Brigitte Studer. Travellers of the World Revolution. A Global History of the Communist International. Verso, London and New York 2023. xiv, 476 pp. Ill. £30.00.

The opening of the Comintern archives in Moscow in the 1990s, together with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of Communist parties worldwide, promised a new dawn for the historiography of the Third International (Comintern). 1 Handicapped by a lack of access to primary materials, its pioneers had much to be proud of.The scholarly analysis and political insight of Franz Borkenau, Fernando Claudin, and Isaac Deutscher, driven by personal experience and determination to make sense of it, and the monumental body of work of E.H. Carr, remain relevant to contemporary students of international Communism.With the availability of new documentation, the emphasis on political and institutional history was sustained and the decade witnessed the appearance of updated surveys of the Comintern from its inception in 1919 to its demise in 1943, 2 as well as examination of the relationship between the Moscow centre and the national sections of the aspirant world party utilizing new archival findings. 3 Research in a similar vein continued to enrich the literature and provoke debate on issues such as the extent and nature of the subordination of national sections to Moscow, the development and role of Stalinism, the Stalinization of the parties, and the divisions within them between leaders, activists, and members in what has always been a controversial subject.The early twenty-first century saw consolidation of a turn towards social and cultural history, biographical studies, exploration of mentalits, and work that, in accordance with contemporary sensibilities, attempted to repair the Eurocentrism and accent on "high politics", and compensate for the neglect of questions of gender, ethnicity, and experience that had characterized much earlier scholarship. 4 The Swiss historian Brigitte Studer was part of this trend.The Transnational World of the Cominternians made available to English-speaking readers a selection of her