This article examines the diffusion of evaporation technology along multi-centred and overlapping scientific, industrial, and commercial knowledge networks. It follows the circulation of vacuum pan (steam evaporator) technology in the Greater Caribbean, the North Atlantic, and the East Indies in order to understand the dual processes of invention and globalization. The article demonstrates that the tropical sugar plantation served as an experimental laboratory and, as such, vital inventions and engineering developments that took place in this space were subsequently incorporated into manufacturing designs in the North Atlantic, helping to modernize European industries in the process. As transient intermediaries, scientists, industrialists, and engineers modified and adapted vacuum pan technologies to meet the local demands of planters in the Greater Caribbean, thereby integrating this area into an increasingly globalized economy.

Immigration acts have long been analysed as instrumental to the working of the modern nation-state. A particular focus has been the racial exclusions and restrictions that were adopted by aspirationally white, new world nation-states: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. This article looks again at the long modern history of immigration restriction in order to connect the history of these settler-colonial race-based exclusions (much studied) with immigration restriction in postcolonial nation-states (little studied). It argues for the need to expand the scope of immigration restriction histories geographically, temporally and substantively: beyond the settler nation, beyond the Second World War, and beyond ‘race’. The article focuses on the Asia-Pacific region, bringing into a single analytical frame the early immigration laws of New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and Canada on the one hand and those of Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Fiji on the other.

This article investigates the powerful normative role of plantation-oriented agricultural practices in what was arguably the premier indigenous crop revolution of the colonial era: the West African cocoa boom. It traces the links between the extraordinary growth of cocoa production in the region – above all in the Gold Coast – and the longer experience of cocoa estates in other parts of the world, in particular the Caribbean, which served as a key reference point for the expanding global cocoa frontier in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In spite of the manifest competitive success of African farmers’ extensive agricultural practices during this period, most outside observers retained a strong partiality towards intensive production techniques under centralized European management. This article emphasizes the role played by the transcontinental exchange of ideas in sustaining the cultural authority of such cultivation techniques long after their commercial viability came into question.

In the 1870s, the American prison reformer E. C. Wines attempted to bring together representatives from every country and colony in the world to discuss the administration and reform of the prison, under the auspices of the International Prison Congress. This article tackles the challenge by exploring how the international congress operated as both a social scientific technology and a diplomatic forum that emerged from this short-lived world of amateur social science and diplomacy. It argues that the exigencies of the international congress as a social scientific space forced it to take on diplomatic and political functions that both imprinted a logic of comparability onto the burgeoning international diplomatic system and also caused the eventual exclusion of non-European polities from the congresses. It engages with recent scholarship in history of science specifically to understand the international congress as a technology that mediated intellectual exchange and scientific communication. By examining the challenges posed by the inclusion of non-Western polities in such communication, it attempts to reveal the multiple global histories of the social sciences in the late nineteenth century.

This articles examines the links between Mexican anthropologists who – as part of a 1960s-era revolt, rejected prior anthropological approaches, which they labelled imperialist – and social science currents in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. They also took inspiration from anti-colonial movements. They spurned modernization theories that focused on the multiple economic, cultural, and psychological factors that might spur US-style capitalist economic growth and that sought to overcome the internal, national brakes on progress. Instead, they embraced dependency theories that linked the ‘internal’ (national) to the ‘external’ (global) and privileged revolutionary changes that implied a radically changed relation to the global capitalist world system. Yet dependency and modernization theories emerged within a shared intellectual space. Even as many intellectuals rejected US models of economic development, they accepted the primacy accorded to economics and technology and the notion that science was a global enterprise aimed at generating universal knowledge.

In the middle of the twentieth century, many Egyptians welcomed the arrival of Coca-Cola.Yet the Egyptian embrace of Coke drastically declined when, in April 1966, the firm consented to the opening of a bottling franchise in Israel. This article explores the de-coca-colonization of post-independence Egypt. The Coca-Cola Company's reluctance to revoke its commercial extension into Israel obliged the Egyptian government to reject the multinational corporation's discourse of development, view Coke as a political threat, vote in favour of an Arab League boycott, and ultimately close its borders to Coca-Cola. By doing so, the Cairo government did not reject either cultural globalization or economic modernization, nor was it disconnected from the global flow of capital, people, ideas, and goods, but it chose to concentrate its support on one of these processes: decolonization.

The ‘transnational turn’ has been one of the most widely debated historiographical directions in the past decade or so. This article explores one of its landmark publications: The Palgrave dictionary of transnational history (2009), which presents around 400 entries on transnational history written by around 350 authors from some 25 countries. Drawing on narrative theory and the sociology of knowledge, the article develops an extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of the most prominent narrative structures that can be found across the Dictionary, thus piecing together a coherent historiographical portrait of the book's many and multifarious entries. In doing so the article wishes to demonstrate a possible methodology for analysing the growing body of reference works – in the form of dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and handbooks – that are currently mushrooming in expanding research areas across the social sciences and the humanities such as international relations, governance, and globalization studies.