This article considers the bodily experience of being at sea in the age of sail. Using shipboard diaries written by eight passengers during the high period of free migration to the Australasian colonies, it argues that oceanic journeys disrupted and upended the land-based bodily practices being fashioned in nineteenth-century Britain. At sea, these mechanisms of bodily comportment were rendered fragile and unstable, leaving middle- and working-class bodies alike vulnerable and open to refashioning and reformation. In so doing, it points to the need for scholars to bring together land- and sea-based histories and to historicize and particularize oceanic spaces.

Immigration acts have long been analysed as instrumental to the working of the modern nation-state. A particular focus has been the racial exclusions and restrictions that were adopted by aspirationally white, new world nation-states: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. This article looks again at the long modern history of immigration restriction in order to connect the history of these settler-colonial race-based exclusions (much studied) with immigration restriction in postcolonial nation-states (little studied). It argues for the need to expand the scope of immigration restriction histories geographically, temporally and substantively: beyond the settler nation, beyond the Second World War, and beyond ‘race’. The article focuses on the Asia-Pacific region, bringing into a single analytical frame the early immigration laws of New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and Canada on the one hand and those of Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Fiji on the other.

This article explores the origins of divergent technological pathways in the early modern world, and the role that artisanal knowledge played in this process. It rejects older explanations based on societal differences in entrepreneurial propensities and incentives, and a more modern one based on factor cost. It argues instead for the importance of conditions that facilitated transactions between complementary skills. In India, the institutional setting within which artisan techniques were learned had made such transactions less likely than in eighteenth-century Europe. The cost of acquiring knowledge, therefore, was relatively high in India.

This article addresses the question of the geographical scope of the ‘age of revolutions’ (c.1750–1850) through the case of a peasant uprising in Mount Lebanon in 1821. This uprising had similarities with recent and contemporary revolutions and rebellions, which have led some to suggest the influence of the ideas of the French Revolution of 1789 or the Greek Revolution of 1821. This article argues that influence at the level of ideas was unimportant, but that the similarities can plausibly be traced to similar and connected contexts at the level of political economy, as the expansion and crisis of military-fiscal states provoked opposition ‘from below’ and renegotiations of sovereignty. This focus on political economy rather than genealogies of ideas can then help define an ‘age of revolutions’ extending beyond Europe and the north Atlantic into the Ottoman empire, Latin America, and other regions.

This essay examines the relationships existing between Dionysian traditions of wine drinking and drama that reached the easternmost part of the Hellenistic world, and the Buddhist culture and art that flourished in Gandhara (Eastern Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan) under the Kushan kings between the first and third centuries CE. By piecing together archaeological, artistic and literary evidence, it appears that along with viniculture and viticulture, Dionysian rituals, Greek theatre and vernacular drama also became rooted in these eastern lands. Continuous interactions with the Graeco-Roman world strengthened these important cultural elements. At the beginning of the Common Era Dionysian traditions and drama came to be employed by the Buddhists of Gandhara to propagate their own ideas. The creation of a body of artworks representing the life of the Buddha in narrative form along with the literary work of Ashvaghosha, may be an expression of the same dramatic format that developed locally along with a strong Dionysian ritual presence.

This article traces the personal and institutional networks that facilitated the transnational spread of Development Volunteering in the 1950s and 1960s. Examining Australia’s Volunteer Graduate Scheme, Britain’s Voluntary Service Overseas, and the United States Peace Corps, it destabilizes each nation’s claims to pioneering Development Volunteering, and interrogates the reasons for these claims. Once national frames are removed, broader patterns come into view. This article reveals that Development Volunteering held multiple meanings, as discourses of development, colonialism, and control existed alongside those of youthful idealism and national benevolence. It argues that, by involving ‘ordinary’ people in international development and by re-inscribing colonial-era divisions between the developed and developing worlds, Development Volunteering contributed to the broader process by which colonial discourses were translated into the postcolonial lexicon of development.

Adapting the dictum that ‘time is money’, Western merchants have long promoted and welcomed technologies to accelerate commerce. Thanks to revolutionary changes in communication in the nineteenth century, including the telegraph, information could for the first time travel much faster around the globe than goods. This asymmetric time–space compression created new problems for agents of global trade, as transactions could occur faster than the handling of the goods. Yet this problem also presented an opportunity to establish new forms of trading and ways of thinking about time. In the case of world markets for primary products such as grain or cotton, the new technique of futures trading at commodity exchanges became a tool to redress the time differential between the movement of goods and information. It pushed the commercial community to think in a ‘double time’ of a dematerialized present and a material future with physical goods, and centred global commodity markets on a few marketplaces. The article thus argues that historians need to examine economic understandings of the future alongside political, cultural, and social understandings.

As a phenomenon accompanying European expansion, piracy and privateering spread globally, beginning in the sixteenth century. These activities, and their handling within transnational relations, shed light on several issues of modern international law, then under formation. They reflect different basic problems that both challenged and structured central aspects of legal relations on an international level: the transformation of ocean spaces into areas of colliding legal strategies, the use of privateers (‘legalized’ pirates) as a tool for extraterritorial expansion, the involvement of non-state players in international legal relations, the fragmentation of maritime sovereignty, and the application of international law to criminalize political resistance as piracy. That said, the international management of piracy shows that international law had the potential to resist its abuse as a mere instrument of politics and special interests. By focusing on piracy and privateering in early modern times, this article suggests a tension within modern international law, between its instrumentalization by particular interests and its status as an independent normative authority to correct or regulate such interests.

This article questions a prevailing bipolarity of traditional Cold War history by examining commonalities and interactions between the Soviet Union and Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s. After outlining the common characteristics of both states around 1960, it analyses the cultural diplomacy of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union towards Brazil. Transforming its hitherto prevailing image as the cradle of world revolution and communist class struggle, the USSR now represented itself as a role model for the quick industrialization of the economy and education of the masses. Many Brazilian intellectuals and political reformers from President Kubitschek to President Goulart shared with the Soviets an interest in what is here called ‘socialist high modernity’. Contacts with the Soviet Union were connected to the putsch and the end of Brazilian democracy in 1964. However, the new military leaders also had their own interests in, and surprisingly good relations with, the stagnating Soviet Union. This was again based on a set of commonalities in the historical development of the two ostensibly idiosyncratic and distant states on either side of the Iron Curtain. Eschewing teleological interpretations of the period and exploring the ideational basis of actors in the conflict, this article – based on new documents from Moscow archives and recently declassified sources from the Brazilian Foreign Ministry – aims to link Cold War historiography to the debates on global history, which have lately neglected both Latin America and eastern Europe.

This paper explores the intimate connection between imperialism and a liberal global economy in the late nineteenth century and the inter-war period by distinguishing and disentangling the imperial and political dimensions of the pre-World War I gold standard, and interwar efforts to restore it. By doing so it attempts partial!y to redress the relative neglect of power in historical accounts of the international financial arrangements, and re-balance conventional liberal assumptions about the role of markets and incentives in the consolidation and spread of global institutions such as the gold standard. By re-embedding the intertwined financial histories of the imperial and Atlantic worlds into a global context, perspectives from the empire help develop more historically-situated analyses of global economic institutions and arrangements, and help clarify the many intersecting processes involving both power, in all its forms, and markets, that have historically shaped financial relations and institutions.

Many of the international technical agencies formed after 1945 addressed environmental topics within their specific fields of work. By the late 1960s, a growing awareness of pollution and an emerging environmental movement in Western countries led to a perceived need for more coordinated and institutionalized international cooperation on the environment. Before the landmark United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972, and the subsequent creation of the UN Environment Programme, several organizations competed for recognition as principal reference organizations for environmental matters. This article analyses the combination of cooperation and rivalry, involving in particular the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (ECE). Among other initiatives, the OECD became the first international organization to establish a permanent committee specifically dedicated to environmental issues and the ECE organized a Conference on Environmental Problems, held in Prague in 1971. Both called for a critical review of the dominant growth-centred economic model. Their analysis adds a neglected dimension to the origins of today’s international structure of environmental cooperation as well as to the long-term evolution of economic environmental thinking.

This case study focuses on two epidemic diseases in Sierra Leone. Ebola in 2014–15 drew international response, but was contained within the Upper West African region. COVID-19 reached Sierra Leone in April 2020 as part of a global pandemic. Local social knowledge has been an important factor in shaping responses to both diseases. In the case of Ebola, infection was concentrated in families, and responders needed a good knowledge of family interactional dynamics. COVID-19 is a more public disease. Responders have to assess risk factors in workplaces, markets, and places of worship. Comparing and contrasting the two cases also draws attention to different aspects of the historical context. Ebola response indexes Sierra Leone’s history as a humanitarian project associated with the abolition of the slave trade. The pandemic challenge of COVID-19 draws attention to Sierra Leone’s nodal position within a global diaspora rooted in Atlantic slavery and emancipation. Responders are forced to consider the ways in which the two infections articulate different aspects of calls for global social justice.

Atlantic history has become fashionable as a way of linking the histories of Europe and the Americas. However, much work in Atlantic history does little to challenge the national biases of traditional colonial and imperial history. This article argues that gender provides an important conceptual tool for a trans-imperial and comparative exploration, just as it provided important conceptual structures for all the peoples of the Atlantic world. An examination of the research on two gendered issues – work, and family and sexuality – demonstrates that while Europeans attempted to impose their ideas on the various societies that they encountered in Africa and the Americas, such attempts were rarely successful. Gender not only provides the basis for a trans-imperial analysis of the Atlantic world but also enables us to reorient our scholarly perspective in the Atlantic, highlighting the agency of non-European peoples and exposing the limits of European patriarchy.

Concerns about a sinking birth rate and possible ‘national degeneration’ led to the implementation of various measures in maternal and child welfare across Europe at the dawn of the twentieth century. Infant health was strongly connected with the idea of population as both a national and imperial resource. In the colonies of the imperial powers, similar issues started to be addressed later, mostly after the First World War, when colonial administrations, who until then had predominantly worried about the health of the white European colonizers, started to take an interest in the health of the indigenous population. This article investigates the transfer of maternal and infant health policies from Britain and Germany to their tropical African colonies and protectorates. It argues that colonial health policy developed in a complex interplay between imperial strategies and preconceptions as well as local reactions and demands, mostly reifying racial demarcation lines in colonial societies. It focuses on examples from German East Africa, which became the British Tanganyika mandate after the First World War, and from the British sub-Saharan colonies Kenya and Nigeria.

Comparative analyses of labour in Russia and the West often assume a dividing line between free and forced labour that is universally applicable. The first aim of this article is to show that, in Russia, the historical and institutional definition of serfdom poses a problem. I will therefore explore Russian legislation, and how it was applied, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Contrary to generally accepted arguments, serfdom as such was never clearly introduced institutionally in Russia. I will also discuss the presence of slaves in Russia, and the association between certain forms of servitude (especially for debt) and slavery. The presence of chattel slaves in the empire was related to territorial expansion, and to commercial relations with the Caucasus and the Ottoman Empire. Russian forms of bondage are compared to those in other situations, such as indentured service in the West, debt servitude in India, and Islamic slavery. My conclusion is that, not only in Russia but also around the globe, the prevailing forms of labour were not those familiar to us today, which were not introduced until the early twentieth century. Russia constituted an extreme case in a world in which severe constraints were imposed everywhere on labour and its movement, and the legal status of the wage earner and the peasant was lower than that of the master.

This article explores the symbolic appeal of Che Guevara within radical Left circles of the 1960s and 1970s. Che's importance as a shared political reference offers a unique window on aspirational symbols and the desire for meaningful transnational solidarity. By tracing Che's resonance in Latin America, western Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, the article brings into conversation the study of post-war radicalism, political iconography, and the cognitive dimensions of interconnectivity. As a means of understanding Che's appeal to both protest movements and guerrilla organizations, the article develops the notion of a ‘transnational imagination’, or mode of perception that frames local circumstances in a world historical trajectory and thereby affects collective aspirations and actions.

This article discusses the role that statistical classifications play in creating gendered boundaries in the world of work. The term ‘family worker’ first became a statistical category in various Western national statistics around 1900. After 1945, it was established as a category of the International Labour Organization (ILO) labour force concept, and since then it has been extended to the wider world by way of the UN System of National Accounts. By investigating the term ‘family worker’ from the perspective of internationally comparable statistical classification, this article offers an empirical insight into how and why particular concepts of work become ‘globalized’. We argue that the statistical term ‘economically active people’ was extended to unpaid family workers, whereas the distinction between family work and housework was increasingly based on scientific evidence. This reclassification of work is an indication of its growing comparability within an economic observation scheme. The ILO generated and authorized that global discourse, and, as such, attested to an increasingly global form of knowledge and communication about the status of gender and work.

This articles examines the links between Mexican anthropologists who – as part of a 1960s-era revolt, rejected prior anthropological approaches, which they labelled imperialist – and social science currents in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. They also took inspiration from anti-colonial movements. They spurned modernization theories that focused on the multiple economic, cultural, and psychological factors that might spur US-style capitalist economic growth and that sought to overcome the internal, national brakes on progress. Instead, they embraced dependency theories that linked the ‘internal’ (national) to the ‘external’ (global) and privileged revolutionary changes that implied a radically changed relation to the global capitalist world system. Yet dependency and modernization theories emerged within a shared intellectual space. Even as many intellectuals rejected US models of economic development, they accepted the primacy accorded to economics and technology and the notion that science was a global enterprise aimed at generating universal knowledge.

Food globalization has been in train for some ten millennia,1 driven by, and driving, war, trade, imperialism, colonialism, and culture. Within economic history, the dominant discipline in the study of globalization, only the first four are dealt with in any depth, invariably focusing on production and the supply side. By contrast, there have been relatively few studies of globalization in terms of culture, consumption, and the demand side, resulting in an incomplete understanding of the ways in which material life, cultural values, and political imperatives interact in a global context. These dynamics are examined in this anthropological account of culture and commerce in Britain and the empire in the interwar years, focusing on a dish that assumed tremendous symbolic and economic importance – the King's Christmas pudding