From the Counter-Reformation to the present, women in a variety of contexts of colonization, decolonization, and slavery crossed the threshold from missionary congregation to missionary workforce to live in Catholic religious community. Comparative, transnational analysis provides insights from a variety of angles into the myriad local factors that fashioned their understandings of the relationship between the spiritual and material benefits so gained. Their experiences were uneven, shaped by the race, gender, and status politics of each ecclesiastical and secular context, by their usefulness to the wider missionary project and the state, and by shifts in ecclesiastical rulings that were prompted by changes in the Vatican’s temporal status. In the later twentieth century, some became activists and advocates, using their symbolic power to work in the interests of women and poor people, and to reform the patriarchy at the core of the church.

Notions of the ‘global’ in historiography have a long tradition, and yet they appear to be a novelty. This article shows how older understandings of world history, imbued with Eurocentric presuppositions and universalist metaphysical reasoning, were questioned and revised in a long-term process. Recent criticism of Eurocentrism, linked with postcolonial scholarship, and the development of source-based approaches to study global connections and comparisons are usually recognized as innovations that took shape since the 1970s. In fact, they are rooted in profound conceptual revisions and academic institutionalization, which began much earlier. Based on the development of the field of world history in the United States, this article argues that concepts for a multipolar, interactive, and transcultural history developed from a dialectical and critical move away from older narratives. Historians and area specialists have wrestled for at least half a century with questions and problems that were rediscovered in the global turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, the example shows that the field developed in specific trajectories, reflecting local and national institutional academic circumstances, as well as specific socio-political contexts.

The emerging cultures of late nineteenth-century steamship mobility can be distinguished broadly by ocean basin and by specific route. In the Pacific, a steamship connection between Sydney and San Francisco was envisaged to forge and sustain strong bonds between regional ‘branches’ of the Anglo-Saxon race. This article moves beyond the rhetorical purchase of assumed affinities, to explore the more layered ways in which difference was articulated in transpacific encounters, and the attendant uncertainties and frictions in these evolving relations. When compared to routes bridging the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, with familiar imperial hierarchies and formalities behind them, British and colonial travellers in the Pacific were frequently unsettled by the more democratic and republican attitudes of the American crews and passengers they encountered. At the same time, Britain’s long-standing supremacy on the high seas provided a benchmark against which American enterprise and power in the Pacific could be assessed and found wanting.

The emergence of ‘fieldwork’ as a technique for gathering knowledge was part of a reciprocal process of two-way observation between Europeans and Asians. The methods of language-learning, cultural immersion, and note-taking that were eventually canonized in the discipline of anthropology were no more unique to Europeans than the writing of the learned travelogues through which they first found expression. In the early nineteenth century, Asian travellers were observing and taking notes on the English at home as part of a reciprocal pattern of exchanges made possible by the new commercial and diplomatic contacts of the age. This thesis is demonstrated by using the Persian travel diary made by an Iranian ‘fieldworker’ to reconstruct in detail the methods and conditions of his ‘ethnographic’ tour of the English West Country in 1818. In the reversal of a familiar trope of European ethnography, the diary described meetings with the ‘sects’ and ‘mystics’ of the English provinces in the very same years that saw the first English accounts of Persia religiosa. Using numerous contemporary English sources to build on the Persian field diary, the article reveals the multiple patterns of reciprocity by which knowledge was gained through a ‘scientific’ epistemology of observation and experience. From Unitarianism to Baha’ism, the collaborative knowledge so created led to changing intellectual attitudes among both European and Asian scholar-travellers.

This article analyses how the first circumnavigation of the world, from 1519 to 1522, introduced South America as a key space in the formation of the ‘global’, thus producing a historical point of inflection. We examine the commercial and political plans and networks that began to function as a result of this new connectivity, which turned the American continent into a major global axis. The analysis focuses on the way in which this voyage gave new prominence to an unexplored region of the world, namely the southernmost tip of America, thus changing the notion of habitability that had prevailed for centuries in Europe. These changes questioned the authority of ‘ancient’ Greek thinkers and strengthened a European historical narrative that appropriated the discovered territories and distinguished the extreme southern part of America from other southern regions, as symbolized through figures such as the Patagonian giants. I consider these changes based on evidence from Spanish sources.

This article explains how the US westward expansion influenced and stimulated Japanese migration to Brazil. Emerging in the nineteenth century as expanding powers in East Asia and Latin America, respectively, both Meiji Japan and post-independence Brazil looked to the US westward expansion as a central reference for their own processes of settler colonialism. The convergence of Japan and Brazil in their imitation of US settler colonialism eventually brought the two sides together at the turn of the twentieth century to negotiate for the start of Japanese migration to Brazil. This article challenges the current understanding of Japanese migration to Brazil, conventionally regarded as a topic of Latin American ethnic studies, by placing it in the context of settler colonialism in both Japanese and Brazilian histories. The study also explores the shared experiences of East Asia and Latin America as they felt the global impact of the American westward expansion.

This article uses the early thought and career of the Indian Mar Thoma Christian and Marxian theologian M. M. Thomas to investigate the connections between ecumenism’s theology of communism and its engagements with anti-colonial politics and decolonization in the 1940s and 1950s. The article situates Thomas’ efforts to reconcile Marxian doctrine with Christian faith within the movement’s institutional practices for combating the entropic effects of modern secular civilization and Cold War polarization. Tracing Thomas’ ascent from Christian Marxist youth circles in south India to leadership positions in the World Student Christian Federation and the World Council of Churches, the article highlights the central role of his theology in establishing ‘revolutionary’ postcolonial social transformation as the object of Christian global governance in the post-war era.

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 argues that Flowers (flores sanctorum), collections of saints’ lives arranged by the liturgical calendar, were the first genre of devotional literature to have a global reach during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This article begins with the medieval origins of Flowers before analysing their dispersion in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by the Franciscans and Jesuits. By taking a temporal long view and a transoceanic perspective, the article contributes to the scholarship on early modern evangelization, translation, global networks, and the historiographies of the Franciscans and Jesuits.

This article analyses some of the transformations in economic vocabularies, practices, and institutions that accompanied the turn towards high value-added and technology-driven industrialization in late socialist Romania. It investigates the challenges posed by increasing integration of the country’s commodity production into the world market in the 1960–70s and assesses the measures adopted by its economic executives as a response to these challenges: the reorganization of production; the reconfiguration of planning mechanisms; and the strategies of keeping labour cheap. This article shows that planners behind the Iron Curtain wrestled with similar problems to their Western counterparts. It demonstrates that the solutions of the socialist economic executives not only mirrored, imitated, and translated Western managerial ideologies and practices but also represented creative local responses to the challenges of the world market. I argue this constellation of solutions constituted a fully fledged form of ‘socialist flexibility’. Analysing how these flexible solutions paralleled the neoliberal deregulation in the capitalist core helps us question the analytical separation between centrally planned and market economies and the still powerful narrative of 1989 as a historical fracture.

This article examines the maritime activities and emigration of Muslim Sylhetis, from what today is north-eastern Bangladesh. Among the Bengali people, Sylhetis were the pioneers in crossing the sea in the Age of Empire. In their voyages, they worked as crewmen on merchant ships, and then began to settle abroad, mainly in Britain and the USA. Some of those who settled in Britain started restaurants and lodging houses. One of the unexplored questions of South Asian historiography is: why was it the Sylhetis who became seamen and emigrants, even though they lived about 300 miles away from the sea? This article traces the socioeconomic, religious, and ecological environment of Sylhetis to understand their transnational mobility, notably within the increasingly interconnected realms of the British empire.

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.

As the Second World War unfolded and became global, intellectuals of various backgrounds turned their minds to the problems of peace. Internal persecution bred external aggression, some believed. States had to be tamed. Such reasoning led the American Law Institute (ALI) to try to draft a globally acceptable bill of rights. Although originating in the USA, the project was essentially a transnational one. The ‘Statement of essential human rights’ became the most elaborate code created up to that point, in both scope and detail. Completed in the early winter of 1944, it was promoted by the Panamanian delegation to the 1945 San Francisco Conference, and used extensively by the UN Commission on Human Rights. Refuting suggestions that human rights originated in the 1970s, the ALI project reveals the great depth of the transnational conversation on human rights during the early 1940s, and even before.

This article examines the life and ideas of Josef Schmidlin, the founder of Catholic ‘missionary science’ and the most influential German Catholic missionary theorist of the first half of the twentieth century. An admirer of the German Protestant missionary theologian Gustav Warneck, Schmidlin often appears in the historiography as a forerunner of the Protestant–Catholic ecumenical collaboration that emerged after the Second World War. Yet a close examination of his writing reveals a vigorous critic of Protestantism and the Protestant ecumenical movement. A sceptic of transnational missionary organizations, he remained a firm supporter of the German nation and imperial project. This article gestures towards both the continuities and the discontinuities between the early attempts at fostering confessional cooperation between Protestants and Catholics and the later iterations. It also examines how nineteenth-century entanglements between missions and empire shaped the ideas of Catholic missionary theory during the interwar years.

In 1921, the United States introduced national immigration quotas. Although designed to curb the arrival of ‘undesirables’ from south-east Europe, this quota system also applied to Britain and its white Dominions. By 1929, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were each allocated 100 quota places per annum. The British quota was far greater, but still struggled to meet demand. Through a focus on the Australian example, this article investigates how an immigration regime intended to bolster America’s ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity also exposed the limits of Anglospheric kinship by closing the gates to white Britons. Although the quotas had a comparatively minor impact on Britons, their exclusion held great significance in the context of Anglo-American relations, where the rhetoric of transnational white solidarity produced expectations of unqualified welcome in the United States. After 1921, as such welcome disappeared and then failed to rematerialize, the global community of white men’s countries was shaken and remade.

Following the First World War, nationalists in several parts of the British empire amplified their calls for greater self-government. Activists in Egypt, India, and Ireland portrayed themselves as representatives of movements for national self-determination. Their opponents countered that religious divisions undermined these groups’ claims to nationhood, making the presence of an outside power necessary to protect minorities. Activists formed networks and positioned themselves as parts of a worldwide anti-imperialist movement. Their opponents used these ties in attempts to portray separatist movements as foreign-inspired and socialist. Irish republicans and their global counterparts also struggled with accusations of sectarianism as they advanced their independence claims. This article examines Irish republicans’ connections with international revolutionaries. The confluence of political and religious identities there and in other parts of the British empire provided a pretext for continued imperial engagement. Partition forced nationalists to adjust to new geographic and demographic realities in their post-independence states.