While the role of coal has been the subject of long-running debate in the historiography of the Industrial Revolution, its part in the economic development of the global periphery has been comparatively neglected. The technological context of the ‘First Globalization’ (c.1870–1914) made pastoral production in the periphery increasingly dependent on modern energy, as new methods of production and transportation bridged the distance between grasslands in the south of the world and kitchens in the north. By comparing choices of meat preservation techniques in Uruguay and New Zealand – two small settler economies that prospered on the back of pastoral exports – this article highlights the usefulness of an energy perspective on agriculture-based transitions to modern economic growth. Different conditions of access to coal shaped how New Zealanders and Uruguayans exploited their livestock herds when terms of trade favoured them the most, with important consequences for the persisting income gap between them.

This article considers four aspects for understanding the greatly over-used term ‘fascism’: its place in space and also in time, the basis of its social support, and its modus operandi. While agreement exists on where and when fascism reached its apogee, there is little concurrence of opinion over the extent to which the world wars were determinative in its birth and death, and how far beyond European boundaries it has ventured. There are also wide-ranging discussions concerning the identity and extent of its backers, with some writers pointing to the formative role of the lumpen body politic, or various class fractions, and others to that of an elite vanguard, or even individual alienation. A similar spectrum of opinion over the basis of fascism’s appeal extends from studies emphasizing, and elucidating, its ideational content to those that focus on the pragmatic value of action. Such a great diversity of analyses brings both considerable empirical richness and the challenge of fragmentation. This article responds by reflecting on fascism as both a social phenomenon and a field of study, in the hope of bringing some analytical structure to what remains a vast, and continuously developing, literature.

This article examines the historical work of the ninth-century Muslim scholar Abū anīfa al-Dīnawarī. Adopting the format of universal history, al-Dīnawarī constructed a historical narrative beginning with the first human Adam, continuing through the rise of Islam and culminating in the Caliphate. This paper argues that al-Dīnawarī’s work, appropriately entitled Longer narratives, represented an attempt to configure Islamic polity into world history through a reorientation of Sasanian imperial ideology and geographical consciousness in order to fit Islamic sensibilities. As an early example of belles-lettres (adab) oriented (belletrist, adabī) universal historiography, al-Dīnawarī’s work comes across as a perceptive outlook on history, which proved relevant to dynasties of diverse origins struggling to carve a space for themselves in the Persianate political landscape of the late and post-‘Abbāsid world.

In the early twentieth century, scientists at the Pasteur Institute and its colonial affiliates developed a historically specific form of bacteriological technoscience, which abstracted the human–microbe relationship from its environmental and social context, and created a model for public health governance that operated at the scale of the empire, rather than at the level of individual colonies or regions. Using a case study of tuberculosis management, this article argues that the success of the Pastorian model relied on its technopolitical vision of a universal model of managing human–microbe relations, while, in reality, exploiting precisely those fissures created by the uneven political and scientific landscape of the colonial and scientific world in which it operated. Pastorian bacteriology helped imperial administrators to imagine a globe-spanning, standardized empire, while restricting public health governance to technological innovations, rather than a proposal for social hygiene that would have expanded labour and associational rights for subject populations.

In the early days of anthropology as a discipline in the nineteenth century, evolutionism and diffusionism supplied anthropologists with ‘global’ visions. Anthropologists have always been involved with all-encompassing cosmopolitan notions such as humankind and culture. Many have thus endeavoured to explain the world as a whole, and how humans have developed in different historical moments. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the new label ‘globalization’ generated a field of scholarly preoccupations, anthropologists started to contribute to this growing body of literature. Their most valuable contributions are related to the tensions between local and global forces, and between forces of heterogeneity and homogeneity, as well as to the use of ethnography as a methodological tool. Anthropologists have borrowed notions from other related disciplines such as sociology, history, and geography. This paper situates the anthropological production on ‘the global’ within this diverse history of borrowings, internal disciplinary debates, and wider historical junctures.

This article aims to analyse some of the multilateral flows of capital that contributed to weaving a Global South during the second half of the eighteenth century. It specifically revisits the functioning and financing of the Portuguese slave trade from a global perspective, and offers insights for assessing older frameworks that explain it, in either triangular or bilateral terms. The article argues that the Portuguese slave traffic should be liberated from the South Atlantic borders to which it has been confined. In so doing, it offers an Atlantic history in a global perspective, disclosing the connections between the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Putting the financing of the slave trade into a larger global perspective helps to more accurately explain how it actually operated in terms of the organization of trade. When the financial and institutional foundations of Asian and African trade are analysed together, it becomes evident that they were part of larger networks and capital flows, both westwards and eastwards, which were not just framed imperially or locally.

The nationalist Welsh colony in Patagonia, Y Wladfa, offers a peripheral vantage point from which to reconsider core assumptions about settler colonialism and the British World. Taking a fresh approach to settler colonial studies, this article both pays close attention to settler motives before embarkation and also analyses the case from a global perspective. It foregrounds the role of unequal power relations in Britain, the British World, and the global arena in shaping social relations at home and in the colony, as well as locating Y Wladfa within a constellation of Welsh sites and influences around the world. Analysis reveals the Welsh to occupy a complex position within such global hierarchies, and to be colonizing Patagonia from a colonized position. As such, this case at the margins of settler power reveals important ambiguities, tensions, and affinities that challenge assumptions in settler colonial theory, and open spaces that might enrich and deepen analysis of this fundamentally global relationship of power.

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 assessment of relative living standards, dominated by food, has been central to analysis of the timing and causes of the Great Divergence. Comparative quantitative measures of real incomes and food availability have generated the conclusion that living standards on the western side of Eurasia, in particular in England, were already higher than those observable on the eastern side by the seventeenth century, with the divergence widening thereafter. However, in the English case, research based on evidence as to what people actually ate suggests that the path of dietary change was by no means a straightforward matter of rising calorie consumption. When viewed in the light of this, evidence derived from the work of food historians of Japan can similarly be used to reveal a more complex pattern of dietary development than can be encompassed in quantitative estimates, even if along the lines of a very different diet and cuisine. This needs to be taken into account when living standards are compared across the divergence.

This article explores a little known facet of transnational opposition to forced labour through the earliest case of ‘Chinese abolitionism’. It analyses the transnational formation of the first Sino-American actor network in the United States and its deployment in the 1874 investigations of coolie conditions in the forced labour regimes of Cuba and Peru. At the core of this actor network was the Chinese Educational Mission and its milieu of sociability, which served as a crucible of transnational cooperation between the first Chinese America experts and their US supporters. The flows of information, cosmopolitan ideas, and personnel across this network led to an unprecedented reinterpretation of the global coolie trade as a key concern in Qing foreign relations and a serious international problem that paralleled the problem of slavery. Two Qing interventions harnessed the actor network’s social capital, framing coolie abuse as an international atrocity, accelerating the abolition of the coolie trade, and signalling the need for a Chinese Foreign Service in Western countries for the protection of Chinese overseas.

This article explores the global dimension of communism during the interwar period. It criticizes a literature that either depicts communist parties as small ‘red armies’ obeying any order from Moscow, or focuses exclusively on the local level and ignores any international aspects. The article first discusses attempts of communist leaders to create a ‘world party’ based in Moscow. It next analyses the conflicts between a globally acting communist leadership and rank-and-file members concerned about their local circumstances. Finally, it highlights the role that internationalism played on the local level. Such an approach – which locates ‘the global’ on the local level, both in terms of how internationalist ideas informed people's behaviour in local contexts and in terms of how they resisted forms of globalism – might provide a means for bridging the gap between global and local histories.

This article examines how, in the course of modernization, Japan learned from Germany and Britain about ideas and institutions concerning social reform, and attempted to implement and develop them at home. It focuses on Fukuda Tokuzo, a pioneering liberal economist and social reformer, who studied under the German historical economist Lujo Brentano, and who was also inspired by the British scholars Alfred Marshall, A. C. Pigou, and J. A. Hobson. By examining how Fukuda's ideas and work were developed and assimilated in Japan, this article shows how Japanese social reformers navigated the two key strands of economic thinking that witnessed a process of globalization during this period: neoclassical welfare economics, on the one hand, and an ethical-historical style of economics, on the other. It shows how the latter was stronger in a latecomer country to modernization such as Japan.

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.

There has been a long-standing debate on the global importance of the African external slave trades. While many scholars believe these to have been detrimental to African development, they were clearly a determining factor in the development of the Americas. What role they played for the European colonial powers is, however, hotly debated. This article contributes to the debate by estimating value added in the Triangular Trade and the American plantation complex. The article empirically studies the case of British connections to the African slave trade and the American plantation complex during the eighteenth century, since these have been the focus of much previous scholarly debate. The estimates suggest that these trades grew substantially over the period, reaching a magnitude equivalent to about 11% of the British economy by the early nineteenth century.

The idea of globalization has helped to rehabilitate universalizing categories, such as colonialism and cosmopolitanism, criticized for their tendency to ignore the differences between local cultures and the operation of power. Drawing on the burgeoning discussion on historical globalization, and focussing on the role of African assessors, this article examines how colonial courts grappled with the tension between the aspiration toward imperial legal universalism and the ‘Othering’ of African subjects. It argues that British colonialism in Africa represented a form of globalization of English law, generating a ‘centripetal jurisprudence’ that sought to square the inequities of an engagement with local custom by holding up the values of justice, equity, and conscience. Imperial legal universalism required both the accommodation and containment of African difference. The paradox of integration and differentiation in colonial constructions of globality is that imperial power and local cultures were not always in conflict, but were sometimes complementary and mutually reinforcing.