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’.

This essay situates the Harlem Renaissance in a world-historical context by building on the global perspective offered by the architect of that renaissance, Alain Locke. It demonstrates that contemporaries like Locke saw the Harlem Renaissance to be a local episode in a broader phenomenon of racial and national renaissance that included post-war developments in Ireland and Mexico. The core argument is that American progressives found in these renaissances three distinct models for defining the proper relationship between race and nation: in the Irish case, a racially homogeneous nation-state premised on a repudiation of the colonizer and his culture; in the Mexican case, a syncretic nation-state based on the cultural and biological fusion of the colonizer and colonized; and in the Harlem case, a pluralist nationstate that held in balance otherwise relatively autonomous races.

Historians have expressed increasing concern about the segmentation of their discipline’s scholarly expertise into discrete compartments, whether defined by place, period, theme, or sub-discipline. A deluge of monographs is obscuring the landscapes of historical knowledge, even in relatively neglected parts of the globe. The Journal of Global History has the ambition of helping to overcome this fragmentation in historiography, while avoiding pitfalls that have emerged in earlier attempts to achieve this goal.

The quantitative growth of coffee production and consumption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced qualitative transformations along every step of the coffee commodity chain. The economic integration of the global coffee market in this period triggered major east-west biological exchanges between the world's coffee regions. The global epidemic of coffee leaf rust, caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix, illustrates the ecological and economic impact of such exchanges. Between 1865 and 1985, the epidemic spread from its original focus in Ceylon to engulf all of the world's coffee zones. Its economic impact varied considerably: in some places it destroyed more than 90% of the coffee crop, while in others it was little more than a minor irritant. The epidemic's origins, its diffusion, and its impacts were not accidental, but reflected specific conjunctures of local and global biological and historical processes.

This essay has been written to serve as a prolegomenon for a new journal in Global History. It opens with a brief depiction of the two major approaches to the field (through connexions and comparisons) and moves on to survey first European and then other historiographical traditions in writing ‘centric’ histories up to the times of the Imperial Meridian 1783–1825, when Europe’s geopolitical power over all other parts of the world became hegemonic. Thereafter, and for the past two centuries, all historiographical traditions converged either to celebrate or react to the rise of the ‘West’. The case for the restoration of Global History rests upon its potential to construct negotiable meta-narratives, based upon serious scholarship that will become cosmopolitan in outlook and meet the needs of our globalizing world.

The aim of this paper is to compare international migrations in two different periods of history, both of them marked by a rapid increase in the trend: the first period runs from 1870 to 1914, and the second from 1965 to 2000. Historical and current migration system maps are compared, together with their different combinations of push and pull factors, and of coerced and free migrations. The various repercussions that international migrations have on demographic structure and on the economic systems of the sending and receiving countries are counterbalanced by a number of significant analogies that occur at the microlevel (individual and community) of the mechanisms governing the decision to migrate, and of migrants’ identities and behavioural patterns. The final section shows that migrants in both periods retain ties to both their old and new countries (as indicated by remittances and return migration), despite the major obstacles that stand in the way of the free circulation of international migrants today. This suggests that an analysis of migration systems, emphasizing ongoing interactions of various sorts between sending and receiving areas, is superior to either a model based on the presumption that assimilation will occur over time or one which presumes an irreducible ‘multiculturalism’.

In 1907–1908, the British labour leader, James Keir Hardie, made a round-the-world tour, which included visits to India, Australasia and southern Africa. The support for Indian nationalism which he expressed precipitated a major international political controversy, in the course of which Hardie came under severe attack from the Right, both in Britain and in her colonies. In southern Africa, the issue, combined with Hardie’s earlier criticism of the repression of the 1906 Bambatha rising in Natal, sparked rioting against Hardie by British settlers during his visit. This article seeks to show how Hardie’s voyage illuminates the imperial politics of its moment. Hardie’s journey demonstrates how politics in the British colonies of his era took place not within local political boundaries, but in a single field which covered both metropolis and colonies. The article is a case study which helps to illustrate and develop an argument that the white working classes in the pre-First World War British Empire were not composed of nationally discrete entities, but were bound together into an imperial working class which developed a distinct common ideology, White Labourism, fusing elements of racism and xenophobia with worker militancy and anti-capitalism. The current paper refines this analysis of the politics of the imperial working class by situating it in relation to the rising force of Indian nationalism in the same period, and to the changes this development generated in the politics of the settler colonies and the imperial centre. In India, Hardie forged links with the dynamic new political mobilization that had followed on the crisis over the partition of Bengal. In doing so, he entered, as an ally, into the discursive struggle which Indian nationalists were waging for self-government. By taking a pro-Indian position he antagonized the British Right. Labourites in the white settlement colonies wanted to defend Hardie, as a representative figure of British labour, but were embarrassed by the fact that Hardie’s position on India went against the grain of White Labourist ideology. In southern Africa, local leaders of British labour did opt to defend Hardie. But they did so not only at the risk of alienating their members, but also at the price of being forced into direct confrontations with anti-Hardie groupings.

In 1571 the founding of Manila made possible regular transpacific trade and thus forged the missing link in the global trade network. American interest in China and Japan soared to new heights. In the next two centuries this attraction fuelled other globalizing exchanges—parallel to the commercial ties—across the Pacific. Thousands crossed the ocean to create the America’s first Asian diaspora communities, and Mexico became Europe’s clearinghouse for information about Asia. The most intense connection was missionary, for churchmen in America worked with one eye relentlessly turned to East Asia and dreamed of the possibility of evangelization, and of its alluring dangers. These exchanges, and the attendant expanding mental horizons, evince enough similarities with modern globalization to warrant incorporation into that concept.

During the early nineteenth century, European nations began to contemplate cooperation in sanitary matters, starting a diplomatic process that culminated in the International Sanitary Conferences and the first laws on the control of infectious disease. This article examines the origins of these conferences and highlights certain features that have been neglected in existing scholarship. It argues that while commercial pressures were the main stimuli to the reform of quarantine, these were insufficient in themselves to explain why most European nations came to see greater cooperation as desirable. It places special emphasis on the diplomatic context and shows that the peace of 1815 produced a climate in which many European nations envisaged a more systematic and liberal sanitary regime.

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.

This article examines the similarities and divergences in the evolution of knowledge concerning river control in China and Europe, between about 1400 and 1850. The analysis concentrates on four densely populated and relatively prosperous regions, which were faced with comparable problems caused by unruly rivers: the coastal plains of the Yellow River, the basin of the middle Yangzi, the coastal area of Northern Italy, and the Rhine delta in the Netherlands. During the period under discussion, Northern Italy was the first region to witness a ‘cognitive leap’ in knowledge of river hydraulics. The author analyses why this particular transformation in the body of knowledge took place in Northern Italy, rather than in any of the regions in China. He also examines why the Netherlands, in contrast to regions in China, offered a receptive environment to this new approach in river hydraulics from c. 1770. He suggests that differences in the development of knowledge can be explained primarily in terms of underlying socio-political structures.

This article examines the economic organization of the trans-Saharan slave trade between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries on those routes that moved slaves from Sudanic Africa via entrepôts in the Sahel and Sahara to the Maghrib. The commercial framework of this trade was integrated into ethnic, cultural, and religious systems, yet for its efficient operation could not rely solely on these social institutions. Temporary cooperation of itinerant slave traders is considered and then projected onto the broader patterns of commercial organization. It is shown that similar pressures resulted in comparable outcomes: partnerships were formed to take advantage of economies of scale in commercial services and to limit cooperation problems. This demonstrates that the organization of the trans-Saharan slave trade was economically rational and can be analysed in terms of cooperative and non-cooperative strategies. Moreover, it is argued that the trade was not restrained by social institutions but versatile in adapting its economic institutions to specific market imperfections. It is concluded that recent economic models are more useful in explaining the economic behaviour of slave traders than conventional neoclassical economics.

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.

The comparative history of the Americas has been used to identify factors determining longterm economic growth. One approach, new institutional economics (NIE), claims that the colonial origins of respective institutional structures explain North American success and Spanish American failure. Another argues that differences in resources encountered by Europeans fostered divergent levels of equality impacting on institutions and growth. This paper challenges the theoretical premises and historical evidence of both views offering a historicized, statistically and economically validated explanation for the institutional and economic development of Spanish America. First, it revises the structure of the fiscal system challenging the characterization of Spain as an absolutist ruler. Secondly, an analysis of fiscal data at regional levels assesses the performance of the Imperial state. It shows the existence of massive revenue redistribution within the colonies, disputing the notion of a predatory extractive empire based on endowments as the source of original inequality. Finally, we discuss how a contingent event, the imprisonment of the Spanish king in 1808, contributed to the disintegration of a 300-year-old empire. The crisis of legitimacy in the empire turned fiscal interdependence between regions into beggar-thy-neighbour strategies and internecine conflict. We conclude by arguing for a reversal of the causality from weak institutions causing economic failure to fiscal (and economic) failure leading to political instability.

The article uses comparative Indian material from British India and later, the Pakistani Punjab to ask new questions of the standard accounts of Egypt’s post-1890 cotton boom. It also argues for the particular relevance of the rich Punjabi green revolution data to the Egyptian case, and more generally, for the rewards to be obtained from an academic dialog between selected aspects of late nineteenth and of late twentieth century globalization. Topics analyzed include the impact of the various agricultural revolutions on social and regional inequalities, the issue of sustainability, the role of experts and the impact on health of long-term environmental degradation.

The present article adopts a comparative perspective contrasting the agricultural civilization of Europe with the agricultural civilizations of other regions to understand the reasons for Europe’s transition to modern energy carriers. In Europe—especially in the West and North—specific ecological conditions determined a stronger need for energy than in other coeval agrarian civilizations. The rapid growth of the European population from the second half of the seventeenth century onward, on the one hand, and worsening climatic conditions, on the other, determined an energy crisis and a lowering of living standards, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth. After 1820, a shift to different, cheaper energy carriers laid the foundation for a new age of growth.

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’?

Tropical Africa has not fared well either in the contemporary world order or in the globalization literature that has accompanied it. Under such labels as ‘black hole’ ‘blank space’ and ‘the hopeless continent’, this part of the world seems hardly worthy of attention in the study of the connections and energies that define the twenty-first century.

We live in an age of increasingly abundant statistical information. The advent of more large data sets obtained from household surveys, as well as from population censuses, labour force surveys, economic censuses and so on, has facilitated reasonably accurate estimates of income and expenditures for households in many parts of the world. These estimates can in turn be used to estimate a number of distributional indicators, as well as estimates of relative and absolute poverty. In addition better census coverage has permitted estimates of infant and child mortality rates, life expectancies, literacy rates and indicators of educational attainment. Such data have in turn been used to estimate composite indicators of wellbeing such as the Human Development Index, not just for entire countries but often for regions within countries as well.