As a historical period, the Cold War may be seen as a rivalry between two nuclear superpowers that threatened global destruction. The rivalry took place within a common frame of reference, in which a new historical relationship between imperialism and nationalism worked in remarkably parallel ways across the superpower divide. The new imperial–national relationship between superpowers and the client states also accommodated developments such as decolonization, multiculturalism, and new ideologies, thus producing a hegemonic configuration characterizing the period. The models of development, structures of clientage, unprecedented militarization of societies, designs of imperial enlightenment, and even many gender and racial/cultural relationships followed similar tracks within, and often between, the two camps. Finally, counter-hegemonic forces emerged in regions of the non-Western world, namely China and some Islamic societies. Did this portend the beginning of the end of a long period of Western hegemony?

German political Orientalists in the era of the First World War thought that new ethnographic methods and insights would allow them to coax Muslim populations throughout the Middle East and South Asia into violent revolt against the British. The European imperial mindset insisted that non-Western peoples could be mastered and masterminded at whim. In fact, German pursuit of absolute control of Asian populations led to their loss of control, as their misrecognitions of the facts on the ground placed them in relationships of mutually-affecting lived encounter with Indian revolutionaries. While these interactions remained largely limited to the realm of military operations during the war, they opened up into ideological encounters on the radical fringes of Weimar society in the war’s aftermath. Yet far from a study of humanistic exchange or understanding, this essay seeks to historicize the meetings of Germans and Indian émigrés and show how misrepresentations and power asymmetries were endemic to the encounter between these groups.

Official histories suggest that the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted the term ‘informal sector’ as a replacement for ‘traditional sector’, which, in its pairing with the ‘modern sector’, had fallen out of favour. This article argues that the adoption of the informal sector concept is better understood as arising out of a different context: the ILO’s post-war efforts to generate a globally operational concept of unemployment for use in the ‘developing world’. ILO officials abandoned this project in the late 1960s when they realized that, where work for wages did not constitute a widespread social norm, an accurate measure of what they called ‘disguised unemployment’ was impossible to construct. That led the ILO to develop alternative constructs, including ‘employment in the informal sector’. However, it proved difficult for the agency to operationalize those, too, and it soon found itself losing control of the policy implications of the measures that it was producing.

This article surveys changing interrelationships between humans and the earth's forest cover over the past few centuries. The focus is on the interplay between population increase, deforestation, and afforestation at both ends of Eurasia. Through the consideration of long-term changes in population and woodland area, Japan is compared with Lingnan in south China, and the East Asians with two European countries, England and France. Based on East–West comparisons and also on somewhat more detailed intra-Asian comparisons with respect to market linkages and the role of the state, the article examines the proposition made by Kenneth Pomeranz that, although both ends of Eurasia were ecologically constrained at the end of the early modern period, East Asia's pressure on forest resources was ‘probably not much worse’ than that in the West.

This article examines the transnational circulation of American mine engineers between the United States, southern Africa, and the Americas in the late nineteenth century. Technology and knowledge was diffused worldwide with the circulation of American engineers who styled themselves as expert race managers as they compared the labour practices of mines across the world. The article's focus is the extension of the United States’ global footprint to South Africa, where an expatriate ‘colony’ of American engineers created a resilient form of Anglo-American inter-imperial collaboration. As they worked the Rand, American engineers made transnational comparisons of South African and North and South American mines. In the process, they led a global discussion of the efficiency of mining labour that reified white management of other races. After leaving the Rand, American engineers migrated across the globe, many to Mexico, where the interwoven networks of expert knowledge, industrial capitalism, and transnational race-making that characterized late nineteenth-century global mining followed.

This article explains why historians of Latin America have been disinclined to engage with global history, and how global history has yet to successfully integrate Latin America into its debates. It analyses research patterns and identifies instances of parallel developments in the two fields, which have operated until recently in relative isolation from one another, shrouded and disconnected. It outlines a framework for engagement between Latin American history and global history, focusing particularly on the significant transformations of the understudied nineteenth century. It suggests that both global history and Latin American history will benefit from recognition of the existing work that has pioneered a path between the two, and from enhanced and sustained dialogue.

Focusing on the case of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, this article asks what set Japan, Germany, and Italy apart from other empires during the ‘fascist moment’ from the aftermath of the First World War to the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945. While scholars have examined the politics and culture of fascism in metropolitan Japan, there is virtually no literature on fascist imperialism. Indeed, the consensus term is ‘wartime empire’ and the dominant framework is of an empire mobilized for total war. One of the goals is to think through what the concept ‘fascist imperialism’ might mean and what the Japanese case might contribute to its definition. Detailed comparison with Germany and Italy is beyond the scope of this article, which builds a definition of fascism around four core elements drawn from the Japanese case: the ideology of Asianism and its vision for Japanese leadership over a regional movement of anti-colonial nationalisms; hyper-militarism that went well beyond military imperialism pursued since the late nineteenth century and that constituted a new celebration of military action and the aesthetics of violence; red peril thinking that propelled the creation of a police state targeting communist intellectuals, politicians, and labour activists within the archipelago as well as communist nationalists in the empire; and radical statism, which signified the turn to the state as the spear tip and staging ground of action to address the crisis. All four dimensions of fascism in Japan intensified in the process of territorial expansion from 1931 to 1945, and linked transformations across the nation-state-empire.

The 1930s and 1940s saw the rise of a new model of global food politics. This model was strongly moulded by the experiences of the Great Depression and the two world wars, all of which had brought hunger and malnutrition back to Europe. Whereas until the nineteenth century famines and food shortages had commonly been interpreted as regional Malthusian crises, they were now attributed to global economic disturbances and imbalances. This article explores how the far-reaching plans of a World Food Board, advocated by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization under John Boyd Orr, were abandoned and supplanted by a new approach that focused on technical aid and the distribution of surpluses. Moreover, the problems of hunger and malnutrition were embedded in a larger discourse on world population and economic development.

Transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality have both been concerned with the issue of borders and their crossing, but the two fields themselves have not intersected much in the past. This is beginning to change, and this article surveys recent scholarship that draws on both fields, highlighting work in six areas: movements for women’s and gay rights; diverse understandings of sexuality and gender; colonialism and imperialism; intermarriage; national identity and citizenship; and migration. This new research suggests ways in which the subject matter, theory, and methodology in transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality can interconnect: in the two fields’ mutual emphasis on intertwinings, relationships, movement, and hybridity; their interdisciplinarity and stress on multiple perspectives; and their calls for destabilization of binaries.

If we take recent income per capita estimates at face value, they imply that the average medieval European was at least five times ‘better off’ than the average Congolese today. This raises important questions regarding the meaning and applicability of national income estimates throughout time and space, and their use in the analysis of global economic history over the long term. This article asks whether national income estimates have a historical and geographical specificity that renders the ‘data’ increasingly unsuitable and misleading when assessed outside a specific time and place. Taking the concept of ‘reciprocal comparison’ as a starting point, it further questions whether national income estimates make sense in pre-and post-industrial societies, in decentralized societies, and in polities outside the temperate zone. One of the major challenges in global history is Eurocentrism. Resisting the temptation to compare the world according to the most conventional development measure might be a recommended step in overcoming this bias.

Even if the high-tech and ‘revolutionary’ electric telegraph has become a favourite topic for communication historians dealing with global history, it cannot alone epitomize the first modern age of globalization. The postal network, and parcel post in particular, was also a key agent of globalization. In 1880, several Universal Postal Union member states signed a convention for the exchange of parcel post, opening a new channel in the world of commerce. By the end of the nineteenth century, millions of packets poured into post offices and railway stations, crossed countries, and created all sorts of transnational connections, from family to business to humanitarian relations. Behind the ordinary, seemingly low-tech small boxes lay a sophisticated service that emerged from transnational dynamics, challenged both national and international commercial circuits, and produced more complex control of economic borders.

According to most reconstructions of development debates, poverty and social issues were not part of the development agenda until the late 1960s. In contrast, this article shows that development practitioners and institutions were already addressing poverty and social issues in the late 1940s and early 1950s. However, economic multilateral organizations soon marginalized those inclusive views and focused exclusively on economic growth. This article discusses those early policy options and why they were marginalized. It argues that this happened for ideological reasons, specifically because of the ideological anti-New Deal post-war backlash and the adhesion of Western countries and multilateral organizations to what Charles Maier defined as the politics of productivity. This ideological backlash explains the rise and early demise of Keynesian ideas in international organizations, and, conversely, their stronger influence in developing countries, where the direct influence of the US and Bretton Woods organizations was somewhat mitigated.

This article traces the history of the concept of poverty within the institutional framework of the World Bank, from its inception to its establishment of the dollar-a-day global poverty threshold. The Bank's evolving conceptualization of poverty and how it related to the development process affected the policies that were advanced to boost the productivity of underdeveloped countries. Internal and external influences and constraints conditioned the Bank's approach to poverty and its alleviation from the beginning, when poverty was conceived as a political issue beyond the scope of the Bank's mandate. Separating the political implications of poverty alleviation from the Bank's development agenda was tenuous, and by the 1970s a universal, absolute concept of poverty became the focal point of Bank operations. The eventual monetization of global poverty reflected the increasingly technical nature of the Bank's development work and its need for a practical yardstick by which to measure the success of its anti-poverty policies.

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) played a major role in the transformation of association football into a global game. Between 1912 and 1974, before the era of rapid economic sports globalization, FIFA officials attempted to extend the boundaries of the football empire by creating the World Cup and trying to convert new parts of the world to the people's game. It was not an easy task since they met with resistance, obstruction, and contestation. They had to revise their Eurocentric way of thinking and be willing to negotiate. Far from being a mere imperialist process, the path to world football consisted of a series of exacting exchanges and mutual misunderstandings, especially with the South American associations. It is not clear that FIFA officials always understood the demands of the developing football world but they were often able to negotiate and adapt their discourses towards non-European national associations and continental confederations. By doing so, they helped to create, if not an equal football world, at least an international world space.

This article revisits the origins of internationalism in the field of health and shows how the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century, much like the current coronavirus crisis, brought global differences such as social inequalities, political hierarchies, and scientific conflicts to the fore. Beyond drawing parallels between the cholera epidemics and the current crisis, the article argues for combining imperial and social histories in order to write richer and more grounded histories of internationalism. It explores this historiographical and methodological challenge by analysing the boardrooms of the international sanitary conferences, Middle Eastern quarantine stations catering for Mecca pilgrims, and ocean steamships aiming to move without delay during a worldwide health crisis.

The study proposes an approach to the history of literacy in the Islamic world that uses a flexible and gradated definition of literacy. It goes on to propose some factors that lay behind the acquisition of certain forms of literacy and of the way that they were put into practical use. Among these factors were the religious factor, which had consequences on a broad region; commercial conditions, which were an impetus to make use of the written word; and the development of a legal culture.

Fashion was arguably a social phenomenon that emerged in Europe during early modern times, and this paper seeks to determine whether it was unknown in the refined civilizations of the East. The conclusion is that fashion was not a European invention. The analysis of the evolution of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese clothing systems underlines how these societies underwent phases in which, thanks to propitious economic conditions, the accentuated propensity towards consumption stimulated behaviour that challenged the traditional hierarchies of appearance, usually regulated by canons of a prescriptive nature. Fashion was not, therefore, a European invention, but it only fully developed as a social institution in Europe, while in India, China, and Japan it only evolved partially, without being able to obtain full social recognition.

This article investigates the powerful normative role of plantation-oriented agricultural practices in what was arguably the premier indigenous crop revolution of the colonial era: the West African cocoa boom. It traces the links between the extraordinary growth of cocoa production in the region – above all in the Gold Coast – and the longer experience of cocoa estates in other parts of the world, in particular the Caribbean, which served as a key reference point for the expanding global cocoa frontier in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In spite of the manifest competitive success of African farmers’ extensive agricultural practices during this period, most outside observers retained a strong partiality towards intensive production techniques under centralized European management. This article emphasizes the role played by the transcontinental exchange of ideas in sustaining the cultural authority of such cultivation techniques long after their commercial viability came into question.

How could labour be mobilized for the production of agricultural commodities in colonial lands? This question was discussed by European powers on many occasions between 1895 and 1930, within the International Colonial Institute (ICI). Three key phases and issues can be identified in these debates relating to Africa: the recruitment of Indian indentured labour (1895–1905); the recruitment and management of indigenous peoples as paid labourers (1905–1918); and the mobilization of indigenous smallholder agriculture (1918–1930). During the whole period under study, the use of constraint, and its legitimacy, appear as a permanent feature of ICI debates. Associated first with European plantations, the use of force became a means to mobilize native farmers in accordance with the conceptions of colonial administrations regarding good agricultural practices. In addition, the ICI’s vision of colonial realities evolved from an out-of-date position during the first and second phases to a forward-looking one during the third phase, albeit one quite unrealistic in the scope of its ambition.

If the concept of global civil society offers a way of thinking about the interwar period that does justice to the new linkages that were developing at the time, it also offers an opportunity to reflect on ‘the varied, contingent meanings of the global – and the limits to such globalist visions’, as this special issue makes clear. This article explores these themes in an African context in relation to two government periodicals, Mambo Leo and the Gazette du Cameroun, both of which first appeared in the early 1920s, and a settler-edited newspaper aimed at an African audience, L’Éveil des Camerouniens, published 1934–35. It argues that such official and semi-official publications serve to illustrate both the unexpected ways in which this period witnessed the birth of new forms of global connection and the limits of such connection.