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.

Modern economic globalization would be impossible without our ability to move billions of tonnes of raw materials and finished goods among the continents and to fly at speeds approaching the speed of sound. These realities were made possible by the interaction of economic and technical factors. Much has been written about their organizational and political underpinnings (ranging from the role of multinational corporations to the history of free trade agreements), but much less on the history of the two prime movers that made these realities possible. Neither steam engines, nor gasoline-fuelled engines could have accomplished comparable feats. Diesel engines made ocean shipping the cheapest mode of long-distance transport and without gas turbines there would be no fast, inexpensive, mass-scale intercontinental travel. This paper examines the history, advances, benefits and costs of the two prime movers.

The United Nations Technical Assistance Administration (TAA) was the world organization’s main body for development advice throughout the 1950s. In technical assistance, the UN found a global mission at a time when its peace and security functions seemed ineffective. Technical assistance experts preached the need for less developed countries to plan and modernize. This process has been studied with regard to American modernization theory, but the important role of the UN as an autonomous diplomatic actor has been less visible. The UN was a relatively acceptable source of technical assistance for many governments. Among them was Indonesia, which welcomed UN help for its State Planning Bureau. TAA aid to the Planning Bureau advanced the interests of both organizations but both failed to institutionalize themselves enough to survive the decade. Both, however, left important legacies: the TAA for UN development thinking, and the Planning Bureau for the Indonesian developmentalist state.

This article re-examines our understanding of modern sport. Today, various physical cultures across the world are practised under the name of sport. Almost all of these sports originated in the West and expanded to the rest of the world. However, the history of judo confounds the diffusionist model. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a Japanese educationalist amalgamated different martial arts and established judo not as a sport but as ‘a way of life’. Today it is practised globally as an Olympic sport. Focusing on the changes in its rules during this period, this article demonstrates that the globalization of judo was accompanied by a constant evolution of its character. The overall ‘sportification’ of judo took place not as a diffusion but as a convergence – a point that is pertinent to the understanding of the global sportification of physical cultures, and also the standardization of cultures in modern times.

Diamonds have a long global history in which India plays a pivotal though little-known role. Indeed, it was in India that diamonds were first mined, finished, and worn. Diamonds and their finishing techniques reached Europe in the fifteenth century. Subsequently, part of the industry moved from India to Europe, where manufacturing shifted from one city to another, before returning to India in the twentieth century. These shifts, I argue, are determined by changes in one or more segments of the global commodity chain and they reveal the global interconnections between mining, trading, polishing, and consuming. Furthermore, these shifting centres are themselves a sign of the globalized character of diamond production, exchange, and consumption.

This article re-examines a contested chapter in the international and environmental history of the 1970s. Even though largely neglected by historical research and in the public memory, the Club of Rome – widely remembered for its 1972 report The limits to growth – was not only born within the OECD, but was also in its early period strongly influenced by debates within this think tank of the industrialized countries. Using previously overlooked sources, this article analyses this highly unlikely OECD–Club of Rome nexus. It not only offers a privileged view into the social history of international policy-making and the related personal entanglements and ideological transfers at a key moment of post-war history. It also demonstrates that the social, intellectual, and economic turmoil of the late 1960s prompted a rethinking of the economic growth paradigm, even within those technocratic institutions that had aspired to guide the post-war industrial growth regime. The article argues that these links are not only vital for our understanding of the relationship between acquisitive growth capitalism and environmentalism, but also enable a more profound understanding of the role of transnational networks in global history and the appreciation of the place of the 1970s in world history.

Global history has debated the emergence of a divergence in economic growth between China and the West during the eighteenth century. The Macartney Embassy, 1792–94, the first British embassy to China, occurring as it did at the end of the eighteenth century, was an event which revealed changing perceptions of China and the Chinese by different British interest groups from government, trade, industry and enlightened opinion. Many histories of the embassy recount failures of diplomacy and cultural misconception, or divergent ideas of science. This article examines attitudes of British industry to the embassy through the part played in its preparations by the Birmingham industrialist, Matthew Boulton, and revealed in correspondence in the Matthew Boulton Papers. The article uncovers debate among different interest groups over the objects and skilled personnel to be taken on the embassy. Were the objects purveyors of trade or tribute, or of ‘useful knowledge’ and ‘industrial enlightenment’?

This article narrates the development of a set of ideas and provocative imagery about population growth and movement that has shaped the way people think about world politics. It represented humanity in terms of populations that could and should be controlled to prevent degeneration and preserve civilization. During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this discursive tradition supported a series of political projects that aimed to either exclude those deemed able to subsist on less and reproduce more or regulate reproduction worldwide. Conceiving of the world in terms of populations – rather than nation-states – led people to think of new ways in which it might be divided, unsettling diplomatic alignments and alliances. But it also contributed to critiques of state sovereignty, since population problems were said to affect everyone and require a united response. This intellectual history helps illuminate some of the local and parochial reasons why people began to ‘think globally’.

At a ‘conjuncture’ in pre-modern global history, labelled by previous generations of historians as the ‘Scientific Revolution’, the societies and states of western Europe established and promoted a regime of interconnected institutions for the accumulation of useful and reliable knowledge. This placed their economies on trajectories that led to divergent prospects for long-term technological change and material progress. Although the accumulation of such knowledge takes place over millennia of time, and in contexts that are global, critical interludes or conjunctures in a ‘dialogue of civilizations’ have remained geographically localized, and indigenous in nature. Determining the locations, origins, and forms of this particular conjuncture is often dismissed as an exercise in Eurocentric history. Modern scholarship has also preferred to emphasize the roles played by craftsmen in its progress and diffusion – ignoring metaphysical and religious foundations of knowledge about the natural world. My survey aims to restore traditional perceptions that the West passed through a transformation in its hegemonic beliefs about prospects for the comprehension and manipulation of that world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It will suggest that the Scientific Revolution's remote antecedents might be traced back to Europe's particular transition from polytheism to monotheism. Thirdly, it summarizes literature that analyses how centuries of tension between Christian theology and natural philosophy led, during the Renaissance, to a displacement of scholastic and beatified Aristotelian conceptions and obstacles to understandings of the natural world. Finally, the survey will elaborate on how new knowledge flowing into Europe from voyages overseas, and medieval advances in technology, together with scepticism arising from religious warfare, stimulated a widespread search for more useful and reliable forms of knowledge throughout the Catholic and Protestant West.

Until the nineteenth century the warhorse played a central role in the political organization of the great empires that bordered on the pastoral heartlands of Central Eurasia. Actually, the survival of the often (semi-)nomadic rulers of these frontier-empires hinged on the continued production, trade and use of Central Eurasian warhorses. This forestalled the full sedentarization of these rulers and conditioned the emergence of a post-nomadic political culture and organization in which Central Eurasian institutions like ordo, nökör and yurt continued to provide a forceful paradigm to mobilize, organize and enumerate cavalry armies. But as the specific ecological circumstances created different conditions for the breeding and trade of warhorses, they also gave rise to different interpretations of the nomadic paradigm. This is demonstrated in the case of the Mughal rulers in India and the Manchu-Qing rulers in China, who both shared a common Central Eurasian heritage and ruled the richest sedentary economies of their time.

Well before the green revolution in the 1960s, hybrid maize technology that had originally been developed in the USA spread across the world, starting before the Second World War. This article uses a framework that analyses the type of transfer (materials, knowledge, or capacity), the roles of diverse actors, and farmer demand and its market context, to trace the diffusion of hybrid technology to Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Africa up to 1970. The article also highlights the importance of access to diverse germplasm from the Americas provided by indigenous farmers. A handful of US public institutions promoted the spread of hybrid technology, with US private seed companies sometimes playing a secondary role. However, most cases of successful transfer were led by national scientists embedded in local institutions, who were able to link to local seed systems and farmers. By the mid 1970s, the aggregate impacts of these efforts were of the same magnitude as for the well-known and much publicized green revolution wheat varieties. Nonetheless, adoption of hybrid maize across and within countries was very patchy, relating to differences in scientific capacity, type of farmer, agro-ecology, and complementary investments in seed systems and extension. Consequently, impacts were often highly inequitable.

This essay examines the role of ‘trust’ and cooperation in early modern long-distance trade. While most literature on the subject posits trust as a given attribute of long-distance merchant communities and not as a factor in need of historical explanation or analysis, this essay seeks to provide a historical explanation for the creation and role of trust in such communities. It focuses on the history of Armenian merchants from New Julfa, Isfahan, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The central theoretical model this essay relies upon to explain trust among Julfan Armenian merchants derives from ‘social capital’ theory as elaborated in sociology and economic sociology, as well as theory from the New Institutional Economics associated with the influential work of Avner Greif. Unlike the latter body of work, however, this essay argues that Julfan trust must be understood not solely as an outcome of informal institutions such as reputation-regulating mechanisms discussed by Greif in his work on Maghribi Jews of the medieval period, but also as a result of the simultaneous combination of both informal and semi-formal legal institutions. In the Julfan context, the essay thus focuses on a merchant arbitrage institution known as the Assembly of Merchants, which enabled Julfan merchants to generate and maintain trust, trustworthiness and uniform norms necessary for collective action and cooperation.

It is the contention of this article that historians of the nineteenth century need to think about notions of empire, nation, and race in the context of the social production of space. More specifically, it posits that the moving space of the steamship functioned as a particularly important site in which travellers reworked ideas about themselves and their worlds. Supporting this contention the article pays close attention to the journeys of J. T. Wilson, a young Scottish medical student who between 1884 and 1887 made three voyages to China and one to Australia. For it was in the space of the ship, literally moving along the routes of global trade, that Wilson forged a particular kind of British identity that collapsed the spaces of empire, elided differences among Britons and extended the boundaries of the British nation.

The study of transregional connections is central to the field of global history. This article reflects on the idea of connections from a conceptual viewpoint and treats them as mediators. This will be exemplified by studying the spatial and temporal dimensions of transoceanic steamship passages. The lives of crew and passengers did not go on ‘stand-by’ during such a passage. The case of the flight and eventual capture of Hawley Harvey Crippen will serve as a case in point. Suspected of murder in London, Crippen tried to escape to North America by transatlantic steamer. The captain, however, recognized the fugitive and informed both authorities and media. The ship, whose movements across the Atlantic contributed to the establishment of global connections, thus became tightly entangled in a global media landscape, with newspapers and readers from all over the globe focusing their attention on the small shipboard community. Simultaneously, the steamer became a profoundly secluded place for its passengers, who were cut off from the media flurry surrounding them. The article shifts the principal perspective of the murder case from a terracentric notion of history to a more sea-based narrative. It offers a new historical interpretation of the events and at the same time reconsiders the analytical concept of connections in a broader historical context.

During the First World War, civil society groups across the North Atlantic put forward an array of plans for recasting international society. The most prominent ones sought to build on the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 by developing international legal codes and, in a drastic innovation, obligating and militarily enforcing the judicial settlement of disputes. Their ideal was a world governed by law, which they opposed to politics. This idea was championed by the largest groups in the United States and France in favour of international organizations, and they had likeminded counterparts in Britain. The Anglo-American architects of the League of Nations, however, defined their vision against legalism. Their declaratory design sought to ensure that artificial machinery never stifled the growth of common consciousness. Paradoxically, the bold new experiment in international organization was forged from an anti-formalistic ethos – one that slowed the momentum of international law and portended the rise of global governance.

The new history of capitalism (NHC) places a great deal of emphasis on slavery as a crucial world institution. Slavery, it is alleged, arose out of, and underpinned, capitalist development. This article starts by showing the intellectual and scholarly foundations of some of the broad conclusions of the NHC. It proceeds by arguing that capitalist transformation must rely on a global framework of analysis. The article considers three critiques in relation to the NHC. First, the NHC overemphasizes the importance of coercion to economic growth in the eighteenth century. We argue that what has been called ‘war capitalism’ might be better served by an analysis in which the political economy of European states and empires, rather than coercion, is a key factor in the transformation of capitalism at a global scale. Second, in linking slavery to industrialization, the NHC proposes a misleading chronology. Cotton produced in large quantities in the United States came too late to cause an Industrial Revolution which, we argue, developed gradually from the latter half of the seventeenth century and which was well established by the 1790s, when cotton started to arrive from the American South. During early industrialization, sugar, not cotton, was the main plantation crop in the Americas. Third, the NHC is overly concentrated on production and especially on slave plantation economies. It underplays the ‘power of consumption’, where consumers came to purchase increasing amounts of plantation goods, including sugar, rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, and coffee. To see slavery’s role in fostering the preconditions of industrialization and the Great Divergence, we must tell a story about slavery’s place in supporting the expansion of consumption, as well as a story about production