Historians have expressed increasing concern about the segmentation of their discipline’s scholarly expertise into discrete compartments, whether defined by place, period, theme, or sub-discipline. A deluge of monographs is obscuring the landscapes of historical knowledge, even in relatively neglected parts of the globe. The Journal of Global History has the ambition of helping to overcome this fragmentation in historiography, while avoiding pitfalls that have emerged in earlier attempts to achieve this goal.

This essay has been written to serve as a prolegomenon for a new journal in Global History. It opens with a brief depiction of the two major approaches to the field (through connexions and comparisons) and moves on to survey first European and then other historiographical traditions in writing ‘centric’ histories up to the times of the Imperial Meridian 1783–1825, when Europe’s geopolitical power over all other parts of the world became hegemonic. Thereafter, and for the past two centuries, all historiographical traditions converged either to celebrate or react to the rise of the ‘West’. The case for the restoration of Global History rests upon its potential to construct negotiable meta-narratives, based upon serious scholarship that will become cosmopolitan in outlook and meet the needs of our globalizing world.

In 1571 the founding of Manila made possible regular transpacific trade and thus forged the missing link in the global trade network. American interest in China and Japan soared to new heights. In the next two centuries this attraction fuelled other globalizing exchanges—parallel to the commercial ties—across the Pacific. Thousands crossed the ocean to create the America’s first Asian diaspora communities, and Mexico became Europe’s clearinghouse for information about Asia. The most intense connection was missionary, for churchmen in America worked with one eye relentlessly turned to East Asia and dreamed of the possibility of evangelization, and of its alluring dangers. These exchanges, and the attendant expanding mental horizons, evince enough similarities with modern globalization to warrant incorporation into that concept.

This article examines the similarities and divergences in the evolution of knowledge concerning river control in China and Europe, between about 1400 and 1850. The analysis concentrates on four densely populated and relatively prosperous regions, which were faced with comparable problems caused by unruly rivers: the coastal plains of the Yellow River, the basin of the middle Yangzi, the coastal area of Northern Italy, and the Rhine delta in the Netherlands. During the period under discussion, Northern Italy was the first region to witness a ‘cognitive leap’ in knowledge of river hydraulics. The author analyses why this particular transformation in the body of knowledge took place in Northern Italy, rather than in any of the regions in China. He also examines why the Netherlands, in contrast to regions in China, offered a receptive environment to this new approach in river hydraulics from c. 1770. He suggests that differences in the development of knowledge can be explained primarily in terms of underlying socio-political structures.

The article uses comparative Indian material from British India and later, the Pakistani Punjab to ask new questions of the standard accounts of Egypt’s post-1890 cotton boom. It also argues for the particular relevance of the rich Punjabi green revolution data to the Egyptian case, and more generally, for the rewards to be obtained from an academic dialog between selected aspects of late nineteenth and of late twentieth century globalization. Topics analyzed include the impact of the various agricultural revolutions on social and regional inequalities, the issue of sustainability, the role of experts and the impact on health of long-term environmental degradation.

The present article adopts a comparative perspective contrasting the agricultural civilization of Europe with the agricultural civilizations of other regions to understand the reasons for Europe’s transition to modern energy carriers. In Europe—especially in the West and North—specific ecological conditions determined a stronger need for energy than in other coeval agrarian civilizations. The rapid growth of the European population from the second half of the seventeenth century onward, on the one hand, and worsening climatic conditions, on the other, determined an energy crisis and a lowering of living standards, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth. After 1820, a shift to different, cheaper energy carriers laid the foundation for a new age of growth.

The paper provides a comparative history of the economic impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. By focusing on the relative price evidence, it is possible to show that the conflict had major economic effects around the world. Britain’s control of the seas meant that it was much less affected than other belligerent nations, such as France and the United States. The fact that this conflict had such large price effects around the world suggests a highly inter-connected international economy, but is also consistent with the hypothesis that mercantilist conflicts prevented the emergence of more pronounced commodity market integration during the eighteenth century. The war had several longer-run effects which both helped and hindered the integration of international commodity markets during the nineteenth century.