This article discusses the largely forgotten anti-whaling protests in Norway and Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century. It shows that fishing communities around the world protested almost simultaneously against the introduction of Norwegian-style industrial whaling, even though the protesting fishermen did not compete for the same marine resources as the whalers. Analysing Norwegian and Japanese fishermen’s knowledge reveals that whales played a crucial part in pre-industrial coastal fishing, as they were partly responsible for bringing fish closer to the shore. The article argues that fishing communities around the world had developed ‘coeval moral ecologies’, believing that the killing and flensing of whales caused environmental pollution, hurting coastal flora and fauna, and thus ultimately diminishing the coastal ecosystem on which the fishing communities depended. Fisheries scientists, politicians, and whalers have, however, downplayed this fishermen’s knowledge by presenting allegedly unbiased scientific data that did not indicate a relationship between whaling and fishing.

This article explores Russian perceptions of ‘America’ as they emerged in the eighteenth century when traders, explorers, and scholars approached the North American continent from the Pacific side. It argues that these perceptions were fundamentally different from the European mental discovery of America via the Atlantic. Rather than imagining a ‘new world’, the protagonists saw the north-west American coastline as a part of the North Pacific basin, which, in turn, was considered a part of the Russian empire. Only in the early nineteenth century did Russian geographic and cultural concepts change, becoming more similar to those of Europeans and to contemporary ideas of continents and global structures.

This article examines one of the most consequential legal–political models for the confiscation of private property in the twentieth century: the Trading with the Enemy Acts (TEAs). Two laws with this name were passed in Britain (1914) and the United States (1917), enabling the large-scale expropriation of ‘enemies’ and ‘aliens’. The extra-territorial application of these laws during the era of total war led to the globalization of its paradigm of expropriation in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The TEAs made the administrative process of dispossession effective and profitable for liberal states. The US law was repurposed for domestic use during the New Deal, while its British counterpart played an unforeseen role during decolonization and the great partitions of the late 1940s, as the nascent nation-states of India, Pakistan, and Israel used it to constitute themselves as territorial and economic units by taking land and property from ‘evacuees’ and ‘absentees’. The article provides a short history of these four national cases in their international context and argues that the history of the TEAs shows that state-driven mass expropriation was much more common throughout the mid twentieth century than usually supposed; the ‘age of extremes’ was also in part an ‘age of expropriation’.

This article takes a close look at the history of an American tree now known as sassafras but known to the Timucua of early modern Florida as pauame. Sassafras root was a major anti-febrile medicament in the early modern world. The history of that medicament has thus far primarily been written in terms of the Spanish empire, which commodified it in post-contact Eurasia. Yet Native Americans, in particular the Timucua, as well as the French, the British, and the Russians, all played major roles in the history of sassafras. That history involves several objects derived from the tree sometimes called sassafras, knowledge about those objects, and Eurasian ideas about the Americas. This article focuses on the issues of entangled empires, and commodity and knowledge exchanges, to show that early modern commodities were not unitary objects, but rather shifting entanglements of objects, words, and ideas.

Reducing globalization to transnational movements and exchanges prevents us from understanding the specificity of our contemporary globalization, which was preceded by earlier waves of globalization. In particular, in the middle of the nineteenth century, many of the dimensions of our globalization had already been identified: the mobility of people, the expansion of trade, financial and cultural flows worldwide, and international cooperation. For example, as early as the 1850s, Marx diagnosed a ‘global’ expansion of capitalism bringing together many of the features of our contemporary globalization. In this article, I thus raise the question of the specificity of our globalization. What makes it new when compared to previous globalization processes? The main sociological theories of globalization in the 1990s relied on the thesis of a transition from a national to a global era. Many sociologists have therefore identified new aspects of our contemporary globalization. I explore six of those in turn: the invention of the terms ‘global’ and ‘globalization’ themselves; the rise of ‘transmigrations’; the rise of value chains, logistics, and ‘emerging’ countries in international trade; global cities and informational capitalism as new geographies of transnational financial flows; the threat to cultural diversity posed by a globalizing culture; and a sociology of globalization that is less and less monopolized by privileged or specific actors, becoming, on the contrary, increasingly ordinary and widespread.

As contribution to the debate about the interpretation of the process of economic growth before the Industrial Revolution, we discuss two concerns about the currently available estimates of historical national accounts and the way in which these estimates should be interpreted. Firstly, we argue that estimates of the long-term trends of economic growth should make use of all information contained in time series of Gross Domestic Product (GDP henceforth), and therefore use standard regression analysis to establish those trends. Secondly, we point to the problem that the time series of historical GDP are based on very different estimation procedures, which probably affect the outcome in terms of the level of GDP per capita in the period before 1850. Both concerns imply that we do not entirely agree with Jack Goldstone’s views of pre-industrial growth. In particular, his conclusion that growth was cyclical before 1800 is inconsistent with the available GDP estimates, which point to sustained growth, albeit at a very low rate.

This article offers a comparative analysis of the historiographical implications of state conflict and expansion in two key regions of ancient Afro-Eurasia, the Mediterranean Basin and East Asia. The Mediterranean-wide conflict known as the Punic Wars, and the protracted struggle between Han China and her militarized steppe nomadic neighbours in a theatre that spanned much of eastern Inner Eurasia, helped shape the direction of subsequent world history. These conflicts also shaped the methodology and approach of three historians in these two regions: Polybius, Diodorus, and Sima Qian. All three wove detailed descriptions of these processes into complex narratives that synthesized events into an organic whole. The result was a universal conception of history that added up to something much more than a mere recounting of events.

Afghanistan is not traditionally seen as a ‘decolonized’ state, given that it was never formally part of any empire. Yet Afghan state leaders embraced the language of anti-colonialism and self-determination to assert influence in the international community, and especially at the UN. This paper explores the interactions between Afghan elites and the UN, particularly the way that Afghanistan fought the growing global consensus that self-determination in the era of decolonization meant the establishment of an international states system. Afghan elites instead argued that self-determination was for peoples, not states. Afghanistan’s stance on self-determination, as an exception to territorial state centrism, provides a way of thinking about decolonization’s universalisms and particularities, as well as how it ultimately complicated Afghanistan’s own place in the international community. The article uses Afghanistan’s engagement with the UN General Assembly and its various subcommittees, from its membership in 1946 to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, to reflect on the ways decolonization became a global yet fractured phenomenon that came to mean numerous practices and could be used by different historical actors to articulate multiple, potentially competing visions of political autonomy and rights. International institutions like the UN provided crucial arenas where postcolonial statehood became the norm yet was nevertheless contested and questioned. By providing an exception to the UN’s focus on territorial statehood, Afghanistan demonstrates the ongoing fluidity and complexity of decolonization’s meaning and consequences, as well as the ways in which nations continue to inform the global.

Originally intended to provide an accessible overview for colleagues in Papua New Guinea, this article outlines the emergence of the continental division of the world in classical antiquity. In medieval Europe this survived as a learned conception which eventually acquired emotional content. Nevertheless, the division was still within the context of universal Christianity, which did not privilege any continent. Contrary to the views of recent critics, the European sense of world geography was not inherently ‘Eurocentric’. While Europeans did develop a sense of continental superiority, Americans, Africans, and many Asians also came to identify themselves with their continents and to use them as weapons against European domination. The application of the division to Melanesia is also considered.

This article compares European nationalism and earlier notions of political community in Europe and Asia. Without denying the discursive novelty of post-1750 nationalism, it argues that eighteenth-century social and economic incentives to ethnic integration in individual European countries accelerated much older dynamics. Moreover, in the same period, c. 1400–1850, as state-centred ethnicities cohered in Europe, similar processes produced broadly comparable formations around the rimlands of Asia. Together, Europe and the Asian rimlands thus generated an early modern cultural system – distinctive from both nationalism and universal empire, but possessing features of both – that I term ‘political ethnicity’. The novelty and idiosyncrasy of this Eurasian-wide formation has yet to be recognized. Why, then, in Europe alone did political ethnicity eventually produce nationalism? Using Myanmar and Britain as case studies, the article argues that in Europe distinctive medieval legacies joined religious ruptures and exceptionally rapid commercial expansion to compress religious authority, to diffuse metropolitan norms with unprecedented rapidity, and to transfer sovereignty from the crown to propertied interests speaking in the name of the ‘nation’.

This article analyses international scholarship of the early twentieth century by focusing on scholarly networks and the uncomfortable interplay between their claims to universalism and the realities of an international war with global dimensions. Academics, books, and ideas had traversed the world with relative ease and regularity from the mid nineteenth century. The consequences were the creation of a hierarchical and Euro-American dominated ‘academic world’ where mobility and the transnational transmission of knowledge were key features. The rupture of the First World War tested the durability of these connections but the Paris Peace Conference showed that scholarly connections – through shared disciplinary interests, alumni groupings, or mutual acquaintance – were not only durable but sometimes crucial to the recasting of the world envisaged by the peacemakers. While the scholars present at the Paris Peace Conference were there as representatives of their respective nations, they also demonstrated strong allegiance to disciplines and institutions.

Tropical Africa has not fared well either in the contemporary world order or in the globalization literature that has accompanied it. Under such labels as ‘black hole’ ‘blank space’ and ‘the hopeless continent’, this part of the world seems hardly worthy of attention in the study of the connections and energies that define the twenty-first century.

The article de-centres the global history of disease by examining the agency of Eastern European expertise at international organizations and during decolonization. It challenges accounts of anti-malaria policies at the League of Nations Health Organization and at the World Health Organization written from a Western, particularly North American perspective, or on the basis of local reactions to Western interventions. The contribution proposes an analysis of circulations and ideas across multiple cultural, social and political spaces: post-imperial European states, (post)colonial territories and bureaucracies of international organizations. From the 1920s to the 1960s, Eastern European experts played a crucial role in the transformation of malaria from an imperial disease that tested governance over ‘tropical’ peoples into an issue of global health and nation-state building. However, regional representatives reproduced civilizational hierarchies intrinsic to North–South biomedical relations. The global entanglements of Eastern European malariology show that liberation from disease was less about communism or liberalism, and more about national renewal, statehood and world hierarchies.

The social history of colonial Southeast Asia has often been narrated through the lens of ‘plural societies’, where various ethnic groups rarely mixed. This article challenges that narrative by pointing to traditions of multi-ethnic interaction, particularly in port cities, dating back to an early modern age of commerce. Although colonialism introduced new racial hierarchies that reinforced stark ethnic divides, it also created arenas where these could be transgressed. In the interwar era, international organizations, such as Rotary clubs, provided a way of breaking the colour bar of colonial society and a venue for multi-ethnic representation in a shared associational space. They converged with existing notions of civic duty, while promoting a public intellectual culture in cities for both men and women, as well as a new sense of regionalism. In ethnically divided Malaya, Asian Rotarians questioned the importance of race and debated the possibilities of a multi-ethnic future for the nation. While such cosmopolitan ideals were more vulnerable in the post-colonial era of nation-states, the organizations of the interwar era left important legacies for civil society in the region.

This article explores the making of the State of Syria after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. I argue that an event-based approach in global legal history offers a useful perspective for studying the transition from imperial to international and national systems. Drawing on new archival research in France and Saudi Arabia, I focus upon the creation of the 1928 Syrian constitution in the League’s mandate to show the administrative framework of political orders. First, I describe the French administrative logic through the story of the international ‘organic law’. Second, I describe the way the organic law necessitated the Syrian political constitution. The constrained constitutional process resulted in a clash and a compromise about a Muslim president between secularist republicans and exiled, Saudi-related Muslim monarchists. Global history can profit from this approach by rethinking decolonization as administrative reorganization and by focusing on dissenting, non-state actors in state-making.

This article considers how the existence of an ancient community, the Jews of Cochin on India’s Malabar coast, was transformed by the force of two powerful twentieth-century nationalisms – Indian nationalism and Zionism. It does so through telling the story of a remarkable individual, A. B. Salem, a lawyer, politician, Jewish religious reformer, and Indian nationalist, who was instrumental in promoting the Zionist cause and facilitating the mass migration of the Cochin Jews to Israel. Salem’s story illustrates how the prioritization and translation of kinds of identity into the public sphere is fluid and contingent upon a variety of circumstances, personal as well as the outcome of changes in the wider world.