The Belle Époque, often thought to be a period defined by nationalism, also saw the remarkable global proliferation of transnational affinities -especially those centred on race. Across Europe and its settler territories, notions of pan-racial affinity spread alongside imperial nationalism, in the context of technological advancement that permitted novel imaginative possibilities. Meanwhile, texts of political imagination in Africa and Asia during this period -particularly those of pan-Africanism and panIslamism -demonstrate not only an awareness of the significance of racial thinking for Europe but a theorisation of the connections between Europe's racial imagination and its policies in the colonised world. The same advances in the fields of communication and travel that opened the door for new imaginative possibilities in Europe also enabled disparate communities in the colonised world to conceive of themselves, often for the first time, as collectively racialised subjects of a European world order.

This article explores the role played by time in the maintenance of global racial difference with reference to the precarious sovereignties of Haiti, Liberia and Ethiopia during the interwar period. It suggests that the experiences of these states, understood through the discourses which sought to both support and undermine them, point to a shift away from juridical division in global order and towards a hierarchy framed in terms of racialised temporalities. While postcolonial scholarship can help us to understand this shift, it has not fully comprehended the interpenetration of multiple forms of temporality in the service of colonial and racial ordering. For interwar intellectuals and activists committed to pan-African liberation, the desire for a new world order free from racialised stratification meant an engagement with sites of black sovereignty that was, by necessity, ambivalent and strategic in its approach to the politics of time.

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