This article asks why simplistic accounts of the British Empire as a modernizing force have been so popular in recent years. It contends that, aside from the obvious ideological appeal of these views to some, academic literature has found it difficult to offer a powerful rebuttal. This article argues that in order to do so we need to think more comparatively about the British Empire as a system, and to restore attention to imperial agency. However, this is not best achieved through a traditional study of high politics, but by bringing cultural historical approaches to the study of Britain’s lower imperial cadre. The second half of the article offers a preliminary analysis of the attitudes of local colonial officers. It argues that, contrary to the arguments of neo-imperialist popular historians, this group was hostile to modernization, and in many cases was determined to maintain or restore what they regarded as a traditional order.

The main goals of this article are to review historiographical trends and set new directions for late Ottoman history. First, the paper demonstrates that current research on the late Ottoman Empire still operates within the confines of the centre–periphery model, and sustains dualistic and state-centred narratives. Second, I argue that a ‘historical trajectory’ framework is a better analytical tool and empirical strategy. It is spatial, path-dependent, and comparative. With special reference to the Middle Eastern provinces, I show that the Ottoman Empire was characterized by distinct imperial paths during the nineteenth century, each representing an alternative route to state–society and local–global relations. The article further suggests that a trajectory-specific approach can provide new prospects for understanding Eurasian land-based empires from a comparative perspective.

The question of ‘nodes’ in the Armenian commercial network, it is argued here, cannot be separated from a larger process, which helped places such as Madras to rise as alternatives to New Julfa, from as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century. The network of Armenian commerce did not have a single strong centre with many peripheries, but a chain of multiple nodes functioning as crucial linking points. This paper focuses on one particular trade route, from Madras to Manila, in the eighteenth century. The Philippines attracted Spanish American silver, which was then pumped into various regional economies of Asia – China and India in particular – in the shape of investment. A Spanish ban on European shipping at Manila made Armenians (and Indians) indispensable partners for European trade to Manila. This gave Armenian trade to Manila a strong European flavour. Armenians helped to camouflage this trade, and enriched themselves from it at the same time, operating often independently of New Julfa.

However an active network once frustrated always has a tendency to compensate for its losses. Driven out of one region, it may press its capital and the advantages it offers upon another. This seems at any rate to have been the rule whenever a really vigorous and accumulative form of capitalism was concerned.1

This paper explores the intimate connection between imperialism and a liberal global economy in the late nineteenth century and the inter-war period by distinguishing and disentangling the imperial and political dimensions of the pre-World War I gold standard, and interwar efforts to restore it. By doing so it attempts partial!y to redress the relative neglect of power in historical accounts of the international financial arrangements, and re-balance conventional liberal assumptions about the role of markets and incentives in the consolidation and spread of global institutions such as the gold standard. By re-embedding the intertwined financial histories of the imperial and Atlantic worlds into a global context, perspectives from the empire help develop more historically-situated analyses of global economic institutions and arrangements, and help clarify the many intersecting processes involving both power, in all its forms, and markets, that have historically shaped financial relations and institutions.

This article deals with the life and work of the early twentieth-century British modernist composers Cyril Scott and John Foulds, in the context of British national music and ‘imperial culture’ at large. Through a discussion of their Theosophical spirituality, Indian musical exoticism, and modernist aesthetics (for all of which they became outsiders to the British music establishment), it tentatively investigates their ideas as part of an ‘alternative’ ideological cluster, which equally influenced British ‘imperial culture’. Furthermore, it discusses the role of Theosophists (such as Annie Besant, Margaret Cousins, and Rukmini Devi) in Indian nationalism and the making of modern South Indian music. This situates the cases of Scott and Foulds within Theosophy as a global movement, and illustrates how cosmopolitan radicalism, Western self-questioning, modernist aesthetics, and anti-establishment thinking linked up with the emergence of non-Western anti-imperial nationalism through an intricate network of personal relationships in metropolis and colony.

This article considers how the existence of an ancient community, the Jews of Cochin on India’s Malabar coast, was transformed by the force of two powerful twentieth-century nationalisms – Indian nationalism and Zionism. It does so through telling the story of a remarkable individual, A. B. Salem, a lawyer, politician, Jewish religious reformer, and Indian nationalist, who was instrumental in promoting the Zionist cause and facilitating the mass migration of the Cochin Jews to Israel. Salem’s story illustrates how the prioritization and translation of kinds of identity into the public sphere is fluid and contingent upon a variety of circumstances, personal as well as the outcome of changes in the wider world.

The article uses various ways of measuring the efficiency of institutions regulating market exchange, such as interest rates, the skill premium, and the level of market integration, to try to answer the question about the quality of institutions in the different parts of Eurasia in the centuries before the ‘Great Divergence’. It appears that Western Europe, from as early as the late medieval period, had a relatively well-developed set of institutions. By contrast, South and Southeast Asian institutions were much less geared towards well-functioning markets. However, Japan and China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries developed institutions that were relatively efficient, and resulted in relatively high levels of commercial exchange. A number of hypotheses are then reviewed that may help to explain a European head start dating from the late Middle Ages.

Comparative analyses of labour in Russia and the West often assume a dividing line between free and forced labour that is universally applicable. The first aim of this article is to show that, in Russia, the historical and institutional definition of serfdom poses a problem. I will therefore explore Russian legislation, and how it was applied, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Contrary to generally accepted arguments, serfdom as such was never clearly introduced institutionally in Russia. I will also discuss the presence of slaves in Russia, and the association between certain forms of servitude (especially for debt) and slavery. The presence of chattel slaves in the empire was related to territorial expansion, and to commercial relations with the Caucasus and the Ottoman Empire. Russian forms of bondage are compared to those in other situations, such as indentured service in the West, debt servitude in India, and Islamic slavery. My conclusion is that, not only in Russia but also around the globe, the prevailing forms of labour were not those familiar to us today, which were not introduced until the early twentieth century. Russia constituted an extreme case in a world in which severe constraints were imposed everywhere on labour and its movement, and the legal status of the wage earner and the peasant was lower than that of the master.

The trajectories of German nationalism in the late nineteenth century were deeply affected by the process of globalization. While the literature on the subject has largely remained within the confines of a national history paradigm, this article uses the example of mobility and migration to show to what extent German nationalism was transformed under the auspices of global integration. Among the effects of cross-border circulation were the emergence of diasporic nationalism, the racialization of the nation, the implementation of new border regimes, and the hegemony of ideological templates that linked nationalist discourse to global geopolitics. This article is intended as a contribution to a ‘spatial turn’ in the historiography of nationalism, in arguing that not only the ‘nation form’ but also the way that the nation was defined, understood, and practised – the particular contents of nationalism – owed more to the global context in which it was constituted than is usually recognized.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wheat varieties from the Russian steppes were introduced on the Great Plains of the USA, a region with a similar environment. The introduction was partly a by-product of the migration of German farmers from the steppes to the Great Plains in the 1870s. The US Department of Agriculture, eager to promote American wheat production in a competitive world market for grain in which Russia was in the lead, sought out wheat varieties on the steppes that were suitable for the Great Plains. Russian wheat varieties became mainstays on the Great Plains for the next few decades, while Russian agriculture declined under Soviet power. On the basis of research on both sides of the Atlantic, this article sheds light on an important aspect of the global exchange of peoples and crops that has shaped the agricultural and economic history of societies around the world since the invention of agriculture.

Scholarly literature on nineteenth-century nationalism concentrates on its strong exclusionary tendencies, while studies of the Cuban independence leader José Martí (1853–95) focus on his articulation of Cuban nationalism and pan-Latin American regionalism through his political activities and writings. This article identifies the globalism of Martí’s nationalism, moving beyond the national and regional frameworks to which studies of Martí have consigned the Cuban freedom fighter. It argues that the global history narratives that Martí wrote for children constitute critical and innovative components of his programme for national liberation and nation building, and encapsulate his nationalist ideology through three key components: the right to self-determination at the national level, the right to self-determination at the personal level, and a sense of global humanitarianism. The article’s transnational perspective places Martí, through his inclusionary, racially blind, humanitarian form of nationalism, as contradicting late nineteenth-century nationalist doctrines, and begs for ideas about the general intellectual climate of the period to be rethought.

This article explores the origins of divergent technological pathways in the early modern world, and the role that artisanal knowledge played in this process. It rejects older explanations based on societal differences in entrepreneurial propensities and incentives, and a more modern one based on factor cost. It argues instead for the importance of conditions that facilitated transactions between complementary skills. In India, the institutional setting within which artisan techniques were learned had made such transactions less likely than in eighteenth-century Europe. The cost of acquiring knowledge, therefore, was relatively high in India.

Organizing trans-Saharan camel caravans was a complicated business requiring skills, stamina, resources, and human capital. This article focuses on the contractual world of caravanning in the nineteenth and early twentieth century based on interviews with retired caravanners, original trade records, and legal sources mined in private family archives. It surveys the different contractual agreements that featured commonly in this ‘paper economy’, which was based on a reliance on literacy and Islamic law. It is argued that contracts were key instruments for accounting and accountability even between traders with kinship ties and other sources of solidarity, and that they were often the only channel for women to engage in long-distance trade via proxy.

There has been little in the way of fresh thinking on the Eurasian spice trade since the 1980s, partly due to the crisis in economic history, although recent work has both dealt with the agency of non-European actors and started to take Chinese demand into the equation. Starting with problems specific to the Portuguese re-export trade, this article highlights the role of consumers, using research undertaken on the structures of demand to present a theory of cultural demystification. The Portuguese, it is argued, by opening direct trading links to the sources of supply, broke what amounted to a spell that had sustained the trade from the time of Alexander the Great. In concrete terms, the performance of individual spices is disaggregated, and the appearance of rival pepper products brought under scrutiny. While African peppers failed to consolidate the consumer interest they had generated over the fifteenth century, capsicum peppers rapidly spread to southern Europe, where they were domesticated and hence became invisible to international trade. The success of the capsicum pepper was replicated in West Africa, India, and China.

Many societies became Muslim gradually, without conquest by Muslim rulers. Explanations of this process typically focus on Muslim traders, proselytizing ‘holy men’, and the conversion of ruling elites, as the limited sources suggest. Yet it cannot be assumed that Islamization always made sense for elites as a power-enhancing stratagem, or that rulers or holy men were willing or able to shape the religious allegiances of commoners. In fact, studies of contemporary Islamic societies demonstrate the relative autonomy of commoners’ religious observance, and the tendency of elites towards accommodation. Evidence from a recently Islamized region in East Africa shows that, rather than following elite converts, ordinary villagers initiated rural Islamization. They learned from coastal Muslim ritual rather than scripture, and evoked Islam to challenge social hierarchies and assert a more egalitarian social ethos. The possibility of similar processes also exists in other sites of gradual Islamization.

This article examines the history of prostitution as a regional phenomenon in Southeast Asia over the course of the twentieth century. I argue that this institution changed shape several times during that period, and that a number of rubrics might be employed to best study this evolution. The first part of the article looks at some of the traditional parameters of prostitution as it was practised both in island and mainland Southeast Asia, while the second part of the essay traces some new developments in the burgeoning colonial age. The third part of the piece then looks at war-time prostitution as a separate phenomenon from these earlier developments, while the fourth examines the rise of sex tourism in the region, partially as an offshoot of these same armed conflicts in the middle decades of the century. Finally, the last section of the article looks at how borders, cities, and economic inequalities have acted upon each other in today’s world to change the shape of regional prostitution in Southeast Asia yet again.

Fashion was arguably a social phenomenon that emerged in Europe during early modern times, and this paper seeks to determine whether it was unknown in the refined civilizations of the East. The conclusion is that fashion was not a European invention. The analysis of the evolution of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese clothing systems underlines how these societies underwent phases in which, thanks to propitious economic conditions, the accentuated propensity towards consumption stimulated behaviour that challenged the traditional hierarchies of appearance, usually regulated by canons of a prescriptive nature. Fashion was not, therefore, a European invention, but it only fully developed as a social institution in Europe, while in India, China, and Japan it only evolved partially, without being able to obtain full social recognition.