American Baptist Theological Seminary (ABTS), founded as a black Baptist school in 1924, sprung from an unusual partnership between black and white Baptists in the Jim Crow South. The black National Baptist Convention (NBC) and white Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) jointly funded and governed the Nashville seminary, emphasizing from the outset the strength of their common Baptist identity, though persistent frictions reared up with regularity. The relationship between two leaders involved with ABTS in the mid-twentieth century – National Baptist David V. Jemison and Southern Baptist Eugene P. Alldredge – offers an intriguing lens for viewing the hopes and pitfalls that attended Baptist interracialism in the segregated South. Their correspondence in the 1940s reveals a growing friendship and fellowship as they collaborated in seminary work and bonded over their likeminded Baptist convictions, followed by an abrupt rift after Alldredge’s paternalistic meddling in NBC politics led Jemison to defend black Baptist autonomy. Thus, the Jemison–Alldredge relationship poignantly illustrates two conflicting realities facing such attempts at Baptist interracialism: Baptist identity did offer a legitimate nexus for interracial fellowship, yet the racial hierarchy and prejudices of a segregated society also circumscribed those efforts, as black Baptists walked a tightrope between assuaging white concerns and maintaining their own independence.

Sir Albert Howard helped popularize the idea of translating ‘Eastern’ practice into ‘Western’ science in the field of agriculture. His approach to composting has been foundational to organic farming and counterposed with the field of agricultural chemistry. This depiction of feuding ideologies – organic versus chemical – is based largely on Howard’s opposition to the fragmentation of scientific knowledge and its products, especially artificial fertilizer. One underexplored aspect of Howard’s contest with the agricultural research establishment is the role played by intellectual property. This article contributes to Howard’s historiography by examining three topics related to his life’s work that concern money and patents: (1) the financial support for the Institute of Plant Industry at Indore, (2) an artificial manure patented by employees at Rothamsted Experimental Station and (3) a rival method in British municipal composting. I argue that Howard’s ideological difference with agricultural chemists was not reducible to generating soil fertility with compost. Rather, the feud consisted of a larger debate about innovation, ownership and the societal benefits of scientific research.

The study of the history of science is widely understood to be undergoing a profound and much-needed transformation, from a subject focused on Europe to one encompassing the entire world. Yet the aims of the field have always been global. During the decades after the Second World War the inevitable progress of Western science was seen as the key to its role in world history. From the 1970s the rise of cultural history and laboratory ethnographies undermined this assumption. Indebted to colonial anthropology, these approaches revealed that the power of science was not inherent, but the result of local and contingent processes. Explanation needed to be symmetrical in analysing practices of all kinds wherever they were found, from economics and divination in West Africa to supernatural healing and particle physics in the American heartland. The geographical and conceptual broadening of the field is thus a long-delayed outcome of developments extending back many decades. It also means that references to the ‘global’ in history of science – even more than elsewhere in the humanities – continue to resonate with the universalizing aims of the natural and social sciences.

Official Ecuadorian gross domestic product (GDP) data begin in 1950. Prior, only preliminary estimates were available, based on very scattered evidence and broad assumptions. In this paper, we estimate new GDP figures for Ecuador for 1900–50. These are based on the quantitative and qualitative information available for the period, using extensive primary and secondary sources. The new data series allows analysing Ecuador’s economic growth and structural change and comparing them to industrialised core countries and other countries in the region. Unlike previous estimates, our series shows a sustained divergence of Ecuador from the core countries during the first half of the 20th century.