Food globalization has been in train for some ten millennia,1 driven by, and driving, war, trade, imperialism, colonialism, and culture. Within economic history, the dominant discipline in the study of globalization, only the first four are dealt with in any depth, invariably focusing on production and the supply side. By contrast, there have been relatively few studies of globalization in terms of culture, consumption, and the demand side, resulting in an incomplete understanding of the ways in which material life, cultural values, and political imperatives interact in a global context. These dynamics are examined in this anthropological account of culture and commerce in Britain and the empire in the interwar years, focusing on a dish that assumed tremendous symbolic and economic importance – the King's Christmas pudding

Historians of migration have increasingly criticized the idea of a ‘mobility transition’, which assumed that pre-modern societies in Europe were geographically fairly immobile, and that people only started to move in unprecedented ways with the onset of modernization in the nineteenth century. In line with this critique, this article attempts to apply thorough quantitative tests to the available data. The focus is on ‘cross-community migration’, following Patrick Manning's argument that migrants moving over a cultural border are most likely to accelerate the rate of innovation. Six forms of migration are considered: emigration out of Europe, immigration from other continents, rural colonization of ‘empty spaces’, movements to large cities, seasonal migration, and the movement of sailors and soldiers. To illustrate regional variations, the examples of the Netherlands and Russia are contrasted. The reconstruction presented here is partial and preliminary, but it unequivocally shows that early modern Europe was much more mobile than modernization scholars allowed for. There was indeed a sharp increase in the level of migration after 1850, but it was due to improvements in transport rather than to modernization in a more general sense. This model has been elaborated for Europe but it can also be applied to other parts of the world and can hopefully contribute to the debate on the ‘Great Divergence’ between Europe and Asia.

Between 3000 BCE and 1800 CE there were more than sixty ‘mega-empires’ that, at the peak, controlled an area of at least one million square kilometres. What were the forces that kept together such huge pre-industrial states? I propose a model for one route to mega-empire, motivated by imperial dynamics in eastern Asia, the world region with the highest concentration of mega-empires. This ‘mirror-empires’ model proposes that antagonistic interactions between nomadic pastoralists and settled agriculturalists result in an autocatalytic process, which pressures both nomadic and farming polities to scale up polity size, and thus military power. The model suggests that location near a steppe frontier should correlate with the frequency of imperiogenesis. A worldwide survey supports this prediction: over 90% of mega-empires arose within or next to the Old World’s arid belt, running from the Sahara desert to the Gobi desert. Specific case studies are also plausibly explained by this model. There are, however, other possible mechanisms for generating empires, of which a few are discussed at the end of the article.

This article surveys changing interrelationships between humans and the earth's forest cover over the past few centuries. The focus is on the interplay between population increase, deforestation, and afforestation at both ends of Eurasia. Through the consideration of long-term changes in population and woodland area, Japan is compared with Lingnan in south China, and the East Asians with two European countries, England and France. Based on East–West comparisons and also on somewhat more detailed intra-Asian comparisons with respect to market linkages and the role of the state, the article examines the proposition made by Kenneth Pomeranz that, although both ends of Eurasia were ecologically constrained at the end of the early modern period, East Asia's pressure on forest resources was ‘probably not much worse’ than that in the West.

In 1769, the East India Company decided to transform the Bengali silk industry, and introduced Piedmontese reeling technologies and spatially concentrated working practices into the area. Although Bengali raw silk reeled with the new methods never reached the standards of Piedmontese silks, the Company was able to produce huge quantities of low-quality raw silks, and to gain market share in London from the 1770s to the 1830s. By investigating the reasons behind this partial success, this article shows that some features of Piedmontese technologies had a crucial impact on peasants who specialized in the mulberry cultivation and the rearing of silkworms. The Company had to cope with resistance from some rural economic agents in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Bengal, but other elements in local society were able to profit from the Company's interest in producing raw silk.

This essay examines the relationships existing between Dionysian traditions of wine drinking and drama that reached the easternmost part of the Hellenistic world, and the Buddhist culture and art that flourished in Gandhara (Eastern Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan) under the Kushan kings between the first and third centuries CE. By piecing together archaeological, artistic and literary evidence, it appears that along with viniculture and viticulture, Dionysian rituals, Greek theatre and vernacular drama also became rooted in these eastern lands. Continuous interactions with the Graeco-Roman world strengthened these important cultural elements. At the beginning of the Common Era Dionysian traditions and drama came to be employed by the Buddhists of Gandhara to propagate their own ideas. The creation of a body of artworks representing the life of the Buddha in narrative form along with the literary work of Ashvaghosha, may be an expression of the same dramatic format that developed locally along with a strong Dionysian ritual presence.

Looking at state finance in the Ottoman Empire from a Dutch perspective shows remarkable differences between the two systems. This article suggests that these differences were related to the fact that, in contrast to those in the Ottoman Empire, fiscal systems in western Europe, and especially in the Netherlands, developed within a context of economy-driven rather than state-driven trajectories of urbanization. This gave rise to separate systems of urban public finance, which enhanced possibilities for funding a debt serviced by indirect urban taxes, the root of later state debts. In Ottoman cities, systems of urban public finance managed by urban governments did not develop, thus precluding a similar development.

Across the Eurasian continent, from England to Korea, silver suddenly became abundant in the late thirteenth century, only to become scarce again in the 1360s. The annual silver output from the London mint and the yearly silver rupee issued in Bengal moved virtually in tandem, arguably as a result of the Mongol empire lifting silver out of the lower tiers of the market and maintaining its flow along the highways of long-distance trade. In this first silver century, monetary usages formed multiple strata, and the circulation of silver remained in a high-level circuit in the hierarchy of monies. Units of account, denominated in terms of silver by weight, worked to give value to silver coinage in the western parts of the commercial highways and kept a link with paper monies in the eastern parts under the Mongol Yuan dynasty. Throughout the silver century, the Mongol empire lowered commercial barriers, to allow the ready flow of silver along trade routes, and consequently created a horizontal unity that, on the surface, was continent-wide. This contrasted with the second silver century, beginning in the 1570s, which ushered in a system of competition between territorial states, some of which vertically cemented the tiers of their domestic markets with credit, and created a space for compatible monies.

This article examines the Danish archaeologist Else Roesdahl’s hypothesis that, by the early fourteenth century, an abundance in Europe of elephant ivory from Africa caused a price drop that edged out walrus ivory, with a devastating economic impact on Norse Greenland that directly contributed to the colony’s collapse. While it seems clear that artisanal use of walrus ivory fell from the late fourteenth century onward, and that Greenland exports of walrus ivory decreased in the fourteenth century, evidence for a pre-1500 price drop for African elephant ivory in the European market is lacking. Nor can it be demonstrated that European demand for walrus tusks shrank prior to 1500. Roesdahl’s speculations about changes in the ivory trade and their effect on the Norse Greenland colony are therefore open to question as an explanation for the colony’s demise. An alternative view is proposed, namely that reduced export of Greenland walrus ivory was initiated by the Greenlanders themselves in response to political and economic changes in the Atlantic and North Sea region, at a time when codfish drew English fishermen and fish merchants ever farther west into the North Atlantic, and that the Greenlanders took part in that westward movement.

The idea of globalization has helped to rehabilitate universalizing categories, such as colonialism and cosmopolitanism, criticized for their tendency to ignore the differences between local cultures and the operation of power. Drawing on the burgeoning discussion on historical globalization, and focussing on the role of African assessors, this article examines how colonial courts grappled with the tension between the aspiration toward imperial legal universalism and the ‘Othering’ of African subjects. It argues that British colonialism in Africa represented a form of globalization of English law, generating a ‘centripetal jurisprudence’ that sought to square the inequities of an engagement with local custom by holding up the values of justice, equity, and conscience. Imperial legal universalism required both the accommodation and containment of African difference. The paradox of integration and differentiation in colonial constructions of globality is that imperial power and local cultures were not always in conflict, but were sometimes complementary and mutually reinforcing.

The emergence of ‘fieldwork’ as a technique for gathering knowledge was part of a reciprocal process of two-way observation between Europeans and Asians. The methods of language-learning, cultural immersion, and note-taking that were eventually canonized in the discipline of anthropology were no more unique to Europeans than the writing of the learned travelogues through which they first found expression. In the early nineteenth century, Asian travellers were observing and taking notes on the English at home as part of a reciprocal pattern of exchanges made possible by the new commercial and diplomatic contacts of the age. This thesis is demonstrated by using the Persian travel diary made by an Iranian ‘fieldworker’ to reconstruct in detail the methods and conditions of his ‘ethnographic’ tour of the English West Country in 1818. In the reversal of a familiar trope of European ethnography, the diary described meetings with the ‘sects’ and ‘mystics’ of the English provinces in the very same years that saw the first English accounts of Persia religiosa. Using numerous contemporary English sources to build on the Persian field diary, the article reveals the multiple patterns of reciprocity by which knowledge was gained through a ‘scientific’ epistemology of observation and experience. From Unitarianism to Baha’ism, the collaborative knowledge so created led to changing intellectual attitudes among both European and Asian scholar-travellers.

This article situates the idea of ‘transnational history’ within the recent historiography of the United States, as both a reaction against and accommodation to the nation-state focus of that historiography. It explains transnational history's specific American development as a broad project of research to contextualize US history and decentre the nation; it explores the conditions of American historical practice that influenced the genesis and growth of this version of transnational history; and it compares the concept with competitor terms such as international history, comparative history, global history, histoire croisée, and trans-border. In the United States, transnational history came to be considered complementary to these concepts in its commitment to render American historiography less parochial, yet, because of its origins, the concept has remained limited in application by period and spatial scope. While the concept retains utility because of its specific research programme to denaturalize the nation, transnational history understood as an exploration of ‘transnational spaces’ opens possibilities for an approach of more general historiographical relevance.

More than six million European soldiers were involved in nineteenth-century empire-building and a substantial number of them stayed behind in the colonies. Throughout history, soldiers have been priming the pump for settler colonies, being a reliable force in difficult pioneering circumstances with high mortality rates. In the age of European mass migration, however, these colonial soldiers were consistently excluded from migration statistics. This article argues that there is a nexus between the beginning of the age of mass migration and the exclusion of colonial soldiers from migration history. Their status as un-free labourers developed into an anomaly at a time when free labour and free European migration increasingly became the norm. An important implication of including these colonial soldiers in the purview of migration history would be a revisiting of nineteenth-century European emigration history. It would require a broader comparative perspective on coercive labour conditions among nineteenth-century European migrants (military and non-military). This effort could be part of an ongoing revision of the perception of the age of European mass migration as overwhelmingly free.

This paper analyses the importation of foreign steam technology into Cuba in the course of the nineteenth century, and the experience of the migrant workers employed to operate it, in order to focus not on Cuba as an isolatable entity, but existing in the context of transnational networks that were involving the island in processes of globalization. This was, at the outset, a ‘sub-imperial’ globalization, operating independently, and implying liberation, from empire. The search for new technologies to enable improvements in sugar production necessarily took the Creole elite beyond the restricted possibilities of the Spanish empire to the industrial centres of the United States, Britain, and France. Such new links helped fuel the emergence of an independent Cuban identity; however, the same globalizing tendencies that were eroding the Spanish empire led Cuba into new forms of imperial domination. The increasing expense of the new steam technology necessitated a growing dependence upon investment from foreign merchant banks, which gradually assumed control over much of the island's production and trade. The same migrant engineers who had begun by assisting Cuban planters took on the role of agents for foreign companies. Rather than contributing their skills, as one more group of migrants in a nation formed out of multiple migrations, these engineers asserted their foreign identity and guarded their privileged position. They came to be seen as symbolic of the process by which Cuba shook off the Spanish yoke only to replace it with another.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, China has witnessed a surge in world history research and a reorientation towards what is called a ‘global view on history’. This article will demonstrate, however, that the ‘global’ in these discussions is not regarded as the substance of the historical process but merely as the context for the development of the nation-state as the uncontested historical unit. This specific orientation is caused by a persistent nationalism, discursive traditions, and alliances of world history writing with contemporary political discourse. Three major concepts will be discussed: integration/interaction as a response to China's ‘open door’ policy and in connection with discourse on globalization; ‘modernization’ in its relation to the Four Modernizations of state ideology; and the ‘rise of the great powers’ as related to discussions of ‘China's rise’. Particular attention will be given to the problem of Eurocentrism in Chinese world history writing.