The Indian Ocean is famous for its well-documented Jewish and Islamic trading networks of the medieval and early modern periods. Social networks that eased the challenges of cross-cultural trade have a much longer history in the region, however. The great distances covered by merchants and the seasonality of the monsoons left few alternatives to staying away for prolonged periods of time, and shipwreck, piracy, and the slave trade caused people to end up on coasts far away from home. Networks of merchants developed in the Indian Ocean region that depended on a degree of social cohesion. This article draws up a map of selected merchant communities in the western Indian Ocean, and argues that geographical origin, ethnicity, and religion may have been different ways of establishing the necessary infrastructure of trust.

This article offers the novel interpretation that Pacific integration began in the ocean's western sphere and later moved into its insular middle and eastern sphere. It demonstrates this by tracing three ocean-wide trends: the emergence of common trading goals and systems, the expansive role of reciprocal demand, and the shared experiences of Pacific peoples, who, both as slaves and in tribute-based and free labour systems, produced prominent trade goods. It presents additional new perspectives by identifying a ‘silver-substitute century’ in maritime commerce from 1750 to 1850, and by establishing the 1850s and 1860s as a period of transition from the influence of China-centred to Western-centred demand in Pacific trade. It thus reveals the limits of established interpretations that emphasize Western state and imperial initiatives and the role of Western technological and manufacturing dominance in the process of integration.

Drawing on primary materials in Persian, Urdu, and English, this article compares Persian and Indian travel accounts to assess the similarities and differences of contemporaneous encounters with Japan. By linking Persian and Urdu writings from either side of 1900 to the differential impact of industrial communications (vernacular printing, steam travel) on Persia and India, the article reconstructs the global connections and inter-Asian networks that suddenly rendered Japan an important touchstone for intellectuals in the Middle East no less than South Asia. By presenting a triangulated and comparative model of inter-Asian exchange, the article contributes to building robust material foundations for positioning Asia, and its Muslims in particular, within global intellectual history, and concludes by contrasting the sources of information generation that preceded ideological formation.

This article examines two tutelage campaigns launched by Japanese social reformers targeting Japanese emigrant women in Manchuria and California in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It reveals how these two middle-class-based social campaigns jointly paved the way for the Japanese state's ‘continental bride’ policy in the late 1930s, which mobilized and exported women from across the nation to Manchuria on an unprecedented scale. Synthesizing the stories of Japan's colonialism in Manchuria and Japanese labour migration to the American Pacific coast, this study traces the convergence and flows between the women's education campaigns in Japanese communities on both sides of the Pacific. It moves the debate of Japanese imperialism beyond Asia and situates it in a transnational space encompassing the local, the national, and the global.

This article traces the complex and shifting organization of soy's production and consumption from Northeast China to Europe and the United States. It focuses on a set of national and transnational actors with differing interests in the global and national spread of soybeans. The combination of these actors in certain spatiotemporal contexts enabled a fundamental change in soy from an Asian to an American cash crop. At the beginning of the twentieth century, soy rapidly became Northeast China's cash crop, owing to steadily increasing Western demand. However, the versatility of soy – and soy oil in particular – offered a highly successful response to the agricultural and industrial challenges that the United States faced during the Great Depression and the Second World War. By the end of the war, American farmers in the Midwest cultivated more soybeans than their Chinese counterparts.

This article offers new historical analysis of global heritage by tracking the evolution of heritage concepts. Specifically, it analyses the introduction of the category of ‘cultural landscapes’ in the UNESCO World Heritage Convention in 1992, using it as a lens through which to view the process of international (re)negotiation of the meaning of heritage. It shows that this reform resulted from the cooperation of competing actors – including experts, non-governmental organizations, and governments – that harboured different visions of culture and nature and their interrelationship. It also demonstrates that the recognition of cultural landscapes as a heritage category marked the new assertiveness of actors from post-settler states in North America and Oceania, as opposed to Europe, which had dominated global heritage until that point.