From the World2 and World3 models to contemporary Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) that model carbon neutral emission pathways, global computer models have served as virtual laboratories for addressing economic, environmental and technological concerns together. Representing technological change has been a controversial element of global modelling efforts because, to a great extent, it sets the parameters on conceivable futures. To retrace this history, this article analyses four moments when modellers debated technological change: the controversy spurred by The Limits to Growth in the 1970s; subsequent global future studies during that decade; the IIASA Energy in a Finite World study in the 1980s; and the shift to endogenous technological change in IAMs in the 2000s. It shows that the notion of technological change as a predictable parameter affecting the future of society was not a given. Technological change progressively became a parameter in models as more elaborate methodologies were developed to simulate it. When modellers began to focus on climate action in the 1990s and 2000s, their interest in the relationship between technological change and social change dwindled. The increasing skill with which modellers formally represented technological dynamics was commensurate to the decline of heated discussions over how conflicting worldviews shaped simulations.

Neoliberal and conservative actors, financed by the fossil fuel industry, have been identified as crucial parts of a climate change denialist counter movement since at least the 1980s. We claim that this intersection stems from more than just vested interest fuelling advocacy groups. By focusing on the intellectual developments and social networks of core actors in the environmental debate in Sweden, we trace the history of opposition to environmental regulation in a country proclaiming to be an environmental pioneer. Our analysis shows that while the framing of climate change in terms of complexity initially provided actors with arguments for neoliberal policies, the obstruction of climate and environmental action was steeped in a neoliberal thought style. Our findings demonstrate the importance of scrutinising economic paradigms and thought styles that has enabled the delay of climate policy as well as the continued need for historical and geographically specific studies of obstruction.

Writing in the mid-1940s, the British civil servant Sir Stephen Tallents would reflect that the interwar period saw a shift in terms of how ‘thoughtful Britons’ viewed their empire: less in terms of ‘machinery and organisation’ and more in terms of ‘growth and nurture’. This essay interprets Tallents’ remarkable observation in light of the history of an organisation with which his career was closely associated: the Empire Marketing Board (1926–33). By examining together the diverse activities of this organisation, which ranged from funding agricultural, ecological, and economic research to producing documentary films, this essay contextualises the emergence of Tallents’ view of imperial growth and development.

Five decades after the United Nation's first conference on the environment in 1972, the IPCC warned that ‘any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all’. Faced with steeply rising greenhouse gas emissions, accelerating biodiversity loss and continued degradation of oceans, forests and soil, the situation appears increasingly baffling. Why do we not see effective measures to turn these developments around? As the situation grows dire, it becomes more mysterious: what exactly is this crisis and why has it proven so difficult to solve? If the problem persists, is it because it is not properly understood? Yet, the environmental question has been studied for decades and diagnoses are legion: capitalism, colonialism, overpopulation, economic growth, humanity's inherent short-sightedness, patriarchy, the private property system – or the tragedy of the commons, the disconnect from nature in Western culture, corporate anti-environmental campaigns, the Neolithic adoption of agriculture – or its more recent industrialisation, the miscommunication of environmentalists and scientists, Christianity and neoliberalism have all been proposed as fundamental causes of the crisis. Despite this long and rich history of debate, it may be, as Pierre Charbonnier argues, that we need a more precise understanding of the ‘ecological question’ to find a way out of the present impasse. In line with Katrina Forrester and Sophie Smith's argument, we are convinced that such rethinking of the environmental must be historical, but also that it must pay special attention to economic aspects. Since the end of the Second World War, economics has risen to prominence as a form of expertise in governance at the expense of other kinds of knowledge, and the environment has become closely intertwined with the economic in the ways it has been governed. In that light, it is not surprising that current discussions among scholars, climate scientists, politicians and social movements hold that the environmental crisis calls for a reevaluation of the economic. History is central to this endeavour and can be ‘usable’ in the current crisis, as it, in Deborah Coen's words, can ‘reveal the contingent and often contradictory traces of the past in the present – and to provide clarity for the future’. In this introduction we discuss three partially overlapping ways in which historical perspectives can be helpful to the effort of constructing an ecologically stable society. In contrast to the general tendency in the twenty-first century academy to divide into ever more specialised fields, we call for a broader conversation among historians of the economic and of the environmental to reveal the paths that brought us here – and the ones not taken. We need new histories of thought, institutions, movements and governance that combine the economic and the environmental to reach a better understanding of the present crisis, decode the specific mechanisms of inaction in the face of looming catastrophe, and strive towards more apt formulations of the environmental. We wish to contribute to an emerging conversation located at the intersection of history of economic thought, intellectual history and political history more generally by pointing to strands of research that could be drawn together and that this special issue is meant to engage in dialogue.

For twenty years, during which time he started to promote Intermediate Technology abroad and began writing Small is Beautiful (1973), E. F. Schumacher was an economist with the National Coal Board. As such, he led what he called a ‘double-life’. On the one hand, his work at the coal board involved colossal plant, pollution and brute human labour, the difficulty of which could be alleviated only by the adoption of heavy coal-extracting machinery. As time went on, Schumacher became deeply involved in managing and defending the declining coal sector, through the rationalisation and further mechanisation of its production activities. On the other hand, through his personal involvement in the Soil Association, his reading of the Gandhian literature and his exploration of Buddhism and other esoteric interests, he increasingly sought to promote a non-violent approach to economics, based on appropriate technology and gentle, labour-intensive methods, especially in the so-called developing countries. This paper tells the story of Schumacher's growing struggle to reconcile these contrasting spheres of his life, until such time as he could finally leave the coal board, give himself completely to Intermediate Technology and begin writing his influential book.

The humanities recently rediscovered the category of the ‘planetary’ for a social theory of the Anthropocene critical of the human remaking of the planet. This article brings together Dipesh Chakrabarty's work with Russian planetary and geopolitical thought. Focusing on Vladimir Vernadsky's and Boris Veinberg's research around the Commission for the Study of Natural Productive Forces, it argues that knowledge on planetary interconnections informed the territorial and industrial expansion of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. According to planetary scientists, humanity's peculiarity as a species and planetary reach hinged on its control of energy. As ‘cosmic technologies’, wind and solar power could expand the biosphere and make the territory's fringes habitable. Thus, insight into the vast scales of the universe did not dwarf but augment humanity – and particularly scientists. The article concludes that the planetary should be understood as an extension of global politics rather than a divergence from it.

This article traces one aspect of Britain's approach to the political economy of energy conservation. It focuses on the forecasting work of Royal Dutch Shell and the deliberations of the Heath government. In the late 1960s, the oil major Shell predicted that oil-producing states would impose an embargo on oil-consuming states. Energy conservation policies would be necessary. In tracing the reception of Shell's ‘crisis’ scenario and its proposed resolution, this article details how these ideas were received by Edward Heath's Conservative government, particularly its ‘think-tank’, the Central Policy Review Staff. In the short term, interventionist policies were proposed so as to demonstrate Britain's ability to operate without ever-increasing oil consumption, while in the long term the idea was that the energy-saving capacities of a freely-operating market could address the problem. The article recounts the confusion these proposed conservation policies provoked, and how the second idea gradually coalesced and ultimately outlasted the Heath government, providing one justification for the eventual privatisation of Britain's formerly nationalised energy industries.

This paper presents a case study of German ‘Nazi internationalism’ as part of a broader, transnational counter-reaction to liberal and communist internationalism in the 1930s. It offers an analysis of the activities and main ideas of the Nationalist International (Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Nationalisten; IAdN), headed by the German jurist Hans Keller and active from 1934 to 1941. The IAdN promoted concepts such as Volk nationalism and a Third Europe as a solution to the European crisis, and attempted to establish an alternative law of nations to replace the post-1919 liberal order. The IAdN illustrates an early attempt to reconcile völkisch ideas with international cooperation, thus foreshadowing ‘ethno-pluralist’ concepts of the New Right in the post-war period.

The article demonstrates how the transnational flows of sexual knowledge created a consensus among medical and legal experts for the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in the Polish Criminal Code of 1932. This happened despite the absence of any significant activism that would demand such a reform in Poland. The German movement's goal to repeal the notorious anti-homosexual paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code was ultimately brought to fruition in Poland but not in Germany. The medical and legal knowledge spread through imperial networks and became useful for the new Polish nation-state in its search for identity and distinctiveness. The novelty of the reform ideas created in German-speaking countries led Polish legal experts to consider their adoption a perfect opportunity for the new nation-state to prove its modernity. Additionally, an authoritarian setting in Poland after 1926 allowed the decision makers to shut out the Church and parliament from the legislative process.

The Locarno Film Festival (LFF), founded in 1946 by film industry professionals and local tourism promoters, is reputed as an international hub for emerging cinema. Built apart from, or in opposition to, traditional commercial cinema, the Swiss event gave particular attention to Eastern European movies, to the point that the LFF has frequently been presented as the place where ‘Westerners discovered the talents of Eastern Europe’. However, the presence of these films in Locarno, whose characteristic was the absence of official support from the state, exacerbated Switzerland's anti-communism and led to the creation of a ‘national’ selection committee in 1962 to limit the programming of movies coming from the other side of the Iron Curtain. This article analyses how Swiss politics and ideological tensions conditioned the construction of the Locarno Festival's identity through the prism of the (non-)interventions of the federal state.

Family reunion had a deeply practical and symbolic significance in post-war Europe. Through the case study of British military families living in Germany, this article examines both official discourse and families’ own experiences of reunion and life overseas in the first decades of the Cold War, through the three national but also international visions of the family: as emblems of familial and domestic stability, as ‘unofficial ambassadors’ promoting European unity and as friendly faces of Western democracy. In all cases, the article shows the ways that official messages were embraced, subverted or ignored by families, highlighting the value of exploring context-specific agency. Military families seemingly lived in a world of limited choices, but a range of life narratives show how they came to see aspects of their family life as resolutely theirs.

The recent Final Report of the Commission into Mother and Baby Homes (January 2021) has received considerable criticism for suggesting that the Irish family was as responsible as the churches and state for the mistreatment of single mothers and their children. This article explores a case of two dead babies in mid-1980s Ireland, one single mother, and a rural family that found itself at the centre of an official inquiry. This case provides a prism through which to explore family agency and the official framing of the Irish family as culpable of moral erosion and social destabilisation. In this analysis agency in the familial context emerges as a complex mix of individual and relational exertions comprising conformity and resistance.

In recent years, school strikes and street protests for climate justice have drawn international attention to young people's mobilisation and activism on global issues. This article addresses the need to map the history of global awareness among young people by exploring the origins of the Operation Dagsverke (Operation Day's Work) campaign in Sweden during the early 1960s. Drawing primarily on material from the student-led school council organisation SECO, the aim is to show how young people mobilised support for addressing global issues. The results show that the campaign format was initially developed by university students in 1960, after which it was adapted by students in secondary education. It is argued that the campaign was successful in transforming time, a resource that young students possessed, into economic contributions. On the organisational level, the structure of the student council organisation SECO was important for the campaign's initial success.

In 1963 the West Berlin mayor proposed a joint bid from West and East Berlin to host the 1968 Olympic Games. West Germany's closest allies sought to persuade the West German and Berlin governments to stop the bid, which both supported but had largely kept secret from their allies. This episode demonstrates not only the significance which foreign ministries have long attributed to international sport, but also their clear involvement to actively end another country's Olympic aspirations because of the diplomatic ramifications, particularly the potential to challenge the four-power control of Berlin, and their own self-serving interests in hosting the same event.

This article investigates how, during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), left-wing British, Dutch and German-language newspapers ‘recruited’ their readers to the cause of the Spanish Republic. Recruitment could consist of donating time, money, social and political capital, or, in extreme cases, actually joining the fighting in Spain. It employs a double comparative approach, analysing recruitment messages attuned to readers in three different national political contexts and cultures produced on behalf of socialist and communist organisations. It argues that different ‘sketches of Spain’ co-existed, aligned to different domestic political and popular cultures and through different ideological lenses. These different sketches, in turn, were vital in shaping people's expectations of the Civil War, circumscribed the scope for and content of anti-fascist transnational connections made in Spain, and helped foster new understandings of social and political circumstances at home.

French price controls and rationing after the Second World War sparked opposition from a broad range of economic actors – farmers, shopkeepers, manufacturers and consumers. Towns rang their church bells to mobilise residents against controllers, whom they attacked with verbal abuse and physical violence. They associated the controllers with Vichy and collaboration with the Nazis, and rejected controls as ‘economic tyranny’. Implicitly, they accepted moderate inflation as the path to economic recovery. This article explains the development of hostility, from wartime frustrations to the violent conflicts that forced the state to retreat and relax controls in 1947.

Drawing on government documents as well as the papers of renewable energy advocates, this article looks at debates over alternative energy in West Germany during the 1980s. It shows that because West Germany's monopolistic electricity market was dominated by utilities companies reticent to invest in alternatives, struggles over access to the electric grid and the rates independent producers received for their electricity were essential to efforts to add renewables into the German energy mix after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The legislated ‘feed-in tariff’ for electricity generated by individuals from renewable sources, which emerged from these debates in 1990, cemented the idea that individual Germans, not utilities or the state, were responsible for the fate of renewable energy in Germany and paved the way towards an ‘economically viable’ renewables sector.

During the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish anarchist movement became not only the driving force behind a social revolution but an active participant in an increasingly modern conflict which would eventually see thousands of its affiliates and militants serving on the frontline within the Republican Army. This article proposes to examine how military images, themes and symbols came to dominate anarchism's wartime culture, in the process reconciling their antimilitarist ideals with front-line service and asserting their exceptional quality as antifascist warriors. Examining a geographically and ideologically broad set of cultural materials, this article demonstrates a high degree of participation by many sections of the anarchist movement in the heavily militarised culture of the wartime Republic and European antifascism. This manifested itself in cults of battlefield heroism, the veneration of combative masculinity and the situating of ‘the front’ as the moral centre of the movement.

The tripartite pact, concluded by Germany, Italy, and Japan in 1940, sought to create a new global order. This article is part of a broader shift in scholarship, inspired by global and cultural history. Instead of revisiting the decision-making that led to the pact's conclusion, this article explores the pact through the dialectics of culture and power. Through an archive-based interpretation of the pact's signing and the celebrations of its anniversaries from 1941 until 1945 that involved ordinary people in Axis-dominated territories around the world, the central mechanisms of this global fascist alliance become clear. A performative diplomacy of power and unity held the alliance together. Style and substance were not mutually exclusive categories of tripartite politics; instead, ‘real’ and representational politics shaped each other. The pact was a concerted attempt by the three signatories to transform global political structures and supersede the purported global hegemony of the liberal democracies.

This article examines the advice columns of a Spanish anarchist periodical, La Revista Blanca, in the 1930s. It considers how this example of interactive media, influenced by wider European scientific discourses including eugenics, contributed to shaping anarchist socio-sexual morality. By analysing the periodical's discussions of bodies, birth control, and ‘free love’, the article draws attention to anarchism's inherent tension between the free will of individuals and their obligations to collective progress. It asks how this tension played out at the intersection between anarchist sexual revolution and ‘women's emancipation’, and by extension how we might situate anarchist women in ‘feminist’ history.