‘Circulation’ is not only among the most widely used words in the language of global history; it is also among the most erratically employed. Amorphous in its usages and protean in its semantics, ‘circulation’ has come to describe any sort of movement: from circular movement and passage along the vessels of closed systems to, paradoxically, open-ended, unidirectional dissemination. This article asks how ‘circulation’ became prominent metaphorically in global history; it seeks to understand the word’s appeal and the consequences of its ascendancy. It argues that the popularity of ‘circulation’ is attributable to a merger of two of its qualities: its seeming ‘untainted-ness’ and openness, on the one hand, and on the other, how its older, medical and economic, meanings resonate in its usages, allowing it to convey a sense of entity (independent existence) for the terrain in which ‘circulation’ occurs, and a sense of directedness, self-reliance, and ‘liquidity’ for the movements it describes.

Natural history products formed an important, but little studied, component of the globalization of trade in the mid nineteenth century. The trade, specifically in zoology, occurred in the face of considerable challenges. It penetrated some of the more remote areas of the globe; its products were heterogeneous and difficult to price; and exchange occurred among scientists, commercial traders, and collectors, each of whom had their own particular practices and mores. This article charts the dimensions of this trade and offers explanations about the ways in which its complexities were addressed through major developments in taxidermy, taxonomy, transport and business logistics, alternative forms of exchange, and trust-based networks. More broadly, our work speaks to current developments in global history, imperial networks, and the history of scientific collecting.

Contemporaries and historians alike have explained the imperialism of interwar Japan, Italy, and Germany through the paradigm of a ‘new world order’. This article critically revisits this received assumption by analysing the place of the Axis in the longer history of imperialism from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War. If we cast Axis empires – a blend of fascism and imperialism – in the larger framework constituted by the relationship between the nation and capital, it becomes clear that they were not so much the result of the peculiar national histories of Japan, Italy, and Germany, but products of larger, global forces. Through an examination of recent scholarship, this article offers a new conceptual interpretation of the link between imperialism and fascism. In so doing, it adds to our understanding of the interwar period by breaking down the neat boundaries between liberal and fascist world orders.

This article stresses the role of colonial governments, not only national sovereign states, in Asia (and to a lesser extent, Africa) at the League of Nations in shaping global governing norms. It emphasizes the significance of lateral and horizontal cooperative actions across colonial governments, especially intercolonial networks of public health experts. It argues that the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) accepted these intercolonial practices in Asia in the 1920s, and that this led it to recognize colonial governments as formal and legitimate units in its intergovernmental conferences held in the mid 1930s. In the process, the LNHO provided an intercolonial channel for ‘national’ experts from colonial Asia to participate directly in regional and global governing norm-making processes. In turn, this highlights both the ambiguous nature of national experts and the intercolonial legacy in international health programmes in developing countries in the post-war period.

This article re-examines a contested chapter in the international and environmental history of the 1970s. Even though largely neglected by historical research and in the public memory, the Club of Rome – widely remembered for its 1972 report The limits to growth – was not only born within the OECD, but was also in its early period strongly influenced by debates within this think tank of the industrialized countries. Using previously overlooked sources, this article analyses this highly unlikely OECD–Club of Rome nexus. It not only offers a privileged view into the social history of international policy-making and the related personal entanglements and ideological transfers at a key moment of post-war history. It also demonstrates that the social, intellectual, and economic turmoil of the late 1960s prompted a rethinking of the economic growth paradigm, even within those technocratic institutions that had aspired to guide the post-war industrial growth regime. The article argues that these links are not only vital for our understanding of the relationship between acquisitive growth capitalism and environmentalism, but also enable a more profound understanding of the role of transnational networks in global history and the appreciation of the place of the 1970s in world history.

To date, the alliance between Tokyo, Berlin, and Rome has been interpreted primarily as an alliance between nation-states and has therefore been studied using bi-national approaches. However, this article argues that the strength and globality of the Axis becomes comprehensible if we understand it first and foremost as an alliance between empires. By discussing the interwar years from the viewpoint of trans-imperial cooperation and competition, we discover an imperial nexus. The history, characteristics, diversity, and consequences of this imperial nexus are shown in three parts. The first describes how the nexus helped to bring the distantly located partners together. This occurred against the backdrop of what they called proletarian imperialism, which turned out to be a kind of post-colonial imperialism. The second part analyses how the imperial nexus led others, such as Great Britain, to believe in the existence and strength of a global Axis. In this context, the anti-colonial tendencies put forth mostly by the Japanese turned out to be dangerous. The last part shows how and why the imperial Axis remained intact during the war. Considered from the standpoint of an imperial nexus, the familiar reading of the alliance as well as of the world war shifts. First, Japan and Italy play more important roles than often assumed, while the primacy of Germany is relativized. Second, the chronologies change in relation to the genesis of the Axis and thus the origins of the Second World War. These origins are more strongly associated with non-European world regions and ‘colonial peripheries’, particularly with China and Ethiopia. Third, the issue of ideological similarities and thus of fascism once again becomes a key focus. Fourth and finally, the Axis appears far more diverse and also stronger than previously understood.

This article discusses the role that statistical classifications play in creating gendered boundaries in the world of work. The term ‘family worker’ first became a statistical category in various Western national statistics around 1900. After 1945, it was established as a category of the International Labour Organization (ILO) labour force concept, and since then it has been extended to the wider world by way of the UN System of National Accounts. By investigating the term ‘family worker’ from the perspective of internationally comparable statistical classification, this article offers an empirical insight into how and why particular concepts of work become ‘globalized’. We argue that the statistical term ‘economically active people’ was extended to unpaid family workers, whereas the distinction between family work and housework was increasingly based on scientific evidence. This reclassification of work is an indication of its growing comparability within an economic observation scheme. The ILO generated and authorized that global discourse, and, as such, attested to an increasingly global form of knowledge and communication about the status of gender and work.

This article examines the development of health system metrics by international organizations, exploring their relationship to the politics of world health. Current historiography treats measurement either as progressive illumination or adopts a critical stance, viewing indicators as instruments of global governance by powerful nations. We draw on diverse statistical publications to provide an empirical overview of change and continuity, beginning with the League of Nations Health Organization, which initiated health system statistics, and concluding with the World health report 2000, with its controversial comparative rankings. We then develop analysis and explanation of these trends. Population indicators appeared consistently owing to their protective function and compatibility with development thinking. Others, related to provision, financing, and coverage, appeared more sporadically, owing to changing trends and assumptions in international health. While partly affirming the critical literature, metrics were also used by peripheral or resistant actors to challenge or influence policy at the centre.

Nazi Germany’s place in the wider world is a controversial topic in historiography. While scholars such as Ian Kershaw argue that Hitler’s dictatorship must be understood as a unique national phenomenon, others analyse Nazism within comparative frameworks. Mark Mazower, for example, argues that the international concept of ‘empire’ is useful for comprehending the German occupation of Europe. Using an approach native to transnational cultural studies, my contribution goes a step further: I analyse how the Nazis themselves positioned their regime in a wider international context, and thus gave meaning to it. My main thesis is that, while the Nazis took a broad look at international colonialism, they differentiated considerably between the various national experiences. French and British empire-building, for instance, did not receive the same attention as Japanese and Italian colonial projects. Based on new archival evidence, I show that the act of referring in particular to the Italian example was crucial for the Nazis. On the one hand, drawing strong parallels between Italian colonialism and the German rule of eastern Europe allowed Hitler to recruit support for his own visions of imperial conquest. On the other hand, Italian colonialism served as a blueprint for the Nazis’ plans for racial segregation. The article thus shows the importance of transnational exchange for understanding ideological dynamics within the Nazi regime.

This article traces the personal and institutional networks that facilitated the transnational spread of Development Volunteering in the 1950s and 1960s. Examining Australia’s Volunteer Graduate Scheme, Britain’s Voluntary Service Overseas, and the United States Peace Corps, it destabilizes each nation’s claims to pioneering Development Volunteering, and interrogates the reasons for these claims. Once national frames are removed, broader patterns come into view. This article reveals that Development Volunteering held multiple meanings, as discourses of development, colonialism, and control existed alongside those of youthful idealism and national benevolence. It argues that, by involving ‘ordinary’ people in international development and by re-inscribing colonial-era divisions between the developed and developing worlds, Development Volunteering contributed to the broader process by which colonial discourses were translated into the postcolonial lexicon of development.

Japan’s relations with Germany and Italy during the Second World War were rather limited. Nevertheless, there were some regional nuances and growing cooperation as the war drew to its close. In the Indian Ocean, at least, and especially in the area around the Straits of Malacca and the Java Sea, the Japanese and German empires, and to a lesser extent the Italian empire too, did develop a rather intensive cooperation during the final two years of the war (1943–45). This cooperation encompassed several domains, such as the exchange of vital raw materials and military technology, coordinated naval activity, and even an ideological affinity that materialized in pressures to implement harsher racial policies towards Jewish communities in the region. This article examines the scope of this unique inter-Axis collaboration, the specific reasons for why which came into being in this region in particular, and the lessons we may draw from it.

References to protection were ubiquitous across the early modern world, featuring in a range of transactions between polities in very different regions. And yet discourses about protection retained a quality of imprecision that makes it difficult to pin down precise legal statuses and responsibilities. It was often unclear who was protecting whom or the exact nature of the relationship. In this article, we interrogate standard distinctions about the dual character of protection that differentiate between ‘inside’ protection of subjects and ‘outside’ protection of allies and other external groups. Rather than a clear division, we find a blurring of lines, with many protection claims creatively combining ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ protection. We argue that the juxtaposition of these ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ meanings of protection underpinned the formation of irregular, interpenetrating zones of imperial suzerainty in crowded maritime arenas and conflict-ridden borderlands across the early modern world.

This article seeks to gain a clearer understanding of the language, reach, and limits of competing patriotic trade campaigns in the British empire during the 1930s, focusing on efforts to promote the purchase of Indian, Chinese, and ‘British’ products (a term which was used to refer to goods from both the UK and the Dominions). Civil society groups used patriotic-buying campaigns to promote and maintain forms of regionalized integration in response to the partial deglobalization of trade. Supporters of such campaigns sought to develop trade networks based on ethnic ties which could connect across and, in the Chinese case, beyond imperial spaces. However, the hybridity of colonial subjects’ identities impeded each of these efforts to develop patriotic trade networks and meant that the content, character, and popular appeal of trade campaigns shifted between different regions.

During the period of decolonization and the Cold War, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and US development agencies promoted free trade zones to developing countries. However, other zones emerged prior to and apart from these policy models, some of which, including India’s early zones, took on features of this model only by the 1980s. To make sense of zones within and beyond a UNIDO model, this article understands them through their connection to the rise of nation-state territoriality around the world. The zone is thereby a spatial strategy used in processes of state (re)territorialization to rearticulate state spatiality under the global condition. This article explores such a perspective by situating the history of India’s early free trade zones comparatively.

Encompassing events from 1680 to the mid 1750s, this article examines the organization and adaptation to capital and credit crises of East Indies trade participants in two metropolitan locales – one whose core bounded the North and Baltic Seas, and the other centred around the South China Sea. It shows that in both locales commercial and governmental actors relied not only on state or company, but also on decentralized, port-based practices, institutions, and networks to solve problems and support a shared information culture. Thus, the rules of what I term ‘commercial commons’, rather than an imperial conflict, characterized many East Indies endeavours of this era. East India companies operated in multiple transnational, distributed, and port-based metropolitan locales for their access to capital and credit, and to police financial failure.

Probing into Japan’s quest to legitimize itself within the Islamic sphere, this article examines some of the lessons that imperial Japan hoped to learn from the Germans and the Italians regarding their respective handling of Muslim populations in the Middle East and North Africa. For their part, Muslims living under Japanese occupation on the mainland often benefited from Axis cooperation and were able to create relationships with Muslims beyond China. In the article, I posit that Japanese militarists used their Axis connections as a powerful rhetorical tool to position themselves as liberators from Western imperialism and communism throughout Asia. I also argue that, by examining intellectual currents circulating Eurasia through Axis-facilitated connections, we glean a more nuanced understanding of global anti-colonial movements among Muslim populations from the Maghreb to Manila in the post-war era.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the transnational ‘Third World’ concept defined how people all over the globe perceived the world. This article explains the concept’s extraordinary traction by looking at the interplay of local uses and global contexts through which it emerged. Focusing on the particularly relevant setting of France, it examines the term’s invention in the context of the Cold War, development thinking, and decolonization. It then analyses the review Partisans (founded in 1961), which galvanized a new radical left in France and provided a platform for a communication about, but also with, the Third World. Finally, it shows how the association Cedetim (founded in 1967) addressed migrant workers in France as ‘the Third World at home’. In tracing the Third World’s local–global dynamics, this article suggests a praxis-oriented approach that goes beyond famous thinkers and texts and incorporates ‘lesser’ intellectuals and non-textual aspects into a global conceptual history in action.