This article explores how multilateral negotiations for technology trade accelerated the fall of the Cold War economic divide in East Asia. Drawing on archival sources in Japan, the United States, China, Britain, and France, it focuses on computer trade between China and capitalist countries from 1968 to 1980. The computer, a dual-use technology essential to China’s industrial and military modernisation, was at the centre of debate among capitalist countries. While competing to export advanced technologies to the China market, they needed to relax export controls through the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, an international regime to oversee export restrictions on communist countries during the Cold War. This combination of competition and cooperation weakened the restrictive trade regime dating back to before the Korean War, enabling capitalist countries with diverse economic and security interests to find common ground to sell to Chinese customers. By examining this process, this article reveals that dual-use technologies, often viewed in global history as a source of division among states, could in fact promote economic and political interactions across the East-West divide.

This article uses non-literary essays that appeared in the Peruvian press during the Oncenio period in Peru (1919–30) to nuance our understanding of Latin American Orientalism. Critical study of the extant material shows that there were at least three strands of Orientalism circulating among Peruvian readers, with the presence or absence of Asian communities in Peru and the larger history of Spanish imperialism and Spanish-language Orientalism acting as their conditions of possibility. While the large Chinese community in Peru triggered an Orientalist backlash akin to modern Anglo-French Orientalism, the absence of Southeast Asians in the country allowed for a more medieval-colonial Orientalism to persist, one that focused more on wonder for and exoticisation of Asian cultures. The exception would be the Philippines, which due to its previous history as a Spanish colony, was presented as a ‘modern’ country comparable to any in Latin America. Given that representations of Southeast Asia are often overlooked in the study of Latin American Orientalism—which in turn tends to focus on literary representations by writers from countries like Argentina or Mexico—this article fills these gaps and contributes to the global histories of Latin America and of Orientalism.

This article discusses the ways the Palestinian struggle was perceived as part of regional and global networks that crystallised following the First World War, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, and the rise of mandatory authorities in the Middle East. It examines Palestinian disillusionment with the expectation that the principle of self-determination would serve as a basis for the creation of a new world political order and, in turn, in the dissolution of the world of the colonial authorities. It focuses, on one hand, on the ways in which the Rif War in Morocco (1921–6) and the great Syrian rebellion, which broke out in 1925, affected Palestinian national consciousness, and on the other hand, how these crises revealed the explicit identification of the Zionist movement with colonial forces. In the article I examine the representations of the uprisings in the contemporary Palestinian and Hebrew press as a basis for seeing the uprising as an important turning point, in terms of creating the Zionist separatist space and the strengthening of the alliance between the Zionist movement and the mandatory colonial rule and its identification with global colonial forces.

This article investigates the global history of dryland modernisation through the case study of southern Italy. From the early twentieth century to the fascist years, several intellectuals, scientists, and politicians reinterpreted the apparent and long-standing backwardness of this region as fundamentally due to its hydrology and climate: southern Italy was rediscovered as a dry land, formally part of Italy and civilised Europe and yet environmentally closer to extra-European spaces of empire. The article shows how Italian agrarian scientists mobilised this ‘environmental Otherness’ of the Italian south as the key to developing a ‘dryland’ science alternative to that of ‘humid’ northern Italy and continental Europe. Instead, this ‘dryland’ approach to modernisation grounded southern Italy within a vast transimperial network defined by the co-production and circulation of knowledge and technologies allowing the adaptation of modern and intensive food production to semi-arid regions. As such, the article argues that Italian agrarian scientists redefined the spatial order of the Italian south in a transimperial sense, embracing its environmental Otherness as a vantage point for its rehabilitation within Italy’s nation-building.

Throughout the nineteenth century, African communities in the Congo estuary displayed a consistent preference for ‘trade guns’, the rough-and-ready muzzle-loading muskets that European producers and traders regarded as obsolete and as an indirect proof of African backwardness. The first section of this article seeks to account for this consumer predilection. The second and third substantive parts of the article explore the provenance of these guns and argue that the lower Congo’s gun trade can be disaggregated into three phases, each of which was marked by the local ascendancy of different trading houses. The most general aim of the article is to make a case for the role of African consumer demand in fostering processes of global economic integration. More specifically, by showing that west-central African demand was responsible for the enduring vitality of Liège’s non-mechanised cottage industry, the article points to an often-overlooked aspect of nineteenth-century globalisation: far from invariably promoting innovation in industrialisation, the growing interdependence of different parts of the world could also have the effect of giving a new lease of life to apparently antiquated manufacturing methods.

In the mid-twentieth century, the jurist Hans Kelsen envisaged a new legal and political international order. His global thinking revolved around his idea of a ‘world state’ as a means to preserve peace. The article contends that Kelsen’s ideas on global legal and political order and a world state in the 1940s drew on his intellectual biography and on his earlier theoretical writings on order in the national scale. Another important source for understanding Kelsen’s global thinking is his critique of the Chicago World Constitution Draft, a mid-century project which proposed the establishment of a federal world state. As this study shows, Kelsen’s global thinking is characterised by a multi-scalar logic and an emphasis on positive law as the foundation of political and legal order. These elements render his ideas distinct in the historical trajectory of modern global thought, and deserve the attention of global historians today.

The destruction of tropical forests is an environmental issue of global significance. This process has deep historical roots, with recent scholarship exploring the role of European colonisation and capitalist expansion in driving tropical deforestation from the sixteenth century onwards. Less attention, however, has been given to how Indigenous resistance has impeded deforestation over this time period. Here we analyse how non-state Indigenous groups obstructed Spanish and Portuguese political control and commodity frontiers in tropical South America. Drawing on archival sources, together with Indigenous Guaraní and Paiter Suruí philosophy and oral history, we assess this phenomenon in two biomes, the Atlantic and Amazon Rainforests. The results highlight that over the longue durée, Indigenous resistance has assisted in the conservation of South American tropical forests, acting as a significant—but under-recognised—factor in both regional and global environmental history. This history is of particular importance given the increased recognition of the role of Indigenous peoples in conserving tropical forests as carbon sinks in the twenty-first century.

The Berlin Conference (1884–85) is widely studied for its role in fuelling European imperialism and legitimising the scramble for Africa. However, its global impact beyond Europe and Africa has received little attention, with Latin America notably absent. This article examines how prominent diplomats from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico interpreted the proceedings. In their view, Europe’s renewed expansionism in Africa—combining private adventurism, colonisation enterprises, and imperial statecraft—resembled the great powers’ incursions into post-independence Latin America. They feared that new criteria for staking colonial claims would endanger their states’ sovereignty over vast, remote territories. Yet, while opposing intervention, these diplomats embraced civilisational thinking and state-building projects that echoed Eurocentric racial hierarchies. Their arguments reflected both resistance to imperialism and complicity in its logic. By tracing Berlin’s reverberations across multiple regions, this article highlights the broader repercussions of late nineteenth-century ‘high imperialism’ and reassesses the nature of Latin American anti-imperialism.

This article explores how figurations of children from India changed in the children’s magazine of the Church Missionary Society in connection with its new internationalist ideals. Analysing the content of The Round World, as it was then known, it examines how India and Indian children mattered to the internationalist imaginaries the Church Missionary Society (CMS) was promoting from the 1920s. From the late 1920s, the CMS Young People’s Department and its Education Secretaries fostered ideas of ‘world-friendship’. Against this backdrop, the article explores how children from India not only entered this conversation within the magazine, but were also seen as becoming part of an international Anglican network. Through an unpacking of various categories of narratives, the article argues that this recasting was connected to the political and geographical imaginaries of the interwar years, and explores the closely enmeshed institutional and personal agendas that aided these children’s entry into a ‘world’ of the CMS’s making.

This article examines the pioneering contributions of a generation of women civil servants, diplomats, and intellectuals—referred to as Cepalinas—to economic thought at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) between the late 1960s and early 1980s. These women experts, including statisticians, economists, sociologists, and demographers, played a critical role in reshaping CEPAL’s development agenda by advocating for the integration of gender perspectives into regional policies. Through extensive fieldwork and data collection, they highlighted the economic and social contributions of women, particularly those from marginalised communities, and challenged the prevailing male-dominated models of development. Despite the progress made following the 1975 UN International Conference on Women, the Cepalinas often remained on the periphery of institutional power and have been largely overlooked in the historiography. This article brings their work to the forefront, analysing their publications and mission reports to reveal how their efforts transformed both the Commission’s economic frameworks and broader global development policies.

In 1974, the International Species Information System (ISIS) was launched as a computerised database for zoo animals. Developed by a small group in Minneapolis, ISIS is now used by over 1,300 zoos on five continents and recognised as a crucial tool for ex situ conservation. The founders aimed to transform long-standing global patterns of zoo animal management. Rather than places where wild-caught animals went to die, they envisioned zoos as interconnected hubs supporting the global breeding and survival of endangered species. This article examines how the ‘infrastructural globalism’ of ISIS took shape. At first sight, the system appears to be a universal instrument for collecting neutral data. Yet, using the lens of ‘infrastructural inversion’ and examining the legal, socio-political, and scientific contexts in which it was developed, the article highlights how locally rooted ambitions and global competitions shaped its design and operation. Despite its aura of global reach, the effectiveness of ISIS relied on continuous local human effort, which explains its limitations. On a broader level, the history of ISIS reminds us that the influence of infrastructural globalism extends to non-human animals, and the ways they move around the world.

In the decades after the death of Iosif Stalin in 1953, Soviet foreign policy shifted away from isolationism to knowledge transfer and competition with the West, as well as robust engagement with the decolonising and non-aligned world. A core component of this reorientation was the reversal of the USSR’s temporary withdrawal from international organisations. This article explores the Soviet Red Cross’s involvement in the League of Red Cross Societies and argues that the two organisations engaged in a mutually beneficial partnership that was built upon shared visions of humanitarianism and development. In this period, the Soviet Red Cross co-hosted major international seminars and conferences with the League, helped to channel humanitarian relief to conflict zones, and supported the League’s development initiatives in the Global South. In return, the League offered the Soviets opportunities to forge links with newly independent countries of the decolonising world and advance narratives about Soviet superiority to international and domestic audiences.

Global historians have contributed greatly to reconfiguring our understanding of the early modern world. An emphasis has broadly emerged in current scholarship on the long-distance circulation of people and goods and cross-cultural exchange of knowledge with overseas empires usually described as major vectors of global interaction. This article corrects and complicates such an interpretation by calling attention to the periodic interruption of the main lines of maritime communication that many port cities around the world experienced every year and what this meant to their inhabitants. In particular, it focuses on the seasonality of the Portuguese Empire in monsoon Asia during the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries. This specific case is approached through a combination of ecological history, labour history, and the history of emotions. Its general significance is further illuminated by extensive use of comparison with examples related to other empires across the Indian and Pacific oceans.

This article explores the global political economy of paper—particularly newsprint—during the era of decolonisation. It shows how Third World countries, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), and the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) understood newsprint as an infrastructural tool for accelerating development. However, a ‘paper famine’ in the mid-1970s exposed the major structural inequalities in the global newsprint trade, catalysing experiments to develop local paper manufacturing capacity in the Third World. The article demonstrates how debates about access to newsprint were tightly bound up with arguments about global information flows and the role of the press in the developing world. In so doing, the article argues that bringing global histories of commodities and communications into conversation enriches our understanding of the media by drawing attention to the material substance by which information circulates.

Postwar decolonisation in the global South sparked a range of political imaginaries and experiments in postcolonial governance. Among the most prominent and least understood of the roads not ultimately taken was that of federation. The federal model seemed to offer something to almost everyone—Cold War hegemons, metropolitan officials, anticolonial nationalists, ‘pan-’ racial visionaries—and a dozen such unions were proposed or attempted after 1945. Yet almost none lasted even a decade before shrinking or collapsing. Their demise, despite occurring at the height of the Cold War, had little or nothing to do with that conflict. Rather, the concurrent rise and fall of two such unions—the West Indies Federation and Malaysia—demonstrates that they succumbed to a number of fatal flaws, above all one that connects this decolonisation story to the long territorial-imperial era preceding it: the centrifugal force of the ethnopolitical identities embedded within them.

This article examines the significance of mobility and transportation infrastructure in the early development of pan-Americanism and the formation of a vision of global transportation in South America in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the 1880s and 1890s, I explore the connection between transportation and the economic and cultural expansionism of the United States, pan-American debates on intercontinental steamship service and an inter-American railroad, and South American approaches to international transportation, which both included and transcended the Americas. My case study contributes to scholarship on the global history of mobility and transportation by showing how, despite the intention of the United States to establish hemispheric exclusivity and hegemony, transportation became a subject of multilateral cooperation. South American experts and diplomats, I argue, renegotiated and reinterpreted the meaning of pan-American infrastructure, integrating it into a broader vision of global transportation that positioned their countries more prominently in worldwide traffic networks.

This article compares and connects two episodes of political violence in the late nineteenth century: the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886 and the bombing of the offices of the De Beers Company, chaired by Cecil Rhodes, at Kimberley on the South African diamond fields in 1891. These episodes were connected by the existence in both countries of an American and then global movement, the Knights of Labor/Labour. The Knights’ American history was shaped by Haymarket. Their South African history was radically altered by the De Beers explosion, which both the Knights and their enemies interpreted through the prism of Haymarket. They drew lessons from it that determined their own conduct and may have contributed to the demise of the South African Knights less than two years later. This article charts those connections and the context to the De Beers explosion, the trial that followed, and the lessons that South African Knights drew from the experiences of their American brothers and sisters.

From the early 1950s, the USSR was the second largest contributor to the UN. Following UN rules, it gave much of its contribution in rubles, an infamously unconvertible currency that generally limited Soviet actions overseas. In the hands of UN officials, however, these ‘weak’ rubles became a powerful lever that made UN development projects more Soviet. Seeking to extract value from the ruble, officials increased the amount of UN development training held in the USSR, prioritized the purchase of Soviet equipment, and incentivized agencies to distribute Soviet manuals. Exploring the ruble lever contributes to our knowledge of the Soviet presence at the UN while foregrounding political economy as a key mechanism shaping UN practices more widely. Following the money in forms other than the dollar can reveal how economies of power at the UN intersect with global economic history, as well as the conceptual and contemporary challenges of international cooperation among wildly unequal economies.

Family Planning (1968), a short, animated film featuring Donald Duck, was translated into at least twenty-four languages and viewed in the span of two years by nearly 1.4 million people around the world. Commissioned by the Rockefeller’s Population Council and expensively produced by Disney, the movie represents the international family planning industry’s single largest investment in a media object. It has since been perceived as largely effective in achieving its goal of promoting contraception to culturally diverse audiences. Using an unusually rich collection of archival records and other previously neglected sources, we demonstrate how Family Planning failed to connect with local viewerships. Our historical analysis recovers the Population Council’s homogenizing and infantilizing view of the global poor and critiques of this view that emanated from the Global South – not just with the benefit of hindsight but at the time. We conclude that the Rockefeller–Disney collaboration was ill-suited for communicating to a heterogeneous, global audience, and that a misplaced optimism in animation as a universal language all but guaranteed failure.

This article contributes to the growing historical literature on the ‘first globalization’ (1815–1913) and income inequality in countries that exported agricultural products. International market integration is expected to increase the demand for exports and therefore their prices. We estimate the effects of increased prices from international market integration on national welfare and income inequality between and within regions in three major exporters of agricultural products—British India, Colonial Indonesia, and the United States—using the prices of eleven key primary commodities. Market integration significantly increased aggregate welfare, but the gains were unevenly distributed. Producing regions gained up to nearly 6% of their GDP. Since the regions that made most welfare gains were also the poorest in their countries, market integration mitigated inequality between regions. Within the southern United States and Java, plantation owners obtained most gains, causing a substantial increase in inequality between persons.