This article stresses the role of colonial governments, not only national sovereign states, in Asia (and to a lesser extent, Africa) at the League of Nations in shaping global governing norms. It emphasizes the significance of lateral and horizontal cooperative actions across colonial governments, especially intercolonial networks of public health experts. It argues that the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) accepted these intercolonial practices in Asia in the 1920s, and that this led it to recognize colonial governments as formal and legitimate units in its intergovernmental conferences held in the mid 1930s. In the process, the LNHO provided an intercolonial channel for ‘national’ experts from colonial Asia to participate directly in regional and global governing norm-making processes. In turn, this highlights both the ambiguous nature of national experts and the intercolonial legacy in international health programmes in developing countries in the post-war period.

This article re-examines a contested chapter in the international and environmental history of the 1970s. Even though largely neglected by historical research and in the public memory, the Club of Rome – widely remembered for its 1972 report The limits to growth – was not only born within the OECD, but was also in its early period strongly influenced by debates within this think tank of the industrialized countries. Using previously overlooked sources, this article analyses this highly unlikely OECD–Club of Rome nexus. It not only offers a privileged view into the social history of international policy-making and the related personal entanglements and ideological transfers at a key moment of post-war history. It also demonstrates that the social, intellectual, and economic turmoil of the late 1960s prompted a rethinking of the economic growth paradigm, even within those technocratic institutions that had aspired to guide the post-war industrial growth regime. The article argues that these links are not only vital for our understanding of the relationship between acquisitive growth capitalism and environmentalism, but also enable a more profound understanding of the role of transnational networks in global history and the appreciation of the place of the 1970s in world history.

This article traces the personal and institutional networks that facilitated the transnational spread of Development Volunteering in the 1950s and 1960s. Examining Australia’s Volunteer Graduate Scheme, Britain’s Voluntary Service Overseas, and the United States Peace Corps, it destabilizes each nation’s claims to pioneering Development Volunteering, and interrogates the reasons for these claims. Once national frames are removed, broader patterns come into view. This article reveals that Development Volunteering held multiple meanings, as discourses of development, colonialism, and control existed alongside those of youthful idealism and national benevolence. It argues that, by involving ‘ordinary’ people in international development and by re-inscribing colonial-era divisions between the developed and developing worlds, Development Volunteering contributed to the broader process by which colonial discourses were translated into the postcolonial lexicon of development.

References to protection were ubiquitous across the early modern world, featuring in a range of transactions between polities in very different regions. And yet discourses about protection retained a quality of imprecision that makes it difficult to pin down precise legal statuses and responsibilities. It was often unclear who was protecting whom or the exact nature of the relationship. In this article, we interrogate standard distinctions about the dual character of protection that differentiate between ‘inside’ protection of subjects and ‘outside’ protection of allies and other external groups. Rather than a clear division, we find a blurring of lines, with many protection claims creatively combining ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ protection. We argue that the juxtaposition of these ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ meanings of protection underpinned the formation of irregular, interpenetrating zones of imperial suzerainty in crowded maritime arenas and conflict-ridden borderlands across the early modern world.

Encompassing events from 1680 to the mid 1750s, this article examines the organization and adaptation to capital and credit crises of East Indies trade participants in two metropolitan locales – one whose core bounded the North and Baltic Seas, and the other centred around the South China Sea. It shows that in both locales commercial and governmental actors relied not only on state or company, but also on decentralized, port-based practices, institutions, and networks to solve problems and support a shared information culture. Thus, the rules of what I term ‘commercial commons’, rather than an imperial conflict, characterized many East Indies endeavours of this era. East India companies operated in multiple transnational, distributed, and port-based metropolitan locales for their access to capital and credit, and to police financial failure.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the transnational ‘Third World’ concept defined how people all over the globe perceived the world. This article explains the concept’s extraordinary traction by looking at the interplay of local uses and global contexts through which it emerged. Focusing on the particularly relevant setting of France, it examines the term’s invention in the context of the Cold War, development thinking, and decolonization. It then analyses the review Partisans (founded in 1961), which galvanized a new radical left in France and provided a platform for a communication about, but also with, the Third World. Finally, it shows how the association Cedetim (founded in 1967) addressed migrant workers in France as ‘the Third World at home’. In tracing the Third World’s local–global dynamics, this article suggests a praxis-oriented approach that goes beyond famous thinkers and texts and incorporates ‘lesser’ intellectuals and non-textual aspects into a global conceptual history in action.