During the seventeenth century, the East India Company (EIC) was a minor power in South Asia, repeatedly defeated in battle. However, this changed rapidly, beginning in the 1750s, as the EIC started projecting power from its coastal enclaves into the interior. One after other, the indigenous powers were defeated and destroyed. This article argues that the EIC’s military success was not merely the result of importing the military institutions that emerged in western Europe: there was no military revolution in early modern South Asia. Rather, the EIC blended imported British military institutions and techniques with South Asia’s indigenous military traditions, creating a hybrid military establishment in which South Asian manpower, animals, and economic resources were crucial. The article focuses on the construction of the EIC’s military establishment by concentrating on three spheres: military technology, manpower management, and logistics.

Modern Spain has remained largely absent from the debates and narratives of global history. In sharp contrast to the early modern period, the case of Spain in the nineteenth century has been overwhelmingly studied from regional and national perspectives. Fortunately, valuable efforts to integrate this country into wider frames of analysis have emerged in the last decade. Building on these writings, this article will argue that connections and entanglements represent two valuable perspectives, which allow the insertion of the Spanish experience into contemporary narratives of global history. The article has two aims. First, it seeks to ‘decentre’ modern Spain, by moving beyond its territorial borders within the Iberian Peninsula, and by examining its global dimensions, through connections with territories, colonies, and nations on several continents. Second, it aims to reveal valuable insights for current debates on global history, which arise from a focus on a country that is usually considered to have been both marginal and peripheral.

In 1769, the East India Company decided to transform the Bengali silk industry, and introduced Piedmontese reeling technologies and spatially concentrated working practices into the area. Although Bengali raw silk reeled with the new methods never reached the standards of Piedmontese silks, the Company was able to produce huge quantities of low-quality raw silks, and to gain market share in London from the 1770s to the 1830s. By investigating the reasons behind this partial success, this article shows that some features of Piedmontese technologies had a crucial impact on peasants who specialized in the mulberry cultivation and the rearing of silkworms. The Company had to cope with resistance from some rural economic agents in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Bengal, but other elements in local society were able to profit from the Company's interest in producing raw silk.

The 1926 International Sanitary Convention, which laid out requirements for port sanitation and quarantine in order to limit the spread of diseases internationally, changed the way that the world approached international epidemic control. The 1926 convention is notable for two reasons: the increased reliance on epidemic intelligence rather than quarantine, and the splitting of the world into a series of formalized regional networks under the auspices of a global agreement. This article explores the creation and the limits of this system as a window into shifting understandings of disease and international relations in the interwar era, arguing that sanitary spheres of influences were shaped by, but not entirely dependent on, political spheres of influence.

Drawing on primary materials in Persian, Urdu, and English, this article compares Persian and Indian travel accounts to assess the similarities and differences of contemporaneous encounters with Japan. By linking Persian and Urdu writings from either side of 1900 to the differential impact of industrial communications (vernacular printing, steam travel) on Persia and India, the article reconstructs the global connections and inter-Asian networks that suddenly rendered Japan an important touchstone for intellectuals in the Middle East no less than South Asia. By presenting a triangulated and comparative model of inter-Asian exchange, the article contributes to building robust material foundations for positioning Asia, and its Muslims in particular, within global intellectual history, and concludes by contrasting the sources of information generation that preceded ideological formation.

The Algerian war of independence (1954-62) was crucial to the extension of the modern international refugee regime beyond Europe. It is also the exemplar of how that regime became a site for the establishment of postcolonial sovereignty, globally. Tunisia and Morocco, newly independent, requested UNHCR’s help in assisting hundreds of thousands of Algerian refugees: interacting with the refugee regime allowed them to establish their credentials as independent states while asserting sovereignty over their own territories. In Algeria, the 1951 Refugee Convention applied before the war started, and UNHCR worked there to support ‘old’ refugees. During the war, the Front de Libération Nationale asserted itself as a state-in-waiting by engaging with UNHCR outside Algeria as the agency coordinated a vast relief operation. After the war, as refugees returned to a landscape riven by mass displacement, interacting with the refugee regime helped the new state assert sovereignty over Algeria’s territory, and Algerian bodies.

The ideas on development issues of two ‘pioneers in development’, Raúl Prebisch and Gunnar Myrdal, are tracked in their formation and evolution. The central role of these two ‘defiant bureaucrats’ in the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) and the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) are used to reflect on the interaction between intellectuals and international institutions in different historical contexts. Both men represented a liberal–universal strand in development thinking. Their divergent conclusions and assessments of the role of international institutions are compared, and are related to their different origins in core and periphery. It is argued that such roots influenced two different approaches to development problems within the UN system.

This article offers a transnational account of the historical origins and development of the concept of ‘global psyche’ and transcultural psychiatry. It argues that the concept of universal, global psyche emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War and during decolonization, when West European psychiatry strove to leave behind its colonial legacies and lay the foundation for a more inclusive conversation between Western and non-Western mental health communities. In the second half of the twentieth century, leading ‘psy’ professionals across the globe set about identifying and defining the universal psychological mechanisms supposedly shared among all cultures (and ‘civilizations’). The article explores this far-reaching psychiatric, social and cultural search for a new definition of ‘common humanity’, relating it to the social and political history of decolonization, and to the post-war reconstruction and search for stable peace. It provides a transnational account of a series of interlinked developments and trends around the world in order to arrive at a global history of the decolonization of mental health science.

Publishing a newspaper was a popular undertaking for passengers aboard intercontinental vessels during the nineteenth century. Although in almost complete isolation for weeks or even months, many travellers saw the need to issue a regular periodical. This article sheds light on the functions that these publications had for the ships’ on-board communities. On the one hand, passengers used them to inculcate a sentiment of togetherness, no matter how ephemeral their community might initially appear. On the other, the periodicals also served to separate and create boundaries between different groups of individuals aboard. Focusing on these unique historical sources allows us to study the building and dissolving of a community feeling in transit in this era of globalizing intercontinental travel. This article shows that ship newspapers were simultaneously a space for social exchange and a means of establishing social boundaries at sea in an age of increasing global shipboard travel.

Recognizing that serious pandemics call forth explanations which go to the heart of beliefs about why natural disasters occur, this article examines three pandemics over the last 200 years (cholera from 1817, Spanish influenza in 1918–19, and COVID-19) to establish whether such explanations have changed significantly over time and, if so, why. What it finds is that this period saw a watershed in which the dominance of traditional religious explanations declined in many parts of the world in the face of the ascent of explanations based on biomedical science. Tracking this momentous change across several faiths and regions globally makes it possible to put into telling historical perspective the stances taken by faith-based communities in response to the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Inspired by C. A. Bayly’s notion of global uniformities, this article investigates the different ways in which elitist non-Western music reformers, often with state support, canonized and institutionalized modern national music traditions during the age of liberalism and empire. As these non-Western music reformers reinterpreted liberal and earlier Enlightenment ideas, they envisaged their own musics hierarchically in comparison with Western music. In the context of comparative musicological thinking, they became particularly preoccupied with the systematization of scales, equal temperament tuning, and the origins of their own music. In the process, they often incorporated claims about authenticity and spirituality in music to give strength to burgeoning national, if not anti-imperial, identities. However, beneath the appearance of formal similarity and mutual translatability of non-Western national musics, significant sonic and cultural differences remained. As a contribution to global history scholarship, the article principally attempts to establish these global parallels and comparisons.

In the 1870s, the American prison reformer E. C. Wines attempted to bring together representatives from every country and colony in the world to discuss the administration and reform of the prison, under the auspices of the International Prison Congress. This article tackles the challenge by exploring how the international congress operated as both a social scientific technology and a diplomatic forum that emerged from this short-lived world of amateur social science and diplomacy. It argues that the exigencies of the international congress as a social scientific space forced it to take on diplomatic and political functions that both imprinted a logic of comparability onto the burgeoning international diplomatic system and also caused the eventual exclusion of non-European polities from the congresses. It engages with recent scholarship in history of science specifically to understand the international congress as a technology that mediated intellectual exchange and scientific communication. By examining the challenges posed by the inclusion of non-Western polities in such communication, it attempts to reveal the multiple global histories of the social sciences in the late nineteenth century.

New research on the early modern colonial state in Asia has emphasized the agency of actors and their networks in a process of state formation, while the rise of global history has similarly highlighted the importance of global connections in forming sites of empire. This article seeks to contribute to this growing literature. It does so by revealing that the families of English East India Company servants, following their counterparts in other European East India companies in Asia, underwent a global transition in which they established Asian-wide networks of kinship, transcending the local and regional spaces in which they had previously operated. Through their increasing ability to operate across the social, cultural, economic, and political borders of Asia, Company kinship networks facilitated the formation of a politically amorphous colonial state. Furthermore, while previous scholarship has confined colonial state formation to the later eighteenth century, this article challenges the historiography by relocating this process to the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

This article provides a history of the First World Agricultural Census of 1930, an ambitious international attempt to evaluate world agricultural resources through the compilation of global statistics on crops, livestock, and agricultural production. Based on primary archival material, it explores how the census emerged from the connections between American and international institutions at a time when food security and the need to address problems of trade and competition appeared as central economic concerns of interstate relations. The article focuses on the role played by the American agricultural expert Leon Estabrook (1869–1937) and a related network of scientists and economists in the preparation and implementation of the statistical survey. By examining how Estabrook’s vision of economic development and scientific planning was shaped by his national background and redefined by his transnational engagement, the article sheds light on the global dominance and limitations of American scientific knowledge and agricultural practices in the interwar years. It uncovers the political manoeuvrings and negotiations that were necessary to move forward with the project, and assesses the survey’s outcome against the backdrop of the global economic downturn of the 1930s.

The increased regulation of mobility that accompanied its late nineteenth-century expansion and acceleration is widely recognized. Regulatory practices reached out to distant shores and on board ships, heightening uncertainties and reshaping meanings of voyage and transit, especially for non-white passengers and crews. Travel and mobility are common themes in historical and other literatures. But less is known about experiences of uncertain or thwarted arrivals, involuntary departures, and indefinite transit resulting from practices governing steam-age mobility. People in transit illuminate the conditional openings and closures in such tropes as mobility, transit, and destination. Few spaces embodied and actualized ‘transit’ better than ships, and this article focuses on the role of ships as vessels of confinement. In equal parts about passengers and crews, it explores experiences of nominally free persons uncertainly afloat in a world marked otherwise by assured or accelerated oceanic mobility in three contexts that illustrate physical, political, and cultural constraints on maritime mobility in the age of steam. They are the 1914 voyage of the Komagata-maru, British merchant vessels employing Indian crews, and wartime subjection and resistance of Chinese crews on British and Dutch vessels.

The question of ‘nodes’ in the Armenian commercial network, it is argued here, cannot be separated from a larger process, which helped places such as Madras to rise as alternatives to New Julfa, from as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century. The network of Armenian commerce did not have a single strong centre with many peripheries, but a chain of multiple nodes functioning as crucial linking points. This paper focuses on one particular trade route, from Madras to Manila, in the eighteenth century. The Philippines attracted Spanish American silver, which was then pumped into various regional economies of Asia – China and India in particular – in the shape of investment. A Spanish ban on European shipping at Manila made Armenians (and Indians) indispensable partners for European trade to Manila. This gave Armenian trade to Manila a strong European flavour. Armenians helped to camouflage this trade, and enriched themselves from it at the same time, operating often independently of New Julfa.

However an active network once frustrated always has a tendency to compensate for its losses. Driven out of one region, it may press its capital and the advantages it offers upon another. This seems at any rate to have been the rule whenever a really vigorous and accumulative form of capitalism was concerned.1

Sewing machines, one of the first mechanical consumer goods to be mass produced and sold worldwide, provide an important case study for the understanding of global history in terms of the global diffusion of goods. However, as the case of colonial India demonstrates, it is what happens to such goods on their arrival in the recipient society – their emergent social history and growing indigeneity – that then demands analytical consideration. By tracing the changing nature of India’s sewing culture and sewing-machine use, linking it to occupational shifts, racial identities, and gender roles, to changing marketing techniques and advertising strategies, this article shows how closely the relative success of the sewing machine was bound up with local artisanal practices, commercial agency, and the transformative forces present in Indian society. It further indicates how Indian production of sewing machines by the 1950s built on several decades of acculturation and local experience of their sale and use.

Action sports such as beach volleyball and snowboarding have recently become popular commodities at the Olympics. While some observers view these new sports as global phenomena with transnational origins, they were incubated in California and are linked to the promotion of American visions of affluence. The encroachment of these sports onto global stages at the Olympics signals the continuing historical power of Californization, a particular brand of Americanization. The efforts to Californize the world through Olympic sports is considerably older than the debut of action sports, dating to the 1920s and 1930s when a coalition of US government agents, sports promoters, and corporate entrepreneurs began to articulate a strategy to mask Americanization campaigns in the world's leading sporting event under the veneer of California style. In the process they ‘dis’-invented historical traditions, in particular Olympic sports, in order to amplify their prospects in global markets.