This article looks at India’s complaint at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in 1979 about the ‘virginity test’ performed on a migrant Indian woman at Heathrow. It examines the use of arguments about race and racial discrimination by India to compel Britain to discuss immigration on a bilateral basis. The article argues that the pivot to a race-based argument was deliberately patriarchal and India’s main concern in these negotiations was the impending British Nationality Act of 1981, which would prevent men from moving to Britain in search of an overseas wife. Using the virginity testing scandal, the article re-examines the changing role of discourses about race in postcolonial institutions of global governance.

Encompassing events from 1680 to the mid 1750s, this article examines the organization and adaptation to capital and credit crises of East Indies trade participants in two metropolitan locales – one whose core bounded the North and Baltic Seas, and the other centred around the South China Sea. It shows that in both locales commercial and governmental actors relied not only on state or company, but also on decentralized, port-based practices, institutions, and networks to solve problems and support a shared information culture. Thus, the rules of what I term ‘commercial commons’, rather than an imperial conflict, characterized many East Indies endeavours of this era. East India companies operated in multiple transnational, distributed, and port-based metropolitan locales for their access to capital and credit, and to police financial failure.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents opportunities and challenges for historians working on the global history of health and disease. This article argues that the history of disease will benefit from interdisciplinary work that brings together historians, microbiologists, and archaeologists. Genomes are historical archives, in two complementary ways. Palaeogenomics provide direct access to genomes of the past, while phylogenetics furnish historical insight from evolutionary relationships. Both palaeogenomics and phylogenetics have already contributed enormously to the history of disease, helping us understand how human ecological transformation drives the evolution of our microparasites.