The early modern western Indian Ocean constituted a dynamic space of human interaction. While scholarship has mostly concentrated on trade and commerce, recent studies have shifted the focus to social and cultural mobilities. This article argues for the emergence of a transoceanic Arabic historiography during the sixteenth century, which reflected on the cultural integration of regions from Egypt, the Hijaz, and Yemen in the Red Sea region, to Gujarat, the Deccan, and Malabar in the subcontinent. Historians from the Persian cosmopolis further north observed a strong cultural connection between Arabophone communities of the western Indian Ocean region. Manuscript collections in India show that Arabic historical texts from the Red Sea region had a readership in the subcontinent. Most importantly, mobile scholars began to compose Arabic histories while receiving patronage at the western Indian courts. Scholarly mobilities fostered cultural exchanges, which increasingly built on a shared history, written, read, and circulated in Arabic during the sixteenth century

The new history of capitalism (NHC) places a great deal of emphasis on slavery as a crucial world institution. Slavery, it is alleged, arose out of, and underpinned, capitalist development. This article starts by showing the intellectual and scholarly foundations of some of the broad conclusions of the NHC. It proceeds by arguing that capitalist transformation must rely on a global framework of analysis. The article considers three critiques in relation to the NHC. First, the NHC overemphasizes the importance of coercion to economic growth in the eighteenth century. We argue that what has been called ‘war capitalism’ might be better served by an analysis in which the political economy of European states and empires, rather than coercion, is a key factor in the transformation of capitalism at a global scale. Second, in linking slavery to industrialization, the NHC proposes a misleading chronology. Cotton produced in large quantities in the United States came too late to cause an Industrial Revolution which, we argue, developed gradually from the latter half of the seventeenth century and which was well established by the 1790s, when cotton started to arrive from the American South. During early industrialization, sugar, not cotton, was the main plantation crop in the Americas. Third, the NHC is overly concentrated on production and especially on slave plantation economies. It underplays the ‘power of consumption’, where consumers came to purchase increasing amounts of plantation goods, including sugar, rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, and coffee. To see slavery’s role in fostering the preconditions of industrialization and the Great Divergence, we must tell a story about slavery’s place in supporting the expansion of consumption, as well as a story about production

In the study of trade-embedded environmental factors (land, water, energy, or material flows), three conflicting interpretations prevail concerning what happened before 1950. The ‘great specialization’ narrative argues that trade served to lighten pressure on the environment by redistributing environmental services from where they were abundant to where they were scarce. The ‘great divergence’ sees an exploitative transfer from poor countries to rich and powerful ones or an environmental load displacement from rich to poor. The ‘great acceleration’ dismisses flows as insignificant either way. We review long-term national studies and find an almost exclusive focus on developed countries, mostly European and especially the UK, where more systematic studies tend to support ‘specialization’ and/or ‘acceleration’. By contrast, more qualitative studies on individual exports from developing countries often support ‘divergence’, but, since imports are excluded by design, this can never be demonstrated. We propose widening the geographical scope of long-term national studies beyond Europe and extending existing studies with bilateral trade, and suggest that ‘developing country’ trade be quantified according to existing methods of environmental accounting.

While the role of coal has been the subject of long-running debate in the historiography of the Industrial Revolution, its part in the economic development of the global periphery has been comparatively neglected. The technological context of the ‘First Globalization’ (c.1870–1914) made pastoral production in the periphery increasingly dependent on modern energy, as new methods of production and transportation bridged the distance between grasslands in the south of the world and kitchens in the north. By comparing choices of meat preservation techniques in Uruguay and New Zealand – two small settler economies that prospered on the back of pastoral exports – this article highlights the usefulness of an energy perspective on agriculture-based transitions to modern economic growth. Different conditions of access to coal shaped how New Zealanders and Uruguayans exploited their livestock herds when terms of trade favoured them the most, with important consequences for the persisting income gap between them.

This article analyses the transatlantic financial crises of 1873 from the vantage point of the three countries that were most affected by it, Austria, Germany, and the United States, focusing on the experience of economic globalization and disintegration for actors on both sides of the Atlantic. It compares the perception of financial commentators and financiers of the panics in 1873, when the experience of integration was asymmetrical, and more pronounced in Germany and Austria than in the United States. It further argues that this asymmetrical experience of contagion shaped the monetary debates of the 1870s in all three countries. Focusing on the interrelationship and coexistence of experiences of integration and isolation, the article maintains that, despite the panics’ near-synchronicity, financial globalization remained difficult to see.

The emergence of a field of global energy policy is usually traced back to the events around the 1973–74 oil embargo. This article provides a prehistory to this by tracing the genealogy of the ‘global energy economy’. This genealogy is reconstructed through the lens of the World Power Conference (WPC, today the World Energy Council, WEC), a non-governmental international organization founded by a British electro-technical engineer in 1924. In a comparison with the engineering of ‘natural forces’ in the nineteenth-century steam economy, I argue that electricity, and particularly large electrical systems, not only changed the meaning of power and institutionalized a regular documentation of the ‘power economy’, but enabled and concentrated ownership of the ‘forces of nature’ as a productive factor. This more comprehensive view of the role of electricity in the economy gave rise to an energo-materialist economics among the electro-technical engineers, technicians, and planners whom the WPC assembled. The WPC imagined itself as the centre of calculation of this ‘global energy economy’, initiating international standardization and complementing the statistics of international organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. As the integration of all ‘energies’ in one statistical model required conversion factors across very different technical processes, it took the urgency of the oil crisis for the WEC to compile a global energy balance, thus statistically ‘representing’ the state of the ‘global energy economy’.