Mountains and highlands are not what scholars have conventionally imagined them to be: environments that limit and constrain their inhabitants in deterministic ways. Rather, mountains and highlands provide unique opportunities for people to engage in creative transformation of their societies. Highland communities are connected to a wider world, and they radically remake and experiment with their landscapes, settlements, and societies. Mountains serve as birthplaces and testing grounds for statecraft, urbanism, irrigation, and monumental landscape engineering. Here we explore the diversity of highland communities by analysing the latest archaeological and historical discoveries from three regions across Southeast Asia: the Kulen mountains (Cambodia), the volcanoes of central Java (Indonesia), and the Ifugao highlands (the Philippines). We find that, far from being a negative image of the ‘civilized’ lowlands, mountains were creative, diverse, dynamic, and well-connected places. This compels us to change the way we conceive of today’s highland communities and their relationships to modern nation-states.

The transfer of sericulture into Byzantium is a critical episode in the global dissemination of silk production technology. However, it is now widely accepted that the explanatory model portraying the transfer as a one-off event is at odds with the historical facts. This article seeks to reassess the transfer of this technology through the lens of appropriation, interpreted as a process. Based on a detailed analysis of the limited evidence available, it attempts to reconstruct the process from transregional and diachronic perspectives, embracing, on the one hand, the transmission of sericulture from China to Byzantium and, on the other, its development in Byzantium over time. This reconstruction offers an explanation for unresolved historical problems. It also constitutes a template for modelling the global transfer of technology in the premodern world, potentially of great value for an in-depth understanding of the transfer.

This article reflects on the dynamics that underlay the circulation of military technology during the early modern phase of globalization. The debate on the development and transfer of gunpowder weaponry has been dominated by a grid of analysis which implicitly puts value on sovereign production and direct state control over the resources used for war. Focusing on the transfer of naval artillery between Europe and Asia, the article argues for the need to expand the scope of analysis of the contractor state, so far centred on Europe, and study the potential world-scale of the market for naval resources and services in the period between 1500 and 1750. It also highlights the need to replace the reading of technological transfers centred on nation-states by a more fluid and transnational vision which articulates the demand stemming from both states and non-state actors and the rise of regional clusters specialized in providing naval technology with competitive levels of prices, in an age of increasingly interconnected maritime economies. Therefore, the article aims to show why naval artillery, despite being a protagonist of old imperialistic narratives, is still a relevant object of study for the agenda of global history.

This study is an intervention in early modern global diplomacy. Integrating an indigenous community of the Philippines into foreign relations and maritime connections, the article reevaluates the complex story of the Pampangans of Luzon, allegedly long-term allies of the Spanish conquerors, and the narrative of indigenous collaboration. Foregrounding the Pampangans’ involvement in military campaigns, as well as territorial and maritime expansion in the early decades of the 1600s, the article introduces three scenarios of Pampangan power bargaining with global consequences. The focus on Pampangan foreign relations opens new analytical perspectives on the role of language and knowledge for internal coloniality on the one hand, foreign and diplomatic negotiations on the other. Methodologically, it proposes a deep (re-)reading of the polyvocal archive of the colonial-indigenous encounter and integrates insights with the largely separated scholarship of diplomatic and indigenous history as a new avenue in global history.

This essay analyzes a Japanese court’s criminal conviction of a Peruvian shipmaster for abusing Chinese contract workers and the subsequent release of all Chinese passengers except a lone girl. Using the case as a lens onto gender dynamics within the coolie trade to Latin America, I argue that overlapping patriarchal practices made Chinese contract labor overwhelming male and prioritized men in debates over freedom. The María Luz trials upheld women’s domestic sexual bondage while condemning men’s enslavement.

The Auckland Islands, a subantarctic archipelago 465 kilometres south of New Zealand, were the setting for one of the stranger episodes in the global history of colonial expansion. From 1849–52, these remote, inhospitable islands were governed and settled by a chartered company. The project was driven by lofty ambitions to simultaneously create a flourishing settler colony and unlock vast new whaling grounds in the Southern Ocean; the reality was a commercial disaster plagued by bitter internal disputes and a speedy abandonment. Drawing on the methods of global microhistory, I argue that the colonization of the Auckland Islands was a pivotal moment in the integration of the Southern Ocean world into global processes of governance, mobility, and trade. This anomalous case contributes to recent scholarship on ‘company-states’ and the central role of such hybrid polities in processes of cross-regional interaction and globalization.

This article analyses communal projects in the first half of the twentieth century. It investigates communes in various places of the non-Western world, including the Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, the Nōson Seinen Sha’s anarchist commune in imperial Japan, and the Rastafarian Pinnacle Commune on Jamaica. At first glance these communes seem completely unrelated as they emerged in distinct cultural and historical contexts. However, bringing them into conversation demonstrates that these communes equally showcase a high degree of integration into global structural transformations of the early twentieth century. Mobility and the body are applied as analytical perspectives to underscore, firstly, the similarity and connectivity of these otherwise very different and distinctive communal projects. Secondly, mobility and the body also illustrate the importance of doing utopia, acknowledging historical experience and practice beyond established analysis of utopia that are too often concerned with mapping utopia’s discursive formation. And finally, this article complements transnational comparative and global connected history by accentuating similarity and the interplay of integration and marginality as analytical tools to narrate a decentred global history.

For a century following the opening of the Suez Canal, the scale and scope of global capital and information flows was predicated on a chain of imperial outposts like Aden, where ships could replenish their fuel supplies while shorefront godowns and telegraph stations gathered commodities and information to be received, processed, and relayed; by the 1950s, over 5,000 vessels called on the harbour annually, making Aden the second busiest port in the world after New York. This article explores the role of Indian-Zoroastrian (Parsi) capital in shaping the material and institutional development of the port of Aden. Parsi firms mediated between international shipping and the hostile environment of the desert colony, supplying provisions and providing brokerage and agency, or dubash services, literally meaning ‘translator’ in the vernacular. More than a particularly successful comprador community, however, Aden Parsis developed an elaborate transoceanic trade predicated on self-financed, capital-intensive infrastructure projects. Tracing the outsourcing of imperial statecraft to dubashes in Aden allows us to provincialize the making of first-wave globalization, as it was predominantly Parsi capitalists rather than European businessmen who were the driving forces of Aden’s development.

Why was the “Chinese Question” of immigration control and exclusion in the United States imagined as an appealing precedent for dealing with the “Jewish Question” of emancipation and citizenship in fin-de-siècle Romania, Hungary, and Austria? The present article examines a vast corpus of parliamentary debates, press, and pamphlets, in order to demonstrate how thinking in terms of “questions” enabled historical actors to place themselves within a “global moment” by highlighting structural similarities that would justify the analogy. By rhetorically turning to an America that was placed at the forefront of “liberal” progress, yet now began to explicitly place limits to its inclusiveness, politicians in Central and Eastern Europe sought to present their own exclusionary policies as timely and acceptable, rather than anachronistic affronts to the spirit of the age. Drawing upon this global precedent was therefore hoped to ward off criticism: if “civilized” America could draw the line, be it as a matter of principle or pragmatism, then antisemitism could be justified with reference to Sinophobia.

Popular support for the League of Nations spread around the world in the interwar period but it did not spread evenly. Instead, it was concentrated in white-majority countries: both in Europe and beyond in the form of settler societies around the world. This article explores the relationship between the League movement and white supremacy in one such community: Australia. Citizens in that country combined their allegiance to the League with their beliefs in white supremacy: about the need to restrict immigration through the ‘White Australia’ policy; about the rationale of them ruling over non-white peoples in the territories they held under League ‘mandate’; and about their treatment of Indigenous Australians. In short, they were ‘white internationalists’. Australia’s white internationalists were relatively few. But they reveal a global history of popular white internationalism. Interwar Australians might have been some of the most blatant white internationalists but they were far from the only ones.

This article examines an international endeavour to manage the 1938 Yellow River dyke breach and to bring mechanized farming to the flooded area, as part of the UNRRA China Programme (1944–1947). It reveals why a Chinese Nationalist vision of international aid entailed technical assistance, and how this call for development was received by UNRRA’s multi-national, albeit predominantly American, cadre of experts at a transitional period from war to reconstruction. This article argues that technical assistance is integral to understanding the history of UNRRA and its role in negotiating different visions for the post-war world, especially a developmental one. Development did not emerge as a united concept; instead, the ambiguity created a space for experts with different backgrounds to fit themselves into the post-war programme. Focusing on those recipients and fieldworkers that shaped the UNRRA aid on the ground, it offers a non-European perspective for understanding how development thoughts gained momentum through a post-war programme, leading the way to global proliferation of development projects.

This article assesses the initial contacts between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the World Bank during the early 1980s, following China’s admission to the institution in 1980. In the late 1970s, the PRC launched a new phase of economic reforms aimed at re-modelling its economic outlook. Collaboration with multilateral economic institutions such as the World Bank was a key part of its “opening up” strategy. By drawing on newly available records from World Bank archives, the article reveals how the Bank’s approach to China's economic development was tailored to meet Beijing’s specific economic conditions and needs, and welcomed gradualism as the best path for China's reform strategy. At times of free market triumphalism and heavy structural adjustment towards developing countries, the China case, the article stresses, shows a World Bank behaving not quite in line with what many would expect. Therefore, the article provides not only an account of a bilateral relationship but offers a new perspective and reflection of the history of the international political economy of the early 1980s.

As the post-colonial Global South was weaving together the Third World Movement in the 1950s, it was also struggling to arrive at a common definition of colonialism. Since the movement was primarily premised on anti-colonial sentiments, redefining the term ‘colonialism’ could change its parameters. This article examines debates between three Asian leaders – Jawaharlal Nehru, Sukarno, and Sir John Kotelawala – who proposed three different meanings of colonialism. These definitions were informed by distinct ways that the colonial experience was remembered in their respective countries. Each definition was meant to redirect the energies of the Third World Movement towards a different vision of a post-colonial global order. The three leaders debated this question in major Afro-Asian conferences of the mid-twentieth century. Their disagreements represented a foundational fissure in the movement. Relying on primary sources from multiple countries, this article recovers a political dialogue within the Global South unmediated by the West, which is often ignored by the scholarship.

This article examines the evolution of the Sino-Malaysian rubber trade between 1950 and 1980 from a global perspective. In the 1950s, this trade was one part of a triangular rubber trade extending from Southeast Asia through China to the European socialist countries who were the real buyers of much of the Malayan rubber exported to China. While China stopped its rubber re-exports to the Soviet Union in 1961, the Sino-Malaysian rubber trade continued to evolve under the shadow of global events, especially Malaysia’s economic tensions with industrialized Western countries and China’s military confrontations with its enemies. The engagement of so many global players in this trade brought more pressures, challenges, and opportunities for Malaysia and China as they bargained with each other, consequently contributing to the sharp fluctuation of trade during this period.

This article argues that technicians’ working lives and workplaces are crucial to conceptualizing the inequalities that characterized the ‘wireless world’ of radio broadcasting during a period of demands for a new information order. Taking Uganda’s national broadcaster and the files it has preserved as a focus, I follow calls to move beyond the exceptionalism of 1970s Uganda to locate it in global histories of technology and work. Like many broadcasters in decolonizing countries, Radio Uganda struggled to secure space on the electromagnetic spectrum, challenge neo-colonial information monopolies, balance its internationalist ambitions with its reliance on foreign equipment and training agreements, and fill vacancies. In the same years, its technicians responded to hundreds of reception reports sent by amateur distant listeners – most from Western Europe. The labour of responding to these reports and their cosmopolitan pronouncements represents a hitherto unexplored window onto the exchanges that underscored the globalization of radio technology and its limits in the 1970s.

This article looks at India’s complaint at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in 1979 about the ‘virginity test’ performed on a migrant Indian woman at Heathrow. It examines the use of arguments about race and racial discrimination by India to compel Britain to discuss immigration on a bilateral basis. The article argues that the pivot to a race-based argument was deliberately patriarchal and India’s main concern in these negotiations was the impending British Nationality Act of 1981, which would prevent men from moving to Britain in search of an overseas wife. Using the virginity testing scandal, the article re-examines the changing role of discourses about race in postcolonial institutions of global governance.