otherness’ to break their own tradition’s exclusiveness.

This article demonstrates how the Enlightenment model of sentiment and sympathy is performed in embodied gestures of affective empathy-building, cross-cultural fraternity, and concern for human rights in three Romantic Regency tragedies: Pizarro (1799) by the Romantic dramatist August von Kotzebue, adapted from the German by the Irish dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan; Remorse (1813) by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and The Apostate (1817) by the Irish dramatist Richard Lalor Sheil. In these plays, protagonists are moved towards sympathy and solidarity with others across cultural divisions and conflict. The discussion also examines how human rights issues are addressed in two plays by Scottish dramatists: Archibald MacLaren’s The Negro Slaves (1799) and Joanna Baillie’s Rayner (1804). Here the protagonists express remorse for engaging in conflict, colonialism, slavery, violence, and human rights abuses against others. All these texts share a common internationalist desire to unite humanity against oppression, injustice, and inequality, advocating human rights, equality, religious tolerance, and cosmopolitan citizenship.