This article presents a preliminary survey by which to track, in the longue durée, the path of the nail of the Gran Bestia (great beast), a remedy that appeared in therapeutics on both sides of the Atlantic. The Gran Bestia is mentioned in the natural histories, books of remedies, and medical handbooks that proliferated in the Old World and European settlements from the seventeenth century onwards. From the point of view of global history, it is a revealing case from which to investigate, first, how the transfer of a name between continents involved the associated transfer of medical virtues and properties and, second, long before Linnaeus, how the commerce in medicines, skins, and other animal products contributed to associating different animal kinds from different cultural worlds. Far from human universals, the history of the great beast seems to refer to common meanings created by commerce. This article therefore argues for a new investigation into the global and transdisciplinary dimension of objects that is not limited to exclusively local traditions, and may instead reflect the living remains of a long history of exchanges, translations, and transfers that de- and re-functionalized nature in evolving geographies over several centuries.

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.

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.

To date, the alliance between Tokyo, Berlin, and Rome has been interpreted primarily as an alliance between nation-states and has therefore been studied using bi-national approaches. However, this article argues that the strength and globality of the Axis becomes comprehensible if we understand it first and foremost as an alliance between empires. By discussing the interwar years from the viewpoint of trans-imperial cooperation and competition, we discover an imperial nexus. The history, characteristics, diversity, and consequences of this imperial nexus are shown in three parts. The first describes how the nexus helped to bring the distantly located partners together. This occurred against the backdrop of what they called proletarian imperialism, which turned out to be a kind of post-colonial imperialism. The second part analyses how the imperial nexus led others, such as Great Britain, to believe in the existence and strength of a global Axis. In this context, the anti-colonial tendencies put forth mostly by the Japanese turned out to be dangerous. The last part shows how and why the imperial Axis remained intact during the war. Considered from the standpoint of an imperial nexus, the familiar reading of the alliance as well as of the world war shifts. First, Japan and Italy play more important roles than often assumed, while the primacy of Germany is relativized. Second, the chronologies change in relation to the genesis of the Axis and thus the origins of the Second World War. These origins are more strongly associated with non-European world regions and ‘colonial peripheries’, particularly with China and Ethiopia. Third, the issue of ideological similarities and thus of fascism once again becomes a key focus. Fourth and finally, the Axis appears far more diverse and also stronger than previously understood.

This article studies the activities of American philanthropic foundations in India between the 1950s and 1970s. It discusses why private institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation felt committed to responding to problems of hunger and population growth abroad and how they managed to establish themselves as leaders in the development aid arena. Instead of considering the foundations as handmaidens of US national strategic interests shaped by the Cold War, the article argues that they should be understood as highly flexible transnational agents who, in an ambitious combination of philanthropic motives, institutional interests, and trust in the power of science, diagnosed political problems and developed methods to overcome them in order to reduce global inequality.

In the concluding contribution to this issue, this article asks how patterns in the movement of social policies between nations can be explained. It particularly highlights the ways in which policies often move in clusters from ‘model’ nations outward. The article finds answers in the asymmetries of social policy networks and, most importantly, in the power of the narratives through which policy models travel.

The study of aphrodisiacs is an overlooked area of global history which this article seeks to remedy by considering how such substances were commercially traded and how medical knowledge of them was exchanged globally between 1600 and 1920. We show that the concept of ‘aphrodisiacs’ as a new nominal category of pharmacological substances came to be valued and defined in early modern Latin, English, Dutch, Swiss, and French medical sources in relation to concepts transformed from their origin in both the ancient Mediterranean world and in medieval Islamicate medicine. We then consider how the general idea of aphrodisiacs became widely discredited in mid-nineteenth-century scientific medicine until after the First World War in France and in the US, alongside their commercial proliferation in the context of new colonial trade exchanges between Europe, the US, Southeast Asia, Africa, India, and South America. In both examples, we propose that global entanglements played a significant role in both the cohesion and the discreditation of the medical category of aphrodisiacs.

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.

This article explores a smattering of thematic questions that criss-cross the articles in this special pandemics issue; it signposts some reverberations, overlapping responses, and problematic comparisons currently (mid 2020) being made between past pandemics and the tense experiences (and projections going forward) of COVID-19 across the world. The historical pandemics covered here offer an entry point to a fruitful set of genealogies, chronologies, epidemiologies, trajectories, and imaginaries linked to a host of issues: what makes a pandemic ‘global’? What does a global history perspective bring to the table? How does examining germs and genomes shed light on imperialism as a/the pandemic driver? Where do animals, the environment, and ecology fit in and why are they so often excluded from pandemic histories? What counts as medical humanitarianism when health knowledge, know-how, and cooperation ‘from below’ are sidelined? And what came/comes first: a pandemic or a changed world?

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.

From the late 1950s, Africans seeking higher education went to a rapidly increasing number of destinations, both within Africa and overseas. Based on multi-sited archival research and memoirs, this article shows how Africans forged and used new routes to gain access to higher education denied to them in their territories of origin, and in this way also shaped scholarship policies across the globe. Focusing on British-ruled territories in East Africa, the article establishes the importance of African intermediaries and independent countries as hubs of mobility. The agency of students and intermediaries, as well as official responses, are examined in three interconnected cases: the clandestine ‘Nile route’ from East Africa to Egypt and eastern Europe; the ‘airlifts’ from East Africa to North America; and the ‘exodus’ of African students from the Eastern bloc to western Europe. Although all of these routes were short-lived, they transformed official scholarship provisions, and significantly shaped the postcolonial period in the countries of origin.

This article asks why simplistic accounts of the British Empire as a modernizing force have been so popular in recent years. It contends that, aside from the obvious ideological appeal of these views to some, academic literature has found it difficult to offer a powerful rebuttal. This article argues that in order to do so we need to think more comparatively about the British Empire as a system, and to restore attention to imperial agency. However, this is not best achieved through a traditional study of high politics, but by bringing cultural historical approaches to the study of Britain’s lower imperial cadre. The second half of the article offers a preliminary analysis of the attitudes of local colonial officers. It argues that, contrary to the arguments of neo-imperialist popular historians, this group was hostile to modernization, and in many cases was determined to maintain or restore what they regarded as a traditional order.

The COVID-19 outbreak of 2020 threatened years of effort by the Chinese authorities to extend its influence around the world. This article seeks to enhance understanding of China’s defensive engagement with global health agencies, and more broadly of the relationship between pandemics and soft power, through an analysis of Uganda’s evolving response to HIV/AIDS. As with COVID-19, HIV/AIDS presented a fundamental threat not only to countries’ internal social stability and population health, but also to governmental legitimacy and nation-states’ international reputation. HIV, however, also provided Uganda with an opportunity to enhance its global standing, influence international policy, and achieve national reconstruction. This case study highlights the importance of viewing international affairs from the perspective of the Global South. It argues that the very weakness of Uganda, and the structural marginality of HIV/AIDS, provided the leverage which would in the end deliver radical shifts within global health.

This article examines debates on the decentralization of the League of Nations that took place in the civil society networks surrounding it. Set in the wider framework of regionalist debates, particularly in Latin America, it focuses on two organizations, the International Federation of League of Nations Societies, which promoted the League, and the Comité Fédéral de Coopération Européenne, which focused on European cooperation. The analysis of the debate on regionalism and universalism highlights the role that Europe played in the League, and points to the use of universalist arguments to further British imperial ends. It shows that interwar internationalism was a multifaceted phenomenon, in which national, imperial, regional, and universal projects and concerns were profoundly entangled. Finally, the article stresses the overlap between official and civil society networks, which complemented each other's activities.

Slave traders forced more than 1.65 million captive Africans aboard illegal transatlantic slave ships during the nineteenth century. This article focuses on the final phase of this brutal traffic, between 1850 and 1866. It argues that slave traders sustained their illicit industry, in large part, by strategically coordinating their financial arrangements against a rising tide of international suppression. One key tactic was for slave trade investors in the United States, Cuba, Africa, and Iberia to lower the risks of interdiction by joining forces and co-financing voyages. Another was to combine with an international cast of merchants and bankers, who helped them launder slave trade capital and transmit it to their distant allies. This capital was concealed within broader currents of global commerce, which was, in turn, spurred by the growth of free trade in the nineteenth century. These myriad alliances and capital flows undergirded the trade until its final extinction in the 1860s.

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’.

This paper provides a broad overview of spatial, architectural, and sensory relationships between rats and humans on British and American vessels from approximately the 1850s–1950s. Taking rats as my primary historical actors, I show how humans attempted to prevent the movement of these animals between ports across three periods. Firstly, the mid- to- late-nineteenth century, where few attempts were made to prevent rats from boarding ships, and where a multiplicity of human/rat relationships can be located. Secondly, the 1890s–1920s, in which port authorities erected anti-rat borders to lock these animals on land or at sea. Finally, the 1920s–50s, where ships were reconstructed to eliminate all possibilities of rodent inhabitation and to interrupt their transit between ports. Ship rats, I argue, not only demonstrate the fragility of historical rodent-control efforts, but also encourage oceanic historians to consider how animals have negotiated and shaped boundaries between spheres of land and sea.

Between 1958 and 1966 the Ford Foundation embarked on a series of pilot projects of ‘urban community development’ in India and the United States. This article will highlight how both of these programmes emerged in response to what Ford officials understood to be a global urban crisis, caused by the migration of ‘backward’ rural populations into the cities. Rather than modernizing under the pressure of urban living, these newcomers appeared to be pooling into pockets of underdevelopment – ‘ghettos’ in the United States and ‘slums’ in India. Ford sought to tackle the problem by encouraging the participation of these marginalized communities in the process of urban renewal, a strategy intended to engineer the psychological modernization of their residents. In practice, however, Ford struggled to control the channels into which these mobilizations flowed, with poor urban residents utilizing the projects to push for radical changes concerning housing, policing, and tenant–landlord relations.