This article explores the evolution of Chinese terminology for American cochineal to study global material culture in its local and trans-regional contexts. As the most highly valued insect-derived source of red colourant, American cochineal was introduced to China in the sixteenth century, with trade reaching its peak between the 1820s and mid-1870s. Since the early eighteenth century, various Chinese names emerged for cochineal; different terms were applied by different socioeconomic groups, though most were eventually forgotten. This article examines the emergence, spread, and persistence of predominant terms, alongside the obsolescence of others, within the context of Sino-European and regional knowledge exchange, trade dynamics, and scientific understanding of cochineal. The analysis demonstrates the evolution of Chinese terminology for cochineal was intricately linked to shifts within the intertwined spheres of global, regional, and local histories. It also reveals the coexistence and disconnection among various forms of global-local ‘connectivity’ through the linguistic dimensions concerning cochineal’s presence in China.

Throughout the nineteenth century, African communities in the Congo estuary displayed a consistent preference for ‘trade guns’, the rough-and-ready muzzle-loading muskets that European producers and traders regarded as obsolete and as an indirect proof of African backwardness. The first section of this article seeks to account for this consumer predilection. The second and third substantive parts of the article explore the provenance of these guns and argue that the lower Congo’s gun trade can be disaggregated into three phases, each of which was marked by the local ascendancy of different trading houses. The most general aim of the article is to make a case for the role of African consumer demand in fostering processes of global economic integration. More specifically, by showing that west-central African demand was responsible for the enduring vitality of Liège’s non-mechanised cottage industry, the article points to an often-overlooked aspect of nineteenth-century globalisation: far from invariably promoting innovation in industrialisation, the growing interdependence of different parts of the world could also have the effect of giving a new lease of life to apparently antiquated manufacturing methods.

The archives of the London Corn Trade Association shed light on how open competitive commodity markets expanded during the First Global Era in spite of hard, non-cooperative geopolitics. This private body, fully controlled by elite merchants, standardised supply, turning grains into fungible commodities; it arbitrated disputes; and it offered to traders standard contracts that integrated the international value chains. Enforcement rested on market power: few merchant houses in the world dared being expelled from the London market. Private rules and contracts thus applied extra-territorially, without being much affected by the political regimes on the ground. But they were also upheld by the London courts and the Bank of England, so that they were both local and global, therefore imperial. Market power, private ordering, and legal pluralism should be seen as a defining feature of Britain’s global economic governance.

This article investigates the global history of dryland modernisation through the case study of southern Italy. From the early twentieth century to the fascist years, several intellectuals, scientists, and politicians reinterpreted the apparent and long-standing backwardness of this region as fundamentally due to its hydrology and climate: southern Italy was rediscovered as a dry land, formally part of Italy and civilised Europe and yet environmentally closer to extra-European spaces of empire. The article shows how Italian agrarian scientists mobilised this ‘environmental Otherness’ of the Italian south as the key to developing a ‘dryland’ science alternative to that of ‘humid’ northern Italy and continental Europe. Instead, this ‘dryland’ approach to modernisation grounded southern Italy within a vast transimperial network defined by the co-production and circulation of knowledge and technologies allowing the adaptation of modern and intensive food production to semi-arid regions. As such, the article argues that Italian agrarian scientists redefined the spatial order of the Italian south in a transimperial sense, embracing its environmental Otherness as a vantage point for its rehabilitation within Italy’s nation-building.

This article discusses the ways the Palestinian struggle was perceived as part of regional and global networks that crystallised following the First World War, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, and the rise of mandatory authorities in the Middle East. It examines Palestinian disillusionment with the expectation that the principle of self-determination would serve as a basis for the creation of a new world political order and, in turn, in the dissolution of the world of the colonial authorities. It focuses, on one hand, on the ways in which the Rif War in Morocco (1921–6) and the great Syrian rebellion, which broke out in 1925, affected Palestinian national consciousness, and on the other hand, how these crises revealed the explicit identification of the Zionist movement with colonial forces. In the article I examine the representations of the uprisings in the contemporary Palestinian and Hebrew press as a basis for seeing the uprising as an important turning point, in terms of creating the Zionist separatist space and the strengthening of the alliance between the Zionist movement and the mandatory colonial rule and its identification with global colonial forces.

This article uses non-literary essays that appeared in the Peruvian press during the Oncenio period in Peru (1919–30) to nuance our understanding of Latin American Orientalism. Critical study of the extant material shows that there were at least three strands of Orientalism circulating among Peruvian readers, with the presence or absence of Asian communities in Peru and the larger history of Spanish imperialism and Spanish-language Orientalism acting as their conditions of possibility. While the large Chinese community in Peru triggered an Orientalist backlash akin to modern Anglo-French Orientalism, the absence of Southeast Asians in the country allowed for a more medieval-colonial Orientalism to persist, one that focused more on wonder for and exoticisation of Asian cultures. The exception would be the Philippines, which due to its previous history as a Spanish colony, was presented as a ‘modern’ country comparable to any in Latin America. Given that representations of Southeast Asia are often overlooked in the study of Latin American Orientalism—which in turn tends to focus on literary representations by writers from countries like Argentina or Mexico—this article fills these gaps and contributes to the global histories of Latin America and of Orientalism.

In the mid-twentieth century, the jurist Hans Kelsen envisaged a new legal and political international order. His global thinking revolved around his idea of a ‘world state’ as a means to preserve peace. The article contends that Kelsen’s ideas on global legal and political order and a world state in the 1940s drew on his intellectual biography and on his earlier theoretical writings on order in the national scale. Another important source for understanding Kelsen’s global thinking is his critique of the Chicago World Constitution Draft, a mid-century project which proposed the establishment of a federal world state. As this study shows, Kelsen’s global thinking is characterised by a multi-scalar logic and an emphasis on positive law as the foundation of political and legal order. These elements render his ideas distinct in the historical trajectory of modern global thought, and deserve the attention of global historians today.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, disputes about fishing rights and practices that emerged due to decolonisation processes and the expansion of maritime boundaries shaped diplomatic relations between Taiwan and Pacific polities. Whether legal or illegal, fisheries provided a space where Taiwan and Pacific locales engaged at state and non-state levels. Using newspapers and archival materials, this article examines how the Taiwanese fishing community in American Samoa became intertwined in American Samoan society and complicated state-level relationships. This legal fishing community then expanded into illegal fishing incidents in Tuvalu, Niue, and the Cook Islands, again shaping Taiwan-Pacific relations. Taiwan’s fisheries history demonstrates beyond-the-state encounters for Taiwan, overseas Chinese communities in the Pacific, colonised and independent Pacific locales, and colonial powers. It contributes to global history understandings of a deep relationality between histories of the Pacific Rim and Oceania that have been separated in historical analysis.

Since the 1950s, Catalonia has remained one of Europe’s most popular tourism destinations. Throughout this period, however, Catalonia’s presentation to the world has changed dramatically. In this article, I explore claims to authenticity in Catalan tourism attractions and promotion, which emerged as shrewd marketing language in the increasingly competitive tourism market of the 1980s and 1990s. The resulting Catalanisation of the region conditioned the international projection and reception of the region as historically, linguistically, culturally, and politically different from Spain and, indeed, the rest of the world. This new image of the region relied on and sustained an ontology of marketable and consumable national difference that resonates far beyond Catalonia’s borders. This research shows how ideas of consumable authenticity functioned as an important mediator between nationalism and globalisation, popularised nationalist thinking without the influence of committed nationalist actors, and helped scholars to understand the sustained importance of the nation-state as a unit of international politics despite its shifting meaning, function, and power from the 1970s to today.

This article explores how multilateral negotiations for technology trade accelerated the fall of the Cold War economic divide in East Asia. Drawing on archival sources in Japan, the United States, China, Britain, and France, it focuses on computer trade between China and capitalist countries from 1968 to 1980. The computer, a dual-use technology essential to China’s industrial and military modernisation, was at the centre of debate among capitalist countries. While competing to export advanced technologies to the China market, they needed to relax export controls through the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, an international regime to oversee export restrictions on communist countries during the Cold War. This combination of competition and cooperation weakened the restrictive trade regime dating back to before the Korean War, enabling capitalist countries with diverse economic and security interests to find common ground to sell to Chinese customers. By examining this process, this article reveals that dual-use technologies, often viewed in global history as a source of division among states, could in fact promote economic and political interactions across the East-West divide.