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.

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 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.

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.

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.

In 1975, the OECD created a research committee entitled ‘Interfutures. Research project into the development of the advanced industrial societies in harmony with the developing world’. The purpose of Interfutures was to examine how the new tools of futures research could be put to use in order to shape strategies for dealing with a new phenomenon of ‘interdependence’, and to set out a ‘long-term vision’ of the Western world. This article argues that Interfutures was appointed in order to draft an alternative image of the future to two radical visions of the early 1970s. The first was the so-called New International Economic Order. The second was the 1972 Club of Rome report, The limits to growth. As a response to these two visions, Interfutures presented a vision of globalization as a process oriented around an expanding world market, piloted by Western interests and continued resource extraction.