This article offers the first study of the Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale, the Journal of World History published under the auspices of UNESCO from 1953 to 1972 as a by-product of the ‘History of mankind’ project. Drawing on material in the UNESCO archives, it delves into what Lucien Febvre, the first editor of the Cahiers, called his ‘kitchen’, in order to understand world history as a practice. Data on author origin and article subject matter point to the journal’s mitigated success in overcoming Eurocentrism. The article ultimately contends that the Cahiers was at once a laboratory that experimented with new forms of relational history, and a forum where the very nature of world history was discussed by scholars from around the world (mainly from the West, but also from the East and the South). It suggests that today’s epistemological discussion on global history might benefit from the reflection offered by this now largely forgotten experiment.

Notions of the ‘global’ in historiography have a long tradition, and yet they appear to be a novelty. This article shows how older understandings of world history, imbued with Eurocentric presuppositions and universalist metaphysical reasoning, were questioned and revised in a long-term process. Recent criticism of Eurocentrism, linked with postcolonial scholarship, and the development of source-based approaches to study global connections and comparisons are usually recognized as innovations that took shape since the 1970s. In fact, they are rooted in profound conceptual revisions and academic institutionalization, which began much earlier. Based on the development of the field of world history in the United States, this article argues that concepts for a multipolar, interactive, and transcultural history developed from a dialectical and critical move away from older narratives. Historians and area specialists have wrestled for at least half a century with questions and problems that were rediscovered in the global turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, the example shows that the field developed in specific trajectories, reflecting local and national institutional academic circumstances, as well as specific socio-political contexts.

As Swami Vivekananda travelled West at the end of the nineteenth century to propagate what has become known as ‘Hindu Universalism’, the American Sarah Farmer travelled to Palestine to embrace the new Baha’i faith. This article will ask why both wished to create ‘universal’ religions, and why they found inspiration at Green Acre, Maine in 1894 in the wake of the Chicago World Parliament of Religions in 1893. Visitors to Green Acre discussed ‘divine femininity’, engaged with men such as Vivekananda and Abdu’l-Baha, and began to criticize colonial hierarchies in the search for spiritual reconciliation, all concerns which touched on questions of ‘Eastern’ religion. However, spirituality was not a mere epiphenomenon of larger historical developments. Rather, the ‘transformation’ discussed here drew on an essentialized notion of ‘Eastern wisdom’ that contrasted spirituality with materialism, tolerance with intolerance, transcendence with instrumentalism. Yet, such polarized characterizations misjudged the ways in which Baha’i and Hindu Universalism destabilized the very categories of East and West, while retaining a vision of ‘Eastern wisdom’ untouched by Western corruptions.

The assessment of relative living standards, dominated by food, has been central to analysis of the timing and causes of the Great Divergence. Comparative quantitative measures of real incomes and food availability have generated the conclusion that living standards on the western side of Eurasia, in particular in England, were already higher than those observable on the eastern side by the seventeenth century, with the divergence widening thereafter. However, in the English case, research based on evidence as to what people actually ate suggests that the path of dietary change was by no means a straightforward matter of rising calorie consumption. When viewed in the light of this, evidence derived from the work of food historians of Japan can similarly be used to reveal a more complex pattern of dietary development than can be encompassed in quantitative estimates, even if along the lines of a very different diet and cuisine. This needs to be taken into account when living standards are compared across the divergence.

The advent of refrigerated transport made fresh beef a global commodity, linking South American and Australian producers to hungry consumers in Europe and North America. With vast supplies of cattle, and growing markets in Japan, Russia, and beyond, China was the last great frontier of this global transformation. Rather than a single export trade, China’s beef industry was a complex and multidirectional network of producers, processors, and consumers, its many production chains each facing distinct commercial, logistic, and political challenges. This article examines three such chains, the Qing-era caravan trade that drove live sheep and cattle to Beijing, the Harbin meat-packing industry that grew up around the Russian China Eastern Railway, and Japanese-dominated export of beef from Qingdao. A cross-section of these issues shows how the industry as a whole adapted to the new pressures and opportunities of globalization, as well as those presented by technology, foreign investment, imperialism, and war.

In the early twentieth century, scientists at the Pasteur Institute and its colonial affiliates developed a historically specific form of bacteriological technoscience, which abstracted the human–microbe relationship from its environmental and social context, and created a model for public health governance that operated at the scale of the empire, rather than at the level of individual colonies or regions. Using a case study of tuberculosis management, this article argues that the success of the Pastorian model relied on its technopolitical vision of a universal model of managing human–microbe relations, while, in reality, exploiting precisely those fissures created by the uneven political and scientific landscape of the colonial and scientific world in which it operated. Pastorian bacteriology helped imperial administrators to imagine a globe-spanning, standardized empire, while restricting public health governance to technological innovations, rather than a proposal for social hygiene that would have expanded labour and associational rights for subject populations.

Reducing globalization to transnational movements and exchanges prevents us from understanding the specificity of our contemporary globalization, which was preceded by earlier waves of globalization. In particular, in the middle of the nineteenth century, many of the dimensions of our globalization had already been identified: the mobility of people, the expansion of trade, financial and cultural flows worldwide, and international cooperation. For example, as early as the 1850s, Marx diagnosed a ‘global’ expansion of capitalism bringing together many of the features of our contemporary globalization. In this article, I thus raise the question of the specificity of our globalization. What makes it new when compared to previous globalization processes? The main sociological theories of globalization in the 1990s relied on the thesis of a transition from a national to a global era. Many sociologists have therefore identified new aspects of our contemporary globalization. I explore six of those in turn: the invention of the terms ‘global’ and ‘globalization’ themselves; the rise of ‘transmigrations’; the rise of value chains, logistics, and ‘emerging’ countries in international trade; global cities and informational capitalism as new geographies of transnational financial flows; the threat to cultural diversity posed by a globalizing culture; and a sociology of globalization that is less and less monopolized by privileged or specific actors, becoming, on the contrary, increasingly ordinary and widespread.

The aim of this article is to analyse the dynamics of international trade in cereals, primarily wheat, in the first third of the twentieth century, with a special focus on the causes of the fall in exchanges and prices that took place in the 1930s. Developments over this period are compared with the general trade in food and agricultural products. An examination of the structure of the trade in wheat, maize, and rice shows the operation of their respective markets, giving special attention to the import and export flows between consumers and producers. To understand the functioning of the market for these products, the article examines the changes in supply, demand, and prices, and the emergence and development of intermediary companies in this business. The argument draws from a new database, based on the statistics published by the International Institute of Agriculture.

In the early days of anthropology as a discipline in the nineteenth century, evolutionism and diffusionism supplied anthropologists with ‘global’ visions. Anthropologists have always been involved with all-encompassing cosmopolitan notions such as humankind and culture. Many have thus endeavoured to explain the world as a whole, and how humans have developed in different historical moments. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the new label ‘globalization’ generated a field of scholarly preoccupations, anthropologists started to contribute to this growing body of literature. Their most valuable contributions are related to the tensions between local and global forces, and between forces of heterogeneity and homogeneity, as well as to the use of ethnography as a methodological tool. Anthropologists have borrowed notions from other related disciplines such as sociology, history, and geography. This paper situates the anthropological production on ‘the global’ within this diverse history of borrowings, internal disciplinary debates, and wider historical junctures.

Concentrating on the connection between the cooperative movements in colonial India and Ghana, the article has two aims. First, it counters the diffusionist story portraying the cooperative institution as indigenous to Europe, from where it was exported to the rest of the world. Second, it draws attention to the contribution and overall importance of cooperatives in the global market economy. Pursuing these two aims, and following a review of the existing literature, the article discusses the development of the cooperative movement in British India between 1900 and 1950. It then turns to the global establishment of the Indian experience as a role model for other colonial regions, notably West Africa. The article then considers the practical implementation of cooperatives in the Gold Coast and Ashanti (both now in Ghana) around 1930, and their development until 1955. Finally, based on the two main cases, as well as on the Cooperative Wholesale Society in Britain, it explores the economic function of cooperatives beyond national particularities, and tentatively analyses the relation of the institution to the broader forces of capitalism.

In 1921, the United States introduced national immigration quotas. Although designed to curb the arrival of ‘undesirables’ from south-east Europe, this quota system also applied to Britain and its white Dominions. By 1929, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were each allocated 100 quota places per annum. The British quota was far greater, but still struggled to meet demand. Through a focus on the Australian example, this article investigates how an immigration regime intended to bolster America’s ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity also exposed the limits of Anglospheric kinship by closing the gates to white Britons. Although the quotas had a comparatively minor impact on Britons, their exclusion held great significance in the context of Anglo-American relations, where the rhetoric of transnational white solidarity produced expectations of unqualified welcome in the United States. After 1921, as such welcome disappeared and then failed to rematerialize, the global community of white men’s countries was shaken and remade.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the presence of European Catholic actors in the Ottoman empire dramatically increased, particularly in the Palestinian provinces. The city of Jerusalem and its surrounding hinterland, referred to here by its Arabic name, Jabal al-Quds, witnessed a particularly intensive Catholic presence owing to its sanctified religious status. This article examines the ways in which the local Arabic-speaking Christian population of Jabal al-Quds interacted with these European Catholic actors. It situates these encounters within the wider scholarship on missionary encounters and cross-cultural interactions in the Mediterranean world, arguing that global historians need to pay greater attention to the inequalities embedded in many of these relationships and the frequent episodes of violent conflict they gave rise to. By inverting the standard Western gaze on Jerusalem and looking at these encounters from the inside out, the article seeks to restore local actors as important players within the global Counter-Reformation, albeit within a context of subjugation, conflict, and stymied mobility.

This article outlines the history of research in global literature as a history that is itself global. This kind of global history of the theorization of global literature demands a departure from the existing accounts and their nascent gap between heated theoreticist debates and pacifying historicist anthologies. A global approach to the problematic can bridge this gap because it considers not only what the most influential studies on global literature say, but also where and when they say it. Whether these be Romantic assertions of world literature, post-war pleas for cosmopolitan literature, Cold War polemics about ‘Third World’ literature, or millennial theories of transnational, post-national, planetary, and, indeed, global literature, the article considers not only the object of these studies but also the studies themselves as an object; not only the text but also the context. Hence, a historicization of literary theories of globalization in effect bleeds into a historicization of globalization itself.

Many of the international technical agencies formed after 1945 addressed environmental topics within their specific fields of work. By the late 1960s, a growing awareness of pollution and an emerging environmental movement in Western countries led to a perceived need for more coordinated and institutionalized international cooperation on the environment. Before the landmark United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972, and the subsequent creation of the UN Environment Programme, several organizations competed for recognition as principal reference organizations for environmental matters. This article analyses the combination of cooperation and rivalry, involving in particular the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (ECE). Among other initiatives, the OECD became the first international organization to establish a permanent committee specifically dedicated to environmental issues and the ECE organized a Conference on Environmental Problems, held in Prague in 1971. Both called for a critical review of the dominant growth-centred economic model. Their analysis adds a neglected dimension to the origins of today’s international structure of environmental cooperation as well as to the long-term evolution of economic environmental thinking.

This article reconsiders the breakthrough of global approaches to art history within a broader historical, sociological, and institutional context. It also puts into perspective the interdisciplinary openness of global-oriented approaches, and their impact in the discipline. Aiming at historicizing them up to the present, it questions the notion that the origins of global thinking in art history are to be found in the 1980s with the so-called postcolonial turn among art historians, which has become the canonical narrative. Postcolonial awareness emerged very late among art historians, only in the early 2000s. This contrasted, however, with a long-standing interest in non-Western artefacts and visual cultures among certain art historians, who were also interested in global comparisons and transdisciplinary approaches. These scholars borrowed from other fields such as history, anthropology, philosophy, and psychology, but their work was gradually put aside in the process of building art history as a discipline. This article will try to explain why this happened, and will also argue that the globalization of the art market played a greater role than postcolonial theory in encouraging art historians to adopt a globalized approach.

Few concepts in the history of twentieth-century history proved as important as economic growth. Scholars such as Charles Maier, Robert Collins, and Timothy Mitchell have analysed how the notion that an entity called ‘the economy’ (defined by metrics such as Gross National Product, or GNP) could be made to grow came to define economic thought and policy worldwide. Yet there has been far less attention paid to the fact that neither growth nor GNP went without challenge during their emergence and global diffusion. This article focuses on one set of growth critics: those who advocated for ‘social indicators’ in international development policy during the 1960s and 1970s. It advances three overlapping arguments: that advocates for social indicators harkened back to early twentieth-century transnational efforts to make workers’ ‘standard of living’ the primary statistical framework for policy-makers; that, while supporters of social indicators expressed frustration with technocratic governance, their reform efforts nevertheless represented technocratic critiques of modernity; and finally, that one of the major reform efforts, Morris David Morris’s advocacy on behalf of the ‘Physical Quality of Life Index’ (PQLI), as an alternative measure of national wellbeing, ultimately struggled to challenge the GNP growth paradigm, and yet proved influential in spawning subsequent research into new measures and approaches to development.

Founded in Moscow in 1960 for students from Third World countries, the Peoples’ Friendship University ‘Patrice Lumumba’ was the most important venture in international higher education during the Cold War and a flagship of Soviet internationalism. It aimed to educate a Soviet-friendly intelligentsia and foster a Soviet–Third World alliance. This article retraces the history of this school, often criticized for its Third World concept, recruitment, and training policies. It recalls the forgotten French initiative to create a university for the underdeveloped countries, situates Lumumba University in the global Cold War, and compares it with mainstream Soviet schools. Soon after its creation, Lumumba University underwent important changes, but departed from its initial educational concept. Consequently, arguments justifying the existence of a special university disappeared. Third World countries, moreover, never agreed with the university’s concept. Despite its educational accomplishments, Lumumba University became the Achilles’ heel of Soviet cultural policy.

Official histories suggest that the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted the term ‘informal sector’ as a replacement for ‘traditional sector’, which, in its pairing with the ‘modern sector’, had fallen out of favour. This article argues that the adoption of the informal sector concept is better understood as arising out of a different context: the ILO’s post-war efforts to generate a globally operational concept of unemployment for use in the ‘developing world’. ILO officials abandoned this project in the late 1960s when they realized that, where work for wages did not constitute a widespread social norm, an accurate measure of what they called ‘disguised unemployment’ was impossible to construct. That led the ILO to develop alternative constructs, including ‘employment in the informal sector’. However, it proved difficult for the agency to operationalize those, too, and it soon found itself losing control of the policy implications of the measures that it was producing.