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.

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.

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.

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.

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.