Focusing on the private governance networks of Maurice Frederick Strong and his second wife, Hanne Marstrand, this article traces the origins of corporate environmentalism and flexible interpretations of sustainable development to the 1970s, the foundational years of international environmental governance. Shifting the analytical focus from official meetings to private gatherings in the Strongs’ homes in Geneva, Nairobi, the Canadian Rockies, and Crestone, Colorado, I show that the environmental imaginaries among governance elites around Strong and Marstrand were shaped by the couple’s entanglements with industrial philanthropy, New Age spiritualism, and cybernetics. Drawing on personal archives, correspondence, and publications, I argue that the Strongs’ heterogeneous networks, which bridged counterculture environmentalism, technological optimism, and alternative approaches to international development, ultimately facilitated the growing role of corporations in environmental policymaking during the late 1980s and 1990s. This article, then, contributes to the history of global environmental governance and development by highlighting the lasting impact of private governance networks on the environmental policy landscape, exemplified by early linkages between United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), oil industry actors, and private banking institutions.

This article examines anti-colonialism and Third World solidarities in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. It does so through a study of the Black Liberation Front (BLF), a Black Power group formed in London in 1971. The BLF saw themselves as part of a global Third World solidarity, and, as activists in Britain, identified their location as ‘inside the belly of the monster’. They understood racism and colonialism as global phenomena, and offered material support to anti-colonial movements across the world, especially in Africa. The prevailing historiography of Black activism in post-war Britain foregrounds domestic anti-racism. Based on a reading of the BLF’s publications, alongside subsequent memoirs by and interviews with former BLF members, this article argues for Black activism in Britain to be viewed through a more global lens. Moreover, it shows how a deeper understanding of transnational anti-colonialism reconfigures our understanding of the domestic politics of race. Historians of decolonization must attend to how twentieth-century geographies of race and migration created the conditions for solidarities that do not fit within a metropole–colony binary.

This article challenges the traditional view of the linear causality of technological globalization in the history of modern predictive meteorology. According to this linear narrative, telegraphy, by enabling near-instantaneous communication over vast distances, was the causa efficiens that directly and inevitably produced large-scale weather forecasting. However, the role of Jesuit scientists in East Asia as pioneers of cyclone warning systems not only demonstrates that the linear narrative is too simple but invites a rigorous examination of the relationships between prior knowledge networks and technological infrastructures. This article contends that the expansion of technological networks does not inexorably imply the expansion of knowledge networks. There was not, therefore, a unidirectional causal relationship but a concomitant two-way interaction; that is, there was a coextension of knowledge and technological networks, where both Jesuit scientists and telegraph companies benefited from each other and shared common goals confronting a global threat—cyclones. This offers a new perspective not only on the history of meteorological services but also of science globalization.

This article recovers the international thought of Jón Ólafsson—an Icelandic journalist, transatlantic migrant, and settler colonialist—to illuminate how visions of world order were articulated from the Northern European periphery at the fin de siècle. While scholars have emphasized the rise of Anglo-Saxonist ideas—particularly the notion of a racial-imperial union between the United States and Britain—as central to late nineteenth-century reimaginings of global politics, little attention has been paid to how such ideas were adapted beyond the English-speaking world itself. Tracing how Ólafsson reworked this paradigm for a transnational audience, the article argues that he expanded the imagined boundaries of the Angloworld through appeals to what he saw as Teutonic whiteness. The result was what might be termed a ‘Teutonisphere’: a vision of racial solidarity illustrating how great-power narratives were refracted, appropriated, and creatively reconfigured by intellectuals in peripheral regions. Cast as pristine exemplars of the Teutonic race, Icelanders were imagined as ideal agents to rejuvenate Anglo-Saxon colonization from the US frontier and Canadian prairies to the South African veldt.

As the first foreign policy issue Nigeria debated, the controversy around France’s nuclear tests, conducted in Algeria during the War of Independence there, allowed Lagos to rehearse its envisioned African role even before formal independence in October 1960. Nigerian opposition to France eventually culminated in the expulsion of the French ambassador on 5 January 1961, after the third French atomic test in the Algerian Sahara. This seemingly straightforward anti-colonial and anti-nuclear act was in fact largely driven by inter-African dynamics, particularly Nigeria’s complicated relationship with Ghana. By reconstructing this episode, the article demonstrates how international affairs uniquely crystallized interactions between domestic and regional politics in decolonizing states. This in turn encourages us to look beyond the paradigms of the Cold War and decolonization when writing the Global South into world history.

Recent scholarship locates the origins of modern free trade policies in the early modern free port movement. This historiography has focused on the intellectual and political history of free ports and emphasized the importance of local and regional factors in shaping trade liberalizations in different European countries and colonies. Based on evidence from eighteenth-century Hamburg, this article proposes a different reading: it argues that free trade policies emerged in response to Atlantic trade expansion. The sources suggest that merchants and magistrates were aware of the monumental change which the growth of the Atlantic trade presented and the economic opportunities it provided. The liberalization of individual ports aimed to capture a greater share of that commerce. Free ports therefore constitute an early example of global economic change driving local European policymaking.

This article examines how Miskitu King Robert Charles Frederic (1824–42) used colonial contracts with foreign merchants to advance his political agenda in Moskitia, on Central America’s Caribbean coast. Drawing on European and Central American archives, this study challenges narratives that portray Indigenous leaders as passive actors in colonial expansion, highlighting how the king strategically wielded contracts to facilitate the import of foreign capital through concessions and loans. His mastery of international finance enabled resistance to imperial domination while allowing him to consolidate power, maintain independence, and participate in nineteenth-century Atlantic political transformations. However, this strategy compelled him to facilitate the entry of financial capitalism into Moskitia, subsequently defining his kingdom’s fiscal governance and external relations. By examining Robert Charles Frederic’s learning process in navigating Caribbean political and Atlantic financial systems, this article contributes to scholarship on Indigenous agency in colonial encounters and reveals how peripheral actors mediated the global spread of economic institutions.

This article considers the responses of the Indian Workers’ Association (Great Britain) (IWA) to food scarcities in India during the late 1960s. It reveals Maoist optics informed IWA critiques, departing from coexistent appraisals articulated in leftist circles in India. In doing so, the article demonstrates the relevance of worldviews, idioms, and paradigms emanating from global conjunctures beyond places of origin among diaspora. IWA luminaries were embedded in revolutionary anti-colonial networks shaped by decolonization and the global Cold War, and bestowed substance upon Maoism in these contexts. Ultimately, this informed IWA perceptions of causes and solutions to the food ‘crisis’: in their characterizations of reliance on external aid as indicative of post-1947 India’s semi-colonial status; in portrayals of Soviet ‘social imperialism’ in India during the Sino-Soviet split; or in demands for radical land reform based on a selective rendering of the Chinese model, which downplayed the consequences of the ‘Great Leap Forward’.

The global expansion of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is an understudied area of research, particularly in the Middle East. The issue is often framed through a linear, state-centric lens that oversimplifies its complexities and subordinates the role of microprocesses and individual actors. This article contributes to global and refugee history through a microhistorical study of the establishment of UNHCR’s branch office for the Middle East in Beirut in 1962. It challenges the assumption that UNHCR’s globalization process unfolded in a systematic and well-reasoned manner and presents three interconnected arguments: first, the selection of Beirut was neither purely systematic nor entirely haphazard; second, UNHCR representatives enjoyed significant freedom in shaping the structure and functions of branch offices; and third, pragmatic diplomacy, rather than strict formalization through an agreement, ensured smooth relations between UNHCR and the Lebanese government.

This article investigates the role of Catholic and non-Catholic local actors in shaping missionary activities in seventeenth-century Ottoman Europe. It examines jurisdictional conflicts and collaborations between Bosnian Franciscan friars, Ragusan merchants, Ottoman officials—particularly judges—and Serbian Orthodox clergy, whose interactions shaped the local landscape of Catholicism and defined the limits of Catholic engagement. Drawing primarily on Catholic missionary sources, the study argues that analysing missions through interconnected local, regional, and global lenses, while foregrounding the agency of local actors, provides a more nuanced understanding of early modern Catholicism. By expanding historiographical approaches that have primarily focused on Catholic missions outside Europe, the article advocates for the inclusion of Ottoman Europe as a significant yet understudied site of Catholic missionary activity. It further highlights the jurisdictional and institutional tensions within Catholic expansion and governance, revealing the complexities of missionary engagement in a politically fragmented and religiously plural environment.

This article reconstructs the religious and political activities of the Lebanese Shi‘i scholar Mohamad Jawad Chirri, who founded the first purpose-built Shi‘i mosque in the United States in 1963. It uses Chirri’s biography to explain the institutional, ideological, and political concerns structuring the global Shi‘i revival of the mid-twentieth century, as well as the strategies adopted by Islamic revivalist figures to achieve their institutional ambitions in a competitive and increasingly globalized religious marketplace. A hypermobile activist who lived and travelled between southern Lebanon, southern Iraq, Michigan, and West Africa, Chirri’s institutional initiatives and public activism took place outside the purview of the centres of Shi‘i religious authority in southern Iraq and Iran. The article argues that Chirri’s work, thought, and legacy complicate diffusionist understandings of Islamic revivalist activity as an ideologically coherent project of politicization or radicalization in the years surrounding the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. The ‘global’ Shi‘i revival should instead be understood as an entanglement of institutional projects linked by transnational familial, professional, and financial networks emerging in the 1950s.

Scholars often analyse Western–Chinese legal conflicts in the nineteenth-century Qing empire through the lens of extraterritoriality. This article examines the 1895 anti-missionary riot in Chengdu and the ensuing dispute over the responsibility of Qing officials. It highlights the protection of foreign lives and property as a key area of contestation between Western powers and the Qing empire. During the riot, Chengdu authorities exploited their discretionary power to challenge missionary presence and undermine treaty obligations. In response, Western powers began a concerted effort to hold local officials accountable by pressuring the Qing state to impose severe punitive sanctions. The riot and its aftermath reveal how a non-Western state negotiated and enforced obligations required by Eurocentric international law. Protection emerges as a multifaceted instrument for the projection of imperial power and a malleable component of the Western-imposed treaty system, mediating the asymmetrical international relations in the nineteenth century.

In 1615, a Dutch fleet under the command of Joris van Spilbergen attacked the Mexican port of Acapulco. The port was the eastern terminus of the Manila galleons, the ships that linked Asia and the Americas during the early modern period. In the face of foreign incursion, Spanish officials in Mexico proposed to secure transpacific trade by constructing the Fort of San Diego to protect Acapulco. To build and later repair the fort, they mobilized thousands of Indigenous men through the repartimiento (rotational forced labour system) from what is now the Mexican state of Guerrero. Using the port’s accounting records, this article argues that the novelty of transpacific empire profoundly affected the social and economic lives of Mexico’s coastal and hinterland Indigenous peoples. However, the global histories of the Manila galleons and of early modern Asia–Latin American connections have overlooked the relationship between Spanish Pacific expansion and Indigenous labour in the Americas. Placing the fort’s Indigenous builders at the centre reveals not only the violent outcomes of imperial anxiety, but also how Indigenous people adapted to the advent of transpacific empire.

Relying on a variety of archival sources, including the recently discovered private correspondence of the Uruguayan diplomat Enrique Buero, this article demonstrates that a Latin American bloc with a common agenda emerged in Geneva during the 1920s and transformed the codification of international law in both the League of Nations and the Pan-American Union. Key pressure groups previously thought to have operated exclusively in the Americas were created in the League by Latin American diplomats who wanted to reform international law to protect small states but had lost faith in Pan-Americanism. The article examines the ideological origins of this bloc and the obstacles that it encountered, including an initial tendency among some diplomats to prioritize status-seeking. It charts the Latin American bloc’s success in dismantling obstacles to the League’s involvement in the Americas. Finally, the article demonstrates that the bloc was able to leverage its influence beyond the League, including during the run-up to the 1933 Montevideo Conference.

The story of the Panama Canal is often framed as a morality tale juxtaposing French tragedy and American triumph (or imperialism). What gets lost in this depiction is a pair of adventurous entrepreneurs, Anthoine de Gogorza and Louis Lacharme, whose efforts led Ferdinand de Lesseps to his doomed canal project. This article shows how the roots of the Panama Canal emerged from the forests of Colombia’s Sinú River Valley, whose settlement, in turn, was fostered by the search for canal routes in the Darien. Yet despite the spatial proximity of these two regions, their overlooked connections were woven together through the ‘lifepaths’ of de Gogorza and Lacharme as they moved from France to Colombia and around the globalizing Atlantic of the nineteenth century. Following their movements, in turn, sheds light on the overlooked figure of the foreign speculator, the business of exploration, and marketing the tropics.

This article explores the nineteenth-century history of ship’s ballast to study global maritime mobility ‘from below’, both socially and materially. Though mostly overlooked by contemporaries and historians alike, ballast was both a necessary resource for and a constraint on sea travel. This article examines ballast in four steps. First, it defines ballast in terms of its function, materiality, and value. Second, it studies ballast in the littoral zone, where specialized ballasting organizations depended on precarious labour and where both its production and disposal became entangled with environmental agendas and concerns. In a third step, the article focuses on ballast at sea, where it materially and sometimes detrimentally impacted the experience of ‘being in transit’. Finally, the article considers the transition to water ballast as an example for the persistence and staying-power of seemingly obsolete technologies and associated labour regimes. Ballast was an obscure but powerful enabler of sea travel. Maintaining this connectivity rested both on the widespread mobilization of labour for ballast practices and on the global movement of vast amounts of otherwise useless weight.

The global diffusion of sewing machines required concerted efforts from manufacturers, sales agents, and, most significantly, local consumers, who rendered the machine legible and desirable across diverse social settings. As this article shows, however, in politically volatile contexts, it was manufacturers who most decisively shaped these processes. Focusing on the Singer Company—the largest and most influential of its kind—the article examines how this process unfolded in the Ottoman empire during the Armenian massacres of the 1890s. Occurring when ethnic and religious homogeneity was becoming central to the political order, the Ottoman case offers an especially important early example of global firms’ responses to the emerging pressures of exclusionary—and often violent—political and economic reordering. The article traces how Singer tested adaptive strategies that not only sustained its regional presence but also recalibrated its business model. In doing so, it contributes to global history by demonstrating how seemingly localized episodes of political violence became formative sites of adaptation, attuning global corporations to a world increasingly structured by systemic violence, warfare, and demographic homogenization.

The exchange of raw cotton and consumer textiles has been widely portrayed as a core element of European imperialism in Africa. The case appears straightforward: textile industries were vital to European economies, yet depended on imported raw cotton and external markets for their surplus output. To meet these needs, colonizers allegedly enforced trade and destroyed African textile sectors, leaving Africans to resist or be coerced. This stylized rendering of ‘cotton imperialism’ was central to metropolitan rhetoric promoted by textile sector lobbyists and government officials, and often remains unchallenged in scholarship today. I show, however, that it is at odds with actual colonial efforts and outcomes across twentieth-century Africa. Colonial cotton and textile trade did expand, but in ways hardly consistent with the aims of European industries, and even textile sector actors themselves showed limited and inconsistent commitment to cotton production in Africa. Policies on the ground were shaped above all by fiscal, administrative, and political priorities in the colonies. Metropolitan rhetoric mattered, but shaped colonial policies and practices only in muted and subverted ways.

This article considers the history of Emergency Health Kits established by United Nations agencies and the larger medical non-governmental organizations of the 1980s to analyse the significance of standardized responses in humanitarian emergencies. We argue that, far from being a rigid and immutable response, the kits reflected a (not universally realized) desire to standardize and control both supplies and medical care from international organizations. As such, humanitarian medical practice remained a disputed field in which each object or drug was negotiated at the risk of creating innovation traps. Coming at a time of increasingly global logistics capacities, the Emergency Health Kits became a central feature of a more coordinated global marketplace of humanitarian aid. The kits’ promise to provide rapid transport of emergency supplies to crisis settings across the world was often experienced as a construct, with long delays and logjams in certain regions. Even so, humanitarian organizations were agents of globalization because they imagined a system of centralized production in the Global North and supply to isolated and/or insecure locations across the world.

Between the 1890s and the 1940s, a diverse group of Chilean diplomats, businessmen, and intellectuals sought to convert Japan into a principal consumer of Chile’s struggling nitrate fertilizer industry (saltpetre). The commercial effort to revive Chile’s export development model through Japanese markets also evolved into an intention to emulate Japan’s formula for sturdy nation-building and for fortifying the economic sovereignty against North Atlantic capital. Ultimately, this article situates Chilean–Japanese relations within a global moment of decolonization and development that sought to reform North Atlantic dominion over international affairs. That Latin American nation- and order-building were shaped not only by the binary embrace or rejection of models from the United States and Europe, but also by ideas from Japan, the Pacific, and Latin America itself, illustrates the possibilities for and sophistication of Global South designs for international engagements and development, even if their counterfactual imaginaries did not always materialize as intended.