This article takes a close look at the history of an American tree now known as sassafras but known to the Timucua of early modern Florida as pauame. Sassafras root was a major anti-febrile medicament in the early modern world. The history of that medicament has thus far primarily been written in terms of the Spanish empire, which commodified it in post-contact Eurasia. Yet Native Americans, in particular the Timucua, as well as the French, the British, and the Russians, all played major roles in the history of sassafras. That history involves several objects derived from the tree sometimes called sassafras, knowledge about those objects, and Eurasian ideas about the Americas. This article focuses on the issues of entangled empires, and commodity and knowledge exchanges, to show that early modern commodities were not unitary objects, but rather shifting entanglements of objects, words, and ideas.

The early modern western Indian Ocean constituted a dynamic space of human interaction. While scholarship has mostly concentrated on trade and commerce, recent studies have shifted the focus to social and cultural mobilities. This article argues for the emergence of a transoceanic Arabic historiography during the sixteenth century, which reflected on the cultural integration of regions from Egypt, the Hijaz, and Yemen in the Red Sea region, to Gujarat, the Deccan, and Malabar in the subcontinent. Historians from the Persian cosmopolis further north observed a strong cultural connection between Arabophone communities of the western Indian Ocean region. Manuscript collections in India show that Arabic historical texts from the Red Sea region had a readership in the subcontinent. Most importantly, mobile scholars began to compose Arabic histories while receiving patronage at the western Indian courts. Scholarly mobilities fostered cultural exchanges, which increasingly built on a shared history, written, read, and circulated in Arabic during the sixteenth century

This article aims to analyse some of the multilateral flows of capital that contributed to weaving a Global South during the second half of the eighteenth century. It specifically revisits the functioning and financing of the Portuguese slave trade from a global perspective, and offers insights for assessing older frameworks that explain it, in either triangular or bilateral terms. The article argues that the Portuguese slave traffic should be liberated from the South Atlantic borders to which it has been confined. In so doing, it offers an Atlantic history in a global perspective, disclosing the connections between the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Putting the financing of the slave trade into a larger global perspective helps to more accurately explain how it actually operated in terms of the organization of trade. When the financial and institutional foundations of Asian and African trade are analysed together, it becomes evident that they were part of larger networks and capital flows, both westwards and eastwards, which were not just framed imperially or locally.

This article explores a smattering of thematic questions that criss-cross the articles in this special pandemics issue; it signposts some reverberations, overlapping responses, and problematic comparisons currently (mid 2020) being made between past pandemics and the tense experiences (and projections going forward) of COVID-19 across the world. The historical pandemics covered here offer an entry point to a fruitful set of genealogies, chronologies, epidemiologies, trajectories, and imaginaries linked to a host of issues: what makes a pandemic ‘global’? What does a global history perspective bring to the table? How does examining germs and genomes shed light on imperialism as a/the pandemic driver? Where do animals, the environment, and ecology fit in and why are they so often excluded from pandemic histories? What counts as medical humanitarianism when health knowledge, know-how, and cooperation ‘from below’ are sidelined? And what came/comes first: a pandemic or a changed world?

The new history of capitalism (NHC) places a great deal of emphasis on slavery as a crucial world institution. Slavery, it is alleged, arose out of, and underpinned, capitalist development. This article starts by showing the intellectual and scholarly foundations of some of the broad conclusions of the NHC. It proceeds by arguing that capitalist transformation must rely on a global framework of analysis. The article considers three critiques in relation to the NHC. First, the NHC overemphasizes the importance of coercion to economic growth in the eighteenth century. We argue that what has been called ‘war capitalism’ might be better served by an analysis in which the political economy of European states and empires, rather than coercion, is a key factor in the transformation of capitalism at a global scale. Second, in linking slavery to industrialization, the NHC proposes a misleading chronology. Cotton produced in large quantities in the United States came too late to cause an Industrial Revolution which, we argue, developed gradually from the latter half of the seventeenth century and which was well established by the 1790s, when cotton started to arrive from the American South. During early industrialization, sugar, not cotton, was the main plantation crop in the Americas. Third, the NHC is overly concentrated on production and especially on slave plantation economies. It underplays the ‘power of consumption’, where consumers came to purchase increasing amounts of plantation goods, including sugar, rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, and coffee. To see slavery’s role in fostering the preconditions of industrialization and the Great Divergence, we must tell a story about slavery’s place in supporting the expansion of consumption, as well as a story about production

This study uses food as a lens to examine three historical phenomena: globalization’s limits, the rise of plantation-centric monocultures, and the resilience of social norms within migrant societies. The article scrutinizes the West African oil palm’s initial journey to, and reception within, the Malay Peninsula, one of the world’s largest exporters of palm oil by the end of the twentieth century. The article pays special attention to changes in the crop’s perceived food value during the interwar years, a facet overlooked by earlier scholarship. Five different migrant groups in Malaya – planter households, Asian cooks, colonial officials, government chemists, and estate labourers – played critical roles in transforming palm oil into a crop purely for industrial purposes, rather than subsistence. The peculiarities of Malaya’s social context are further sharpened by comparisons with Latin America and West Africa, where different clusters of migrants propagated the oil palm’s subsistence cultures, instead of shunning them.

In the study of trade-embedded environmental factors (land, water, energy, or material flows), three conflicting interpretations prevail concerning what happened before 1950. The ‘great specialization’ narrative argues that trade served to lighten pressure on the environment by redistributing environmental services from where they were abundant to where they were scarce. The ‘great divergence’ sees an exploitative transfer from poor countries to rich and powerful ones or an environmental load displacement from rich to poor. The ‘great acceleration’ dismisses flows as insignificant either way. We review long-term national studies and find an almost exclusive focus on developed countries, mostly European and especially the UK, where more systematic studies tend to support ‘specialization’ and/or ‘acceleration’. By contrast, more qualitative studies on individual exports from developing countries often support ‘divergence’, but, since imports are excluded by design, this can never be demonstrated. We propose widening the geographical scope of long-term national studies beyond Europe and extending existing studies with bilateral trade, and suggest that ‘developing country’ trade be quantified according to existing methods of environmental accounting.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents opportunities and challenges for historians working on the global history of health and disease. This article argues that the history of disease will benefit from interdisciplinary work that brings together historians, microbiologists, and archaeologists. Genomes are historical archives, in two complementary ways. Palaeogenomics provide direct access to genomes of the past, while phylogenetics furnish historical insight from evolutionary relationships. Both palaeogenomics and phylogenetics have already contributed enormously to the history of disease, helping us understand how human ecological transformation drives the evolution of our microparasites.

The Black Death is a secure feature of European and west Asian history; in Chinese history, by contrast, the record of mass epidemic outbreaks over the same centuries is not. As a step towards integrating these two zones into a global history of disease, this article establishes a timeline of roughly a thousand major outbreaks in Ming–Qing China during the century 1567–1666. On the basis of these data, comparison is made of how pandemics were received and interpreted in two delimited zones, the Chinese province of North Zhili (now Hebei) and Tudor and Stuart England, with particular attention to differences in their literary incorporation, religious meaning, and political resonance.

This article analyses the Indian, Persian, and Algerian–Tunisian independence committees and their place in Germany’s ‘programme for revolution’, Berlin’s attempt to instigate insurrection across the British, French, and Russian empires during the First World War. The agency of Asian and North African activists in this programme remains largely unknown, and their wartime collaboration in Germany is an under-researched topic in the histories of anti-colonial activism. This article explores the collaboration between the three committees, highlighting their strategic relationships with German officials and with each other. Criticizing the Eurocentric framings still present in studies of wartime strategy, it contributes to a growing historiography on the war as a global conflict. It argues that the independence committees were central actors in Germany’s programme, that the transnationalism of the pre-1914 anti-colonial movements both imprinted Germany’s programme and was furthered by it, and that only a comparative perspective exploring the interactions of its anti-colonial activists fully grasps the global scope of this topic.

While the role of coal has been the subject of long-running debate in the historiography of the Industrial Revolution, its part in the economic development of the global periphery has been comparatively neglected. The technological context of the ‘First Globalization’ (c.1870–1914) made pastoral production in the periphery increasingly dependent on modern energy, as new methods of production and transportation bridged the distance between grasslands in the south of the world and kitchens in the north. By comparing choices of meat preservation techniques in Uruguay and New Zealand – two small settler economies that prospered on the back of pastoral exports – this article highlights the usefulness of an energy perspective on agriculture-based transitions to modern economic growth. Different conditions of access to coal shaped how New Zealanders and Uruguayans exploited their livestock herds when terms of trade favoured them the most, with important consequences for the persisting income gap between them.

This article explores the tensions between well-intentioned humanitarianism and coercive colonialism during smallpox outbreaks in eighteenth-century Guatemala, when the state extended inoculation programmes to its predominant, culturally diverse Maya communities. Evidence from anti-epidemic campaigns shows public debates broadly comparable to the current COVID-19 crisis: debates about the measurably higher mortality rates for indigenous people and other marginalized groups; debates about the extent of the state’s responsibility for the health of its peoples; and debates on whether or not coercion and violence should be used to ensure compliance with quarantines and public health campaigns. While inoculations provided medical assistance and material help to Maya communities, and resulted in demonstrably lower mortality rates from smallpox, at the same time they functioned as avenues for the expansion of colonial power to intervene in the daily lives of people in those communities, characterized by colonial actors as necessary for their own good, and for the broader public good.

This article analyses the transatlantic financial crises of 1873 from the vantage point of the three countries that were most affected by it, Austria, Germany, and the United States, focusing on the experience of economic globalization and disintegration for actors on both sides of the Atlantic. It compares the perception of financial commentators and financiers of the panics in 1873, when the experience of integration was asymmetrical, and more pronounced in Germany and Austria than in the United States. It further argues that this asymmetrical experience of contagion shaped the monetary debates of the 1870s in all three countries. Focusing on the interrelationship and coexistence of experiences of integration and isolation, the article maintains that, despite the panics’ near-synchronicity, financial globalization remained difficult to see.

This article examines one of the most consequential legal–political models for the confiscation of private property in the twentieth century: the Trading with the Enemy Acts (TEAs). Two laws with this name were passed in Britain (1914) and the United States (1917), enabling the large-scale expropriation of ‘enemies’ and ‘aliens’. The extra-territorial application of these laws during the era of total war led to the globalization of its paradigm of expropriation in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The TEAs made the administrative process of dispossession effective and profitable for liberal states. The US law was repurposed for domestic use during the New Deal, while its British counterpart played an unforeseen role during decolonization and the great partitions of the late 1940s, as the nascent nation-states of India, Pakistan, and Israel used it to constitute themselves as territorial and economic units by taking land and property from ‘evacuees’ and ‘absentees’. The article provides a short history of these four national cases in their international context and argues that the history of the TEAs shows that state-driven mass expropriation was much more common throughout the mid twentieth century than usually supposed; the ‘age of extremes’ was also in part an ‘age of expropriation’.

This article revisits the origins of internationalism in the field of health and shows how the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century, much like the current coronavirus crisis, brought global differences such as social inequalities, political hierarchies, and scientific conflicts to the fore. Beyond drawing parallels between the cholera epidemics and the current crisis, the article argues for combining imperial and social histories in order to write richer and more grounded histories of internationalism. It explores this historiographical and methodological challenge by analysing the boardrooms of the international sanitary conferences, Middle Eastern quarantine stations catering for Mecca pilgrims, and ocean steamships aiming to move without delay during a worldwide health crisis.

The emergence of a field of global energy policy is usually traced back to the events around the 1973–74 oil embargo. This article provides a prehistory to this by tracing the genealogy of the ‘global energy economy’. This genealogy is reconstructed through the lens of the World Power Conference (WPC, today the World Energy Council, WEC), a non-governmental international organization founded by a British electro-technical engineer in 1924. In a comparison with the engineering of ‘natural forces’ in the nineteenth-century steam economy, I argue that electricity, and particularly large electrical systems, not only changed the meaning of power and institutionalized a regular documentation of the ‘power economy’, but enabled and concentrated ownership of the ‘forces of nature’ as a productive factor. This more comprehensive view of the role of electricity in the economy gave rise to an energo-materialist economics among the electro-technical engineers, technicians, and planners whom the WPC assembled. The WPC imagined itself as the centre of calculation of this ‘global energy economy’, initiating international standardization and complementing the statistics of international organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. As the integration of all ‘energies’ in one statistical model required conversion factors across very different technical processes, it took the urgency of the oil crisis for the WEC to compile a global energy balance, thus statistically ‘representing’ the state of the ‘global energy economy’.

Well before the green revolution in the 1960s, hybrid maize technology that had originally been developed in the USA spread across the world, starting before the Second World War. This article uses a framework that analyses the type of transfer (materials, knowledge, or capacity), the roles of diverse actors, and farmer demand and its market context, to trace the diffusion of hybrid technology to Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Africa up to 1970. The article also highlights the importance of access to diverse germplasm from the Americas provided by indigenous farmers. A handful of US public institutions promoted the spread of hybrid technology, with US private seed companies sometimes playing a secondary role. However, most cases of successful transfer were led by national scientists embedded in local institutions, who were able to link to local seed systems and farmers. By the mid 1970s, the aggregate impacts of these efforts were of the same magnitude as for the well-known and much publicized green revolution wheat varieties. Nonetheless, adoption of hybrid maize across and within countries was very patchy, relating to differences in scientific capacity, type of farmer, agro-ecology, and complementary investments in seed systems and extension. Consequently, impacts were often highly inequitable.

Comparing three of the major hydroelectric power-producing countries during the war – Canada, the United States, and Germany – this article considers the implications of expanding hydroelectricity for war production and strategy, and how wartime decisions structured the longer-term evolution of large technological systems. Despite different starting points, all three countries pursued similar strategies in attempting to mobilize hydroelectricity for the war effort. The different access to and use of hydro in these states produced a vital economic and ultimately military advantage or disadvantage. The global dimensions of hydroelectric development during the war, moreover, demonstrate that this conflict was a turning point in the history of electrification.