In response to increasing academic interest, Cambridge University Press launched a new journal in 2006, entitled the Journal of Global History. To inaugurate the endeavour, the editors asked economic historian Patrick O'Brien to write an introductory essay to serve as a prolegomenon for this newly invigorated field of study. O'Brien began by noting that it is no mere coincidence that interest in global history should be growing, given the global challenges entailed in current-day economic, political and environmental issues. From this perspective, we might take “global history” to refer both to the field's geographical reach and its attempts to relate a global range of seemingly diverse phenomena. Both understandings require us to stretch beyond the narrow specialisms in which we were trained and invite increasing willingness to collaborate. Along these lines, O'Brien applauded those historians who have reached outside their own discipline to draw on the insights and methods of the natural sciences, as well as natural scientists whose work is shedding new light on historical development.

Historians of science and technology—with much assistance from the work of world historians, environmental historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists—have begun to develop some promising scholarly apparatus for decentring European science in world history. But we are still a long way away from developing a comprehensive, accessible frame in which European science is simply one (albeit very successful) way of conceptualising the natural world.

In the years after its foundation in 1814, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands witnessed the emergence of several new sites where natural history—the study of naming, describing and classifying plants, animals and minerals—was carried out. These new sites, such as the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (National Museum for Natural History), founded in 1820, the Rijksherbarium (National Herbarium) and the colonial site Nederlands-Indië (Netherlands Indies) had not existed in that form and in that combination before. The Rijksmuseum and the Rijksherbarium, established in Brussels in 1829, were the first national and fully state-funded natural historical institutions in the Dutch kingdom. In the course of the nineteenth century, both institutions rapidly developed into well-known centres for natural historical research in Europe. Significant parts of their collections derived from the Malay Archipelago, a region the Dutch kingdom regained from the British for strategic reasons in 1814. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Malay Archipelago, which had remained a terra incognita to European naturalists and colonial administrators, witnessed an unprecedented run on its natural wealth—initiated and propelled by both the emerging Dutch colonial state and the natural historical institutions in the Netherlands.

The main square of Mexico City, known as the Zocalo, occupies a central place in the make-up of the city, the nation, and even the national identity of Mexico. As we all know, the conquistadors built Mexico City on the site of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec empire. Indeed, the ruins of the Great Temple of the old city lie hidden under the square itself. This essay deals with the moment when the native past began to emerge from beneath the plaza, when a viceroy had the ground paved, and undertook a series of public works to solve the problems of drainage and water channelling which had existed throughout the history of the city. In his effort to modernise, the viceroy brought his contemporaries face to face with a long-buried past. For amidst the construction work two great archaeological pieces were discovered in 1790. These findings were subsequently studied by the multi-talented Creole, Antonio León y Gama, one of the most steadfast representatives of the Enlightenment in New Spain. By examining elements of Leon y Gama's work, I want to do a bit of historical excavation myself and reveal the existence of what we might describe, following Mary Louise Pratt, as a contact zone—one in which contemporary tools for investigatively ordering time and space were brought to bear on natural and cultural phenomena alike, in order to situate Mexico and its cultural heritage historically as well as geographically.

Through its focus on the question of circulation, world history attained a central position amongst the historical configurations in the last decade. Indicative of our fundamentally changing world, the past thereby reveals itself to have been shaped by commercial, human and intellectual flows of global dimension. The history of science has been particularly receptive to such methodological developments, especially with regard to works influenced by a markedly social approach to science and knowledge, which has focused for some time on the analysis of intellectual networks. From the French provincial Enlightenment to Athansius Kircher's circles—including the relationships of patronage of mathematicians and court philosophers—social, intellectual and epistemological configurations have been designed, allowing us to consider different scales in the circulation of knowledge.