Organizing trans-Saharan camel caravans was a complicated business requiring skills, stamina, resources, and human capital. This article focuses on the contractual world of caravanning in the nineteenth and early twentieth century based on interviews with retired caravanners, original trade records, and legal sources mined in private family archives. It surveys the different contractual agreements that featured commonly in this ‘paper economy’, which was based on a reliance on literacy and Islamic law. It is argued that contracts were key instruments for accounting and accountability even between traders with kinship ties and other sources of solidarity, and that they were often the only channel for women to engage in long-distance trade via proxy.

The trajectories of German nationalism in the late nineteenth century were deeply affected by the process of globalization. While the literature on the subject has largely remained within the confines of a national history paradigm, this article uses the example of mobility and migration to show to what extent German nationalism was transformed under the auspices of global integration. Among the effects of cross-border circulation were the emergence of diasporic nationalism, the racialization of the nation, the implementation of new border regimes, and the hegemony of ideological templates that linked nationalist discourse to global geopolitics. This article is intended as a contribution to a ‘spatial turn’ in the historiography of nationalism, in arguing that not only the ‘nation form’ but also the way that the nation was defined, understood, and practised – the particular contents of nationalism – owed more to the global context in which it was constituted than is usually recognized.

This article offers the novel interpretation that Pacific integration began in the ocean's western sphere and later moved into its insular middle and eastern sphere. It demonstrates this by tracing three ocean-wide trends: the emergence of common trading goals and systems, the expansive role of reciprocal demand, and the shared experiences of Pacific peoples, who, both as slaves and in tribute-based and free labour systems, produced prominent trade goods. It presents additional new perspectives by identifying a ‘silver-substitute century’ in maritime commerce from 1750 to 1850, and by establishing the 1850s and 1860s as a period of transition from the influence of China-centred to Western-centred demand in Pacific trade. It thus reveals the limits of established interpretations that emphasize Western state and imperial initiatives and the role of Western technological and manufacturing dominance in the process of integration.

Decolonization and the expansion of international organizations in the twentieth century are crucial developments in modern global history, yet scholars have seldom closely studied their impact on one another. While decolonization is often presented as the ‘success story’ of international organizations, these bodies have also been condemned as instruments of neocolonialism. This introduction and special issue moves beyond this binary and investigates the multifaceted roles that international organizations have played in decolonizing countries and how the dissolution of European empires has in turn affected the development of international organizations. International organizations were neither straightforward tools of empire or neocolonialism, nor natural instruments for ‘Third World’ liberation. Rather, the contributions collected here underline a history of decolonization that defies any teleological framing and emphasizes diverse trajectories of global interaction facilitated through international organizations. The introduction offers an overview of recent literature on the topic and discusses promising avenues for further research.

Between 1572 and 1575, a man named Diego litigated for his freedom from slavery in several Spanish courts. Identified as an Indio (Indian), he claimed to have been born in the Spanish territory of Liampo (now Ningbo), China, and later carried on a Spanish ship to Mexico, and eventually to Seville. His master, the cleric Juan de Morales, asserted that he had bought Diego in Portuguese Goa and taken him to Mozambique and to Lisbon before finally bringing him to Seville. At issue was whether Diego was a Portuguese or Spanish imperial subject, since Spanish law strictly prohibited the enslavement of Indios in Spanish territories, while Portuguese laws did not. As witnesses (several of them former slaves from disparate locations including Panama, Lima, Goa, Mozambique, and China) tried to determine Diego’s imperial status, not only did they reveal their comparative fantasies about Portuguese or Spanish landscapes, but they also embedded their own diasporic tales of liminality and loss into Diego’s. Here is the ultimate example of the Indio experience in Castile: an attempt to affix imperial boundaries to a construct that was, in itself, a metaphor for how the rapidly changing globe was imagined, experienced, and compartmentalized. The use of the increasingly amorphous cultural label ‘Indio’ in Castile was symptomatic of tensions between imperial regimes’ desire to constitute and reify themselves as bounded entities and the global mobilities of some of the most marginalized subjects who informed those processes.

There has been little in the way of fresh thinking on the Eurasian spice trade since the 1980s, partly due to the crisis in economic history, although recent work has both dealt with the agency of non-European actors and started to take Chinese demand into the equation. Starting with problems specific to the Portuguese re-export trade, this article highlights the role of consumers, using research undertaken on the structures of demand to present a theory of cultural demystification. The Portuguese, it is argued, by opening direct trading links to the sources of supply, broke what amounted to a spell that had sustained the trade from the time of Alexander the Great. In concrete terms, the performance of individual spices is disaggregated, and the appearance of rival pepper products brought under scrutiny. While African peppers failed to consolidate the consumer interest they had generated over the fifteenth century, capsicum peppers rapidly spread to southern Europe, where they were domesticated and hence became invisible to international trade. The success of the capsicum pepper was replicated in West Africa, India, and China.

This article traces the complex and shifting organization of soy's production and consumption from Northeast China to Europe and the United States. It focuses on a set of national and transnational actors with differing interests in the global and national spread of soybeans. The combination of these actors in certain spatiotemporal contexts enabled a fundamental change in soy from an Asian to an American cash crop. At the beginning of the twentieth century, soy rapidly became Northeast China's cash crop, owing to steadily increasing Western demand. However, the versatility of soy – and soy oil in particular – offered a highly successful response to the agricultural and industrial challenges that the United States faced during the Great Depression and the Second World War. By the end of the war, American farmers in the Midwest cultivated more soybeans than their Chinese counterparts.

This article explains the rise of palm oil as a global commodity during the twentieth century as the result of cooperation and competition between two different clusters in former colonial territories. The connection between these two locations was mediated by Western companies, colonial officials, scientists, and businessmen. Eventually, the Southeast Asian cluster, organized on estate lines inherited from rubber, outcompeted the old one in Africa, mostly based on the farming of semi-wild trees. The article investigates the activities of scientists and businessmen exchanging information, knowledge, and practice between Africa and Asia for almost a century. It shows that cooperation among communities of practice helped to advance palm oil knowledge, but also created increased rivalry between the two locations. Thanks to the mobility of experts, and to knowledge exchange in colonial and early postcolonial times, multinationals were able to replicate clusters across locations with similar climate, taking advantage of a business environment more conducive to foreign investment.

Although the Philippines is hardly known for sending out migrants prior to the twentieth century, and even among seafarers only the galleon age is remembered, this article provides evidence of transcontinental maritime movements from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century. These migrants were known in the English-speaking world as Manilamen. Most were seafarers, but some became involved in pearl-shell fishing, while others engaged in mercenary activities. They settled in key ports around the world, their numbers in any one location fluctuating in response to changing circumstances. Despite relocation to distant places, the difficulties of communication, and the impetus toward naturalization, Manilamen seem to have retained some form of identification with the Philippines as homeland, no matter how inchoately imagined.

This article examines why Western programmes of social security became a topic of interest for Chinese Nationalist (Guomindang) policy-makers during the early 1940s. It traces a generation of sociologists and civil servants, often trained abroad, who used wartime exigencies to make the case for New Deal-style reforms. While offering a route to professional advancement, social insurance was primarily intended to serve the needs of the government. Embedded in, and dependent on, the Anglo-American alliance, Nationalist party planners embraced the internationalist social agenda of the Atlantic Charter – advanced by institutions such as the International Labour Organization and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration – to solidify their nation's status as an aspiring great power, and to legitimize to foreign sponsors their hold on the state. In this regard, fascination with the likes of the Beveridge Report and the Social Security Act was a performance, intended to show how China was in keeping with the spirit of the age.

This essay discusses the main lines of current research on the social and economic history of the early modern Iberian worlds. It then goes on, in light of recent debates, to make the case for the value of a purposeful dialogue between global history and imperial history. The issues of primary concern here are the extent to which lateral, inter-regional relations in the Iberian worlds dominated vertical relations connecting particular areas to Madrid or Lisbon; how power and agency on local scales may be integrated into accounts of flows and interactions on larger scales; the ways in which the history of the Iberian empires through a global prism breaks with pre-existing nationalistic narratives; and whether or not the decentralized component of these empires was unique to them. Finally, examples are detailed of how Iberian imperial history can provide a fruitful basis for a polycentric history of globalization. The examples given take heart from critical engagement with the Great Divergence paradigm, the new analytical potentialities of global ecological history, the constructive and destructive impact of globalization upon empires, and the importance of studying the history of empires comparatively.

Drawing on a far-flung, multilingual archive of contracts and financial instruments from around the western Indian Ocean, this article highlights how cross-cultural trade depended on the ability of groups to translate between one system and another, rendering one commercial lexicon legible to another so as to produce commensurability and allow for conversions to take place. Law constituted a foundational building block of this process: Indian Ocean merchants drew on a deep well of legal concepts and forms as they attempted to make their worlds legible to one another, mobilizing the grammars of law to bridge commercial systems. We situate these dynamics within the context of the Indian Ocean ‘bazaar’, establishing it as a site for thinking about the place of cross-cultural trade in world history, and the histories of global capitalism more broadly. We suggest that Euro-American capitalism’s very agents had to adapt their commerce to the idioms, logics, and contracts of their business partners around the Indian Ocean – a vernacular world of the bazaar that was itself already in motion.

This article examines the news business in Africa during decolonization. While UNESCO stimulated enormous discussion about creating independent ‘third world’ alternatives for news exchange, African countries such as Kenya and Tanzania sought to secure informational sovereignty by placing international news agencies within their control. Reuters and other international news agencies, in turn, adapted to decolonization by reinventing themselves as companies working to assist new nation-states. In the subsequent contest over news distribution, the Cold War, and inter-agency competition, Africa became a battleground for disputes between Reuters’ capitalist vision of news as a commercial product and UNESCO's political conception of news. Ironically, decolonization enabled Reuters to gain greater control over information supply across Africa, because African leaders viewed the capitalist model of news as better suited to their diplomatic goals and political views.

This article examines professional boxing as a compelling and dynamic example of globalization from below between 1890 and 1914. It explores the sport's fluctuating legal and organizational status and maps the movement of professional boxers – and the networks that facilitated this movement – across the anglophone world. Boxing was particularly suited to cross-national mobility because it developed alongside, and built upon, the global circuits of the late nineteenth-century entertainment industry. Yet the main sites of the anglophone boxing world were not connected in any structured or standardized fashion. Channels of communication and routes of traffic were continually shifting, with no one city, region or nation emerging as a consistent hub of activity. This article explores boxing's fluid, multiple and loosely structured ‘networks’, and shows how the sport remained largely resistant to international regulation and standardization in this period.

This article will argue that the memory of the great ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic of 1918–19 played a significant role in the preparedness and response of Australia and New Zealand to the COVID-19 pandemic, and may help to explain their success compared with Europe and North America. An obvious alternative explanation for the success of Asian states such as China, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan would be their experience of the SARS outbreak in 2002 and the H7N9 influenza outbreak of 2013. However, this explanation does not apply to Australia or New Zealand. All of these states had pandemic plans, initially developed with encouragement from the World Health Organization after the SARS outbreak, but only Australia and New Zealand appear to have directly incorporated ‘lessons’ from 1918–19 into their pandemic plans.

In his seminal book The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz has argued that access to inputs from the vast acreages available in the Americas was crucial for the Industrial Revolution in Britain. But could no other regions of the world have provided the inputs in demand? Recent research claims that this could have been the case. This article takes that research one step further by studying Britain’s trade with an old and important peripheral trading partner, the Baltic, contrasting this to the British trade with America. The article shows that production for export was not necessarily stagnating in the Baltic, as Pomeranz has claimed. Qualitative aspects of the factor endowment of land did not, however, enable the production of specific raw materials, such as cotton, to meet the increasing demand. Thus, the decreasing role of the Baltic ought to a large extent to be attributed to the patterns of British industrialization, and the demand it created for specific raw materials, rather than internal, institutional constraints in the Baltic region.

Global coffee markets entered into a deep cyclical downturn from the mid 1950s. As producers, notably Brazil and Colombia, continued to increase their output, intense struggles arose among global competitors for larger slices of a contracting market. The prospect of an economic catastrophe, following the release of Brazil's surplus stocks, preoccupied Kenya's colonial government, which was dependent on tax revenues derived from coffee sales, and was less able to support the settler-dominated industry in the face of the increased costs incurred by the Mau Mau Emergency after 1952. This left European settlers exposed, with many barely able to recover their costs of production. What began as a counter-insurgency strategy, by allowing an elite of African farmers to grow Arabica coffee (a privilege formerly reserved to settlers) was enlarged and accelerated in response to unrelenting global market pressures. These compelled the colonial government to beckon low-cost African farmers into coffee production, in a bid to save its tax base and ensure the survival of the coffee sector. Even though the Coffee Marketing Board confiscated much of their income, African farmers proved well able to rally family labour and achieve surpluses. Rationalization of production and the re-organization of the commodity chain to maintain high quality at lower cost were decisive in both reconfiguring the economic and social relationships that underpinned Kenya's independence in 1963 and securing the country's place on the world market. The aim here is to explain the crisis, and its grip on Kenya's economy during the transition to independence and beyond.

This article explores the tensions between well-intentioned humanitarianism and coercive colonialism during smallpox outbreaks in eighteenth-century Guatemala, when the state extended inoculation programmes to its predominant, culturally diverse Maya communities. Evidence from anti-epidemic campaigns shows public debates broadly comparable to the current COVID-19 crisis: debates about the measurably higher mortality rates for indigenous people and other marginalized groups; debates about the extent of the state’s responsibility for the health of its peoples; and debates on whether or not coercion and violence should be used to ensure compliance with quarantines and public health campaigns. While inoculations provided medical assistance and material help to Maya communities, and resulted in demonstrably lower mortality rates from smallpox, at the same time they functioned as avenues for the expansion of colonial power to intervene in the daily lives of people in those communities, characterized by colonial actors as necessary for their own good, and for the broader public good.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru were among the countries participating in the most important world’s fairs in Europe and North America. These mass gatherings focused on national self-images as well as technological development and commodities, but the Latin American exhibition organizers also understood them to be transnational spaces that contributed to the mobility of persons, objects, and knowledge. In this context, the scientific display of pre-Columbian ‘antiquities’ was regarded as being as important as the participation in archaeological and anthropological congresses. By understanding the world’s fairs as ‘spaces of global knowledge’, this article highlights the agency of Latin American scientists, intellectuals, and collectors in the transnational endeavour to create a ‘Latin American antiquity’ at the fairgrounds. Although most fair attendees sought to study and display the pre-Columbian past in an objective manner, the older dream of (re-)constructing the splendour of America’s ancient civilizations never completely vanished.

This article places empires as interlocking parts of a broader global regime, a term invoked as an alternative to a world system. By focusing on connective processes and political contingencies, it presents a strategy that avoids rendering empires as radial hubs of a European-centred arrangement. Two features lie at the core of the approach: the way in which empires competed with each other, and the way in which they imitated, borrowed, and learned from each other. Instead of looking at the cyclical rise or fall of great powers, the accent here is on the tensions and intervisibilities between the parts that make up a whole. The regime was, therefore, inherently unstable and integrative at the same time. The article looks in particular at European empires embedded in the broader, unstable, yet increasingly integrated global context that shaped them. The period at stake covers the fifteenth century to the nineteenth and concludes by pointing at some longer-term legacies. It suggests an alternative political economy to the familiar models of ‘European world system’.