This chapter provides a comprehensive narrative of the central role of Stockholm in the evolution of climate change science, one of the most significant scientific specializations relevant for global environmental governance.. With roots in Stockholm-based Svante Arrhenius’ still remarkably precise calculations in the 1890s of the magnitude of the greenhouse effect, the narrative shows how Carl-Gustaf Rossby, after an initial career in the United States, returned to Sweden from where he managed to build and maintain institutions and networks on both sides of the Atlantic in the postwar decades and secure a stable base for a new understanding of the geophysics and chemistry of climate. Swedish climate science, including expertise in glaciology, became recognized as world-leading, with an early and firm institutional foothold being established at Stockholm University. Of global environmental relevance, it produced entrepreneurial science diplomats like Bert Bolin, a climate scientist and founding chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This trust-building combination of institutions, networks, and policies enabled the continued evolution of Stockholm-based innovative platforms for global environmental governance leadership.

This chapter traces how the concept of ethnicity emerged as a depoliticised alternative to nationality. By the end of the nineteenth century, the triumph of nationalism as the hegemonic source of state legitimacy had resulted in the politicisation of the nation concept. This conceptual linkage of ‘nation’ with ‘state’ opened up a terminological vacuum: If nationhood implied statehood, what label should be given to those stateless nations and national minorities that had neither a state of their own nor the political capacity to acquire one? Against this backdrop, the chapter traces how an embryonic concept of ethnicity was articulated to fill in the terminological void. The chapter’s empirical focus is on the early twentieth-century academic literature on nationalism and the establishment of the world’s first international minority rights regime after the First World War. The argument also has significant implications for debates surrounding the conceptual distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism.

Dietterlin’s Architectura prints and the processes he used to form them engaged with sixteenth-century Central Europe’s robust culture of alchemy to transform the architectural image into a context of scientific inquiry. Formal and iconographic analyses of architectural etchings by Dietterlin, Wenzel Jamnitzer, and Hans Vredeman de Vries, in conversation with texts by alchemists Agrippa of Nettesheim and Paracelsus, reveal how architectural image-makers used etching’s mercurial, shapeshifting forms and the protean materiality of ornament not only to picture but also to activate alchemical theories and principles of empirical investigation. Dietterlin’s Architectura prints channelled etching’s alchemical dimensions, comparing the material and chemical transformations involved in architectural etching with the processes of transmutation studied in contemporary alchemical research. As is evident from the alchemical imagery that Dietterlin’s Architectura contributed to the court art of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, the Architectura established architectural images as contexts of alchemical thinking in the years around 1600. In sum, the transformative structures of Dietterlin’s architectural etchings allowed architectural prints to become fora for natural philosophical inquiry.

This chapter discusses Ghazali’s Writings in Persian and reception in Iran. Typical Ghazālī studies center his Arabic output. Yet one major work, The Alchemy of Happiness, was written originally in Persian. Ghazālī participated in a Khurasani cultural tradition. Zarrinkoub argues that Ghazālī’s mystical understanding of Islam, against prevailing literalism, influenced Islamicate civilization and culture. Zarrinkoub highlights the contribution of Persian-speaking philosophers, theologians, and scholars to the mystical and theological development of Sunni Islam. Although Iran is conventionally framed as the epicenter of Shi‘ism, Iran only became a majority Shi‘a country with the Safavid Empire in 1501. Through Persian resources we see a cosmopolitan Islam thriving where the Abbasid Empire intersected with multiple cultural revolutions, and where mysticism and established power clashed and reconciled in Ghazālī’s Sufi encounter. Ghazālī’s flight from the madrasa was a flight from orthodoxy in Islamic education, in his renunciation of the educational system. Ghazālī’s Sufism was partly a critique of the dogmatic understanding of Islam common among the ‘ulama.’

Artists, natural philosophers, and architects in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century northern Europe regarded images and image-making as sources of knowledge. Diverse practitioners of art, architecture, and natural philosophy – from artists Albrecht Dürer and Martin Schongauer to medical practitioner Walther Hermann Ryff and natural historian Conrad Gessner – used images to revive Vitruvius’s vision of architecture as both art and science, for instance in collaborating to complete the Strasbourg Astronomical Clock in 1574. Architectural ornament came to act as a model for visualizing nature’s regular forms and systems, playing a vital role in the revival of such Vitruvian interdisciplinarity. That process, in turn, prompted early modern architects and designers of architectural ornament to combine artistic and scientific techniques of visual research, a phenomenon exemplified in Dietterlin’s Architectura treatise.

This chapter examines the Chinese controversy over “Jeep girls,” referring to women who socialized, sometimes intimately, with American soldiers during and after World War II. While conservatives maligned “Jeep girls” out of racial and sexual anxieties, liberals and self-identified Jeep girls invoked the language of modernity and patriotism. However, in the wake of the Peking Rape incident in 1946, the once diverse debate quickly ended as nationwide protests raged against American imperialism. Delving into various archives and periodicals from both countries, this research uncovers the complexities of Chinese women’s experiences and their stories, which have been muffled or filtered through patriarchal agendas.

Chapter 4 introduces the concept of a Black feminist toolkit to show that at the microlevel, Black women succeed at growing movement participation and solidarity by utilizing transnational Black feminist politics to convert experiences of pain into purpose. Here, I examine the processes through which affective and emotional bonds serve as political devices for mobilization in race-based social movements, utilizing and expanding the concept of collective emotional energy levels. Furthermore, I engage with Vilma Piedade’s concept of dororidade, a combination of the Portuguese words for pain, solidarity, and sisterhood, to illuminate why and how affective processes of mobilization are critical to Black women’s participation in Argentina’s feminist and Black social movements. I argue that Black women activists and artist-activists equip their constituency with what I name a Black feminist toolkit, which gives them a collectivized knowledge, language, and confidence to process the otherwise crippling forms of quotidian and institutional racism that they experience.

Histories of harbour development at Cochin have assumed that the Cochin Harbor Project was motivated by the colonial state’s economic interests and that it provides yet another illustration of the technological hubris associated with high modernism. Through a close analysis of the debates and discussions preceding the execution of the project however, this chapter shows that both of these assessments are inaccurate. Unlike what such accounts suggest, every stage of the Cochin Harbor Project was mired in doubt – with senior officials conceding that the project was likely to have an adverse impact on the port and its surroundings. Why then was this project executed despite such concerns? I argue that far from representing the colonial state’s confident mobilization of technology to meet its economic and strategic needs, as commonly assumed, the Cochin Harbor Project was in fact an uneasy compromise between the divergent and often competing political and economic interests of the colonial state and the princely states of Malabar. At a time of increasing environmental and political instability, a development project, this chapter shows, offered the best possibility of not only meeting the criterion of ‘productive works’ that was so central to colonial finance but also securing the cooperation of the princely states of Malabar that were becoming increasingly assertive.

Marx summed up Europe’s many impacts on world history as showing “what human activity can bring about” – namely, the capacity to undo and remake the human world. Although we have become increasingly aware of the negative side of this release of human energies, in war, ecological destruction, and imperial domination, the positive one survives in the closer contact between peoples, modern industry’s potential to reduce poverty, and the expansion of practical knowledge and scientific understanding. Remaking the World argues that what put Europe at the center of these changes was first the division and fragmentation that persisted through much of its history and then the emergence of spheres of activity that were autonomous in the sense of regulating themselves by principles derived from the activities carried on within them, as opposed to “teleocratic” domains governed by norms that were generated outside themselves. Unlike other attempts to grasp European distinctiveness which focus chiefly on economics and industry, it gives equal attention to culture, science, and the politics of liberty, and makes comparisons based on substantial discussions of counterparts to these developments elsewhere.

Generals Joseph W. Stilwell and Haydon L. Boatner shared extensive China experiences, starting from their tours in Tianjin to their roles as language students and US army attachés in Beijing in the 1920s to the 1930s. After Pearl Harbor, they returned to Asia to assume crucial positions in the China-Burma-India Theater (CBI). Chiang appointed Stilwell the commanding general and Boatner the chief of staff of the Chinese Army in India. However, American and Chinese officers clashed over command, in the training center in Ramgarh, India, and on the war front in north Burma. Boatner, often acting as Stilwell’s surrogate, became a lightning rod, drawing the ire of a number of Chinese officers. This chapter examines the contentious US-China relations as exemplified by Boatner’s conflict with his Chinese peers, especially during the Battles of the Hukawng Valley and Myitkyina. It cautions against interpreting Sino-American conflicts in moralizing, racializing, or orientalizing terms.

In Chapter 3, I illustrate the macro-level role of a society’s emotional history, defined as the collective emotional response to historical events, in galvanizing state support. I argue that by leveraging the opportunities offered by the Kirchner moment and the bicentennial, with its opening toward new histories of women, people of color, and other marginalized communities, Black activists successfully employed discursive and emotional repertoires of the human rights movements in interactions with the state. For example, societal shame and haunting tied to the concept of “the disappeared” provided the political currency to achieve state-level recognition by calling on the government to address the historically attempted genocide of Afro-Argentines as a human rights issue. This strategic activism resulted in Law 26.852, the National Day of Afro-Argentines and Black Culture, as well as other Movimiento Negro successes at the state level.

This chapter demonstrates how Sweden as a state, and in particular Stockholm as a city, has played an oversized role in the emergence of global environmental governance since the mid-1960s, with the 1972 Stockholm Conference on “the human environment” as a defining event. The chapter argues that “human” is a key word to identify the set of properties of Swedish society that can explain Sweden’s vanguard role, including strong popular movements, widespread social trust, robust social institutions, the high status of knowledge and research, and a rational positioning of Sweden as a progressive, nonaligned advocate of small state cooperation bringing advantages for both the country and its capital city. It is thus a counternarrative that is presented, in contrast to many conventional environmental narratives of decline, with theoretical and historiographical implications not only for environmental history but also for the understanding of what “environmental progress” might mean on the international level. The chapter identifies four “con”-words – contributing, connecting, convening, and contributing.