This opening chapter provides a methodological and theoretical framework for this volume's case studies on Asian practices of semantic innovation and appropriation of concepts describing the social, the economic, and their related semantic fields. The enterprise of writing global conceptual history – and introducing it as a fruitful approach within the recently evolved field of global history – is complex and, in many ways, still uncharted territory. In what follows, I will develop the methodological and theoretical ingredients for a global conceptual approach in three main steps. First, global history is described as a field of historiography that embraces the perspectives and practices of transnational and entangled history. Second, conceptual history is introduced as a new approach within the field of global history and thus clad in a global and entangled gown. Necessary alterations to established practices in conceptual history follow from the new perspectives, and some consequences of this refreshed glance at concepts and their role are presented too. Third, method and approach are integrated into a theoretical framework of global modernity, and the contributions of this volume are presented and used as an example to illustrate the theoretical agenda. Through these three steps, global conceptual history is presented as a multilingual academic practice based on the notion of a polycentric rather than a nation-centric, Western-centric, or indeed anti-Western-centric approach.