This paper analyses the importation of foreign steam technology into Cuba in the course of the nineteenth century, and the experience of the migrant workers employed to operate it, in order to focus not on Cuba as an isolatable entity, but existing in the context of transnational networks that were involving the island in processes of globalization. This was, at the outset, a ‘sub-imperial’ globalization, operating independently, and implying liberation, from empire. The search for new technologies to enable improvements in sugar production necessarily took the Creole elite beyond the restricted possibilities of the Spanish empire to the industrial centres of the United States, Britain, and France. Such new links helped fuel the emergence of an independent Cuban identity; however, the same globalizing tendencies that were eroding the Spanish empire led Cuba into new forms of imperial domination. The increasing expense of the new steam technology necessitated a growing dependence upon investment from foreign merchant banks, which gradually assumed control over much of the island's production and trade. The same migrant engineers who had begun by assisting Cuban planters took on the role of agents for foreign companies. Rather than contributing their skills, as one more group of migrants in a nation formed out of multiple migrations, these engineers asserted their foreign identity and guarded their privileged position. They came to be seen as symbolic of the process by which Cuba shook off the Spanish yoke only to replace it with another.

Throughout the 1970s, journalists and leaders in the Global South organized around the concept of a New International Information Order (NIIO), premised upon the self-determination of news access and production. Though largely forgotten today, the NIIO constituted a key platform of the ‘Third World’ solidarity movement. Latin America was a prominent site for NIIO activism, and this article examines the regional and local meetings that frequently brought together governing officials, reporters, and academics. Focusing on the shifting expectations of exiled Latin Americans living in Mexico City, the article explores the domestic political factors that eventually attenuated enthusiasm for the NIIO. By the late 1970s, Latin American advocates argued that repressive governments could not be trusted to safeguard socially responsible information initiatives, such as regional wire services. Moreover, they underscored that national democratization was necessary before global inequities could be resolved.

The essay sets out to re-examine the events and processes of inter-state and commercial competition that accompanied the arrival of the first Portuguese fleets in the Indian Ocean after the voyage of Vasco da Gama (1497–99). Focusing on the ‘long decade’ from 1498 to 1509, a series of differing perspectives on the challenges caused by the Portuguese to other rival powers is laid out and examined in detail. These include the Venetian conception of the Portuguese enterprise, which tended to be divided between an ‘optimistic’ view (suggesting that the Cape route would collapse quickly), and a more ‘pessimistic’ one, which saw the Serenissima itself as gravely threatened. The geo-political vision of Venetian observers, and the place given by them to the Vijayanagara empire in South India is duly noted with regard to the pepper trade in particular. This view is then contrasted with the abundant but uneven Portuguese documentation available from the time of the viceroyalty of Dom Francisco de Almeida (1505–09). The essay finally sets out to explain and contextualize the Mamluk maritime intervention in the affairs of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, culminating in the defeat of the fleet of Amir Husain al-Kurdi off Diu in 1509.

How did medieval builders manage to construct some of the tallest structures in the world without access to modern engineering theories? Construction drawings were limited to details and, with only a handful exceptions, manuals for builders only appeared in the late fifteenth century. By implication, the relevant knowledge had to be transferred on a personal basis. Its underlying principles must therefore have been reasonably simple. This article shows how a modular design, combined with on-site experimentation, guided much of the construction work on large projects such as European cathedrals, Middle Eastern mosques, Indian temples, and Chinese pagoda towers.

This article seeks to gain a clearer understanding of the language, reach, and limits of competing patriotic trade campaigns in the British empire during the 1930s, focusing on efforts to promote the purchase of Indian, Chinese, and ‘British’ products (a term which was used to refer to goods from both the UK and the Dominions). Civil society groups used patriotic-buying campaigns to promote and maintain forms of regionalized integration in response to the partial deglobalization of trade. Supporters of such campaigns sought to develop trade networks based on ethnic ties which could connect across and, in the Chinese case, beyond imperial spaces. However, the hybridity of colonial subjects’ identities impeded each of these efforts to develop patriotic trade networks and meant that the content, character, and popular appeal of trade campaigns shifted between different regions.

This article argues that the manner by which colonial societies achieved independence as sovereign states in the late 1940s and 1950s fundamentally shaped the parallel emergence of ideas and institutions of international governance, particularly at the newly created United Nations. Using Anglo-Indian relations as its primary focus, it argues that the internationalization of imperialism was particularly evident in two areas: postcolonial states’ negotiation of relations with their former colonial power within the UN system; and the influence of colonialism on international governance, particularly through the idea and practice of planning. The article assesses these developments through an analysis of British debates about United Nations membership for postcolonial states, India's role at the San Francisco Conference in 1945 where the United Nations was formed, India's campaign for a seat on the Security Council and its engagement with ECOSOC, the applicability of existing international conventions to postcolonial states, and the transfer of the ideal of planning from colonial to international governance.

This article examines the economic organization of the trans-Saharan slave trade between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries on those routes that moved slaves from Sudanic Africa via entrepôts in the Sahel and Sahara to the Maghrib. The commercial framework of this trade was integrated into ethnic, cultural, and religious systems, yet for its efficient operation could not rely solely on these social institutions. Temporary cooperation of itinerant slave traders is considered and then projected onto the broader patterns of commercial organization. It is shown that similar pressures resulted in comparable outcomes: partnerships were formed to take advantage of economies of scale in commercial services and to limit cooperation problems. This demonstrates that the organization of the trans-Saharan slave trade was economically rational and can be analysed in terms of cooperative and non-cooperative strategies. Moreover, it is argued that the trade was not restrained by social institutions but versatile in adapting its economic institutions to specific market imperfections. It is concluded that recent economic models are more useful in explaining the economic behaviour of slave traders than conventional neoclassical economics.

This article discusses the material history of coffee and tea by drawing on mid-eighteenth-century substitute recipes collected by physicians in different provinces of Sweden, applying perspectives from economic history, the history of science, medicine, and globalization. The starting point for the analysis is that a substitute can be said to reflect what are perceived as the most important properties, in terms of look, feel, taste, and scent, of the thing being copied. The products of a predominantly self-sustained agrarian world, the tea and coffee substitutes offered a distinctive rural alternative to the new exotic beverages. In terms of ecology and economy, this context encompassed large parts of central and north-eastern Europe; it also involved areas with a history of consumption that differed considerably from those of the cosmopolitan elites which have hitherto dominated the scholarship on eighteenth-century coffee and tea. The article finally suggests that the ways in which early modern substitutes were consumed and processed helped pave the way for the mass consumption of imported goods in rural areas of Europe in the following centuries.

Early modern Russia sat at the intersection of Eurasian trade networks, which allowed both commodities and information to move from east to west and north to south. Rhubarb exported from China had held a prominent position in Western medical treatments since the classical era, but improved transportation and communication between Europe and Asia through Russia enabled the growth of the medicinal rhubarb trade to unexpected heights after 1760. Earlier studies of rhubarb have focused on European interests in uncovering ‘true’ medicinal rhubarb, but this article will situate the plant as a part of the broader process of scientific exchange across Eurasia. Russia’s unique position in Eurasia ultimately allowed its specialists to contribute to the development of Western science through the importation of information from Asia and its own expeditions in Siberia, Russia’s internal ‘Asian’ territory.

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.

Attributing revolutionary potential to new international communications technology, notably the internet, is not new. On a global scale, similar ideas emerged in the mid nineteenth century in relation to government-subsidized mail steamers. These visions remained utopian, then as now, although some nations went further than others in attempting to implement ‘world peace’ and ‘social improvement’ through communications. Before widespread electrical transmissions, Americans created the blueprint for such utopian visions through mail steamers. Americans had long considered their postal system socially transformative; the development of mail steamers turned that social vision outwards to the globe. This article examines two movements of the 1850s that sought change through global communications: using mail steamers to resettle American free blacks in Africa and reducing international postage rates to such a low rate that increased communications would prevent war. These two nearly simultaneous histories suggest that the evolving concept of the nation-state deserves further investigation as an element at the conjuncture of global communications and social reform.

This article explores the origins and early history of American football in relation to the development of rugby and similar codes in the English-speaking world of the last third of the nineteenth century. It suggests that the traditional narrative description of the emergence of the American game – which is ascribed in large part to the individual initiative of Walter Camp – fails to situate the sport in the context of the wider, transnational dynamics of the development of the various handling codes of football. In particular, it contends that the common assumption that the gridiron game's early development was a sporting expression of American exceptionalism is mistaken and that it only acquired its distinctive national character in the early twentieth century.

This article examines the history of prostitution as a regional phenomenon in Southeast Asia over the course of the twentieth century. I argue that this institution changed shape several times during that period, and that a number of rubrics might be employed to best study this evolution. The first part of the article looks at some of the traditional parameters of prostitution as it was practised both in island and mainland Southeast Asia, while the second part of the essay traces some new developments in the burgeoning colonial age. The third part of the piece then looks at war-time prostitution as a separate phenomenon from these earlier developments, while the fourth examines the rise of sex tourism in the region, partially as an offshoot of these same armed conflicts in the middle decades of the century. Finally, the last section of the article looks at how borders, cities, and economic inequalities have acted upon each other in today’s world to change the shape of regional prostitution in Southeast Asia yet again.

Combining global perspectives with localized case studies and integrating scientific and material evidence of environmental change in historical narratives are amongst the main challenges for the field of global history in addressing the dawn of the Anthropocene. In this article, we trace the relationship of the city of Gerasa (Jerash, Jordan) with its riverine hinterland, from the first millennium BCE until the nineteenth century CE. We argue that the study of long-term historical trajectories of microregions not only depends on context from regional and global history timelines, but also has the potential to provide insights relevant to those scales in return. Zooming in and scaling up must go hand in hand in order for global history perspectives to be properly informed, and archaeology and natural sciences have crucial insights to offer – although importantly only when evidence comes from well-contextualized frameworks.

Contemporaries and historians alike have explained the imperialism of interwar Japan, Italy, and Germany through the paradigm of a ‘new world order’. This article critically revisits this received assumption by analysing the place of the Axis in the longer history of imperialism from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War. If we cast Axis empires – a blend of fascism and imperialism – in the larger framework constituted by the relationship between the nation and capital, it becomes clear that they were not so much the result of the peculiar national histories of Japan, Italy, and Germany, but products of larger, global forces. Through an examination of recent scholarship, this article offers a new conceptual interpretation of the link between imperialism and fascism. In so doing, it adds to our understanding of the interwar period by breaking down the neat boundaries between liberal and fascist world orders.

Drawing on the increasingly important insights of historians concerned with global and transnational perspectives, in this article I argue that Du Bois' international activism and writings on global oppression in the decades following the Second World War profoundly shaped the ways in which people in the United States engaged with race as a concept and social practice in the mid decades of the twentieth century. Du Bois' efforts to bring his insights on global racism home to the US domestic legal arena were to a large degree thwarted by a US foreign policy focused on Cold War politics and interested in pursuing racial equality not on the basis of universal human rights principles but as a Cold War political strategy. Nonetheless, I argue that Du Bois' writings, which were informed by a new rhetoric of global responsibility and universal citizenship, had unpredictable and significant consequences in shaping the direction of US racial politics in the civil rights era.

This article argues that the emerging Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) provides a valuable new perspective on colonialism. CSR argues that humans are innately inclined towards certain types of religious belief (e.g., belief in spirit beings, belief in immortal souls) and certain types of non-utilitarian morality (e.g., belief in an obligation to care for kin, belief in an obligation to avoid ‘disgusting’ substances or behaviours). These innate inclinations underlie many religious and cultural traditions transformed by colonialism, including Islam. The article suggests that colonial power operates not only by suppressing traditional non-Western institutions but also by suppressing the natural inclinations underlying non-Western traditions. This claim is developed through a study of colonial efforts to transform Egypt’s al-Azhar, the world’s most influential institution of Islamic learning and scholarship. These efforts made al-Azhar into the centre of a global Islamic reform movement, which sought to integrate Islam with a colonial scientific-utilitarian worldview.

As Swami Vivekananda travelled West at the end of the nineteenth century to propagate what has become known as ‘Hindu Universalism’, the American Sarah Farmer travelled to Palestine to embrace the new Baha’i faith. This article will ask why both wished to create ‘universal’ religions, and why they found inspiration at Green Acre, Maine in 1894 in the wake of the Chicago World Parliament of Religions in 1893. Visitors to Green Acre discussed ‘divine femininity’, engaged with men such as Vivekananda and Abdu’l-Baha, and began to criticize colonial hierarchies in the search for spiritual reconciliation, all concerns which touched on questions of ‘Eastern’ religion. However, spirituality was not a mere epiphenomenon of larger historical developments. Rather, the ‘transformation’ discussed here drew on an essentialized notion of ‘Eastern wisdom’ that contrasted spirituality with materialism, tolerance with intolerance, transcendence with instrumentalism. Yet, such polarized characterizations misjudged the ways in which Baha’i and Hindu Universalism destabilized the very categories of East and West, while retaining a vision of ‘Eastern wisdom’ untouched by Western corruptions.

This article addresses two interrelated questions pertaining to the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) attempt to internationalize the Chinese currency – the renminbi (RMB). First, what is the historical rationale of RMB internationalization, and what are its implications? Second, how does the rationale for, and implications of, RMB internationalization distinguish this process from the emergence of the US dollar as the global reserve currency? The article proceeds by framing the RMB internationalization process as a historical palimpsest that emerges from three critical moments following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. It then assesses their collective global historical significance through a comparison with the rationale and effects of dollar internationalization. Through foregrounding the domestic and global path-dependence of the RMB’s historical evolution, the article argues that RMB internationalization does not constitute a rupture in global historical terms by challenging the dollar’s global reserve currency status; rather, it paradoxically consolidates a dollar-centric global monetary system because the CPC is committed to sustaining the Mao-era (1949-76) legacy of absolute macroeconomic control.