For most of human history the smelting of metallic ores has been performed immediately adjacent to the ore body. In the 1830s the copper industry that was centred on Swansea in the UK departed abruptly from that ancient pattern: Swansea smelters shipped in ores from very distant locations, including sites in Australasia, Latin America, and southern Africa. Swansea became the hub of a globally integrated heavy industry, one that deployed capital on a very large scale, implanted British industrial technologies in some very diverse settings, and mobilized a transnational workforce that included British-born ‘labour aristocrats’, Chinese indentured servants, and African slaves. This paper explores the World of Copper between its inception c.1830 and its demise in the aftermath of the American Civil War. It asks what the experience of this precociously globalized industry can contribute to some current concerns in global history.

In southern Africa the portal of globalization opened by finance capital towards the end of the nineteenth century frequently turned on mining speculation. A particularly notorious case was that of the Ayrshire mine in Southern Rhodesia's Lomagundi district. Touted in its heyday as the richest gold prospect in the entire southern half of the continent, the Ayrshire's corporate existence was characterized by company-mongering and market manipulation in the City of London. Few of these concerns immediately impinged on indigenous interests. As interaction between the global and the local was sporadic and contingent, local politics of dynastic accommodation only gradually gave way to global dynamics of dispossession and accumulation.

This article examines the transnational circulation of American mine engineers between the United States, southern Africa, and the Americas in the late nineteenth century. Technology and knowledge was diffused worldwide with the circulation of American engineers who styled themselves as expert race managers as they compared the labour practices of mines across the world. The article's focus is the extension of the United States’ global footprint to South Africa, where an expatriate ‘colony’ of American engineers created a resilient form of Anglo-American inter-imperial collaboration. As they worked the Rand, American engineers made transnational comparisons of South African and North and South American mines. In the process, they led a global discussion of the efficiency of mining labour that reified white management of other races. After leaving the Rand, American engineers migrated across the globe, many to Mexico, where the interwoven networks of expert knowledge, industrial capitalism, and transnational race-making that characterized late nineteenth-century global mining followed.

This article places empires as interlocking parts of a broader global regime, a term invoked as an alternative to a world system. By focusing on connective processes and political contingencies, it presents a strategy that avoids rendering empires as radial hubs of a European-centred arrangement. Two features lie at the core of the approach: the way in which empires competed with each other, and the way in which they imitated, borrowed, and learned from each other. Instead of looking at the cyclical rise or fall of great powers, the accent here is on the tensions and intervisibilities between the parts that make up a whole. The regime was, therefore, inherently unstable and integrative at the same time. The article looks in particular at European empires embedded in the broader, unstable, yet increasingly integrated global context that shaped them. The period at stake covers the fifteenth century to the nineteenth and concludes by pointing at some longer-term legacies. It suggests an alternative political economy to the familiar models of ‘European world system’.

New research on the early modern colonial state in Asia has emphasized the agency of actors and their networks in a process of state formation, while the rise of global history has similarly highlighted the importance of global connections in forming sites of empire. This article seeks to contribute to this growing literature. It does so by revealing that the families of English East India Company servants, following their counterparts in other European East India companies in Asia, underwent a global transition in which they established Asian-wide networks of kinship, transcending the local and regional spaces in which they had previously operated. Through their increasing ability to operate across the social, cultural, economic, and political borders of Asia, Company kinship networks facilitated the formation of a politically amorphous colonial state. Furthermore, while previous scholarship has confined colonial state formation to the later eighteenth century, this article challenges the historiography by relocating this process to the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The post-Second World War era witnessed the need for new political forms to accommodate the aspirations for national identity of newly decolonized nations within the hegemonic structure of the Cold War. Although both Cold War historiography and postcolonial studies have analysed these phenomena, the place of Latin America in general and Brazil in particular remains fraught with conceptual difficulties, largely due to the very different (post)colonial experience of this region from the rest of the ‘Third World’. This article examines how three Brazilian intellectuals and diplomats observed India from its independence until the annexation of Portuguese India by the Indian Union in 1961. In exploring their peripheral gaze, it shows how Brazilian self-identification with the West, and particularly its complex relationship with the heritage of European colonialism, prevented a truly commensurable experience, despite a sense of commonality with India based on their peripheral position in the global political structure.

This article examines the impact of the late 1970s ‘breakthrough’ in human rights, as it was registered within the United Nations. It analyses the debates on human rights at the thirtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in December 1978, and those a decade later. These two moments, among the few that invited explicit reflection from states on the meaning of human rights, and of their universality, reveal that the effects of the ‘breakthrough’ arrived at the UN after a long period of latency. Even by 1988, their manifestation was only partial, and often contradictory. The profound gap between the efflorescence in the NGO movement and the depressing stasis, or worse, elsewhere suggests the need for a more complex periodization of the 1970s as an era of decisive triumph in the ascent of human rights.

This article adopts a historical approach to examine the role played by maritime entrepreneurs and maritime policy-makers in the unprecedented growth of world trade during the second half of the twentieth century. The purpose is to show how globalization as a macroeconomic process was shaped and sustained by human agency operating within maritime business and maritime politics. For more than two decades, economic globalization has been a major field of study within the social sciences. While providing many valuable insights, this literature tends to approach globalization primarily from a macro-perspective and to treat the process largely in quantitative terms. Through a series of separate historical case studies, this article shows the possibilities of more micro- and meso-oriented analysis, focusing more on processes and transformations than stages and outcomes.