This chapter seeks keywords and concepts that will enable us to grasp the contradictory and conflictive globality of the current moment and sharpen our analysis of equally contradictory and conflictive global pasts. In a plea to move beyond equating the global with openness, connection, and integration, I address the role of closure, boundaries, and limits in global history in a wider sense. For this purpose, I explore in an experimental and deliberately open-ended fashion how thinking about global spherescan be utilised fruitfully for the current practice of history writing. The first part explores the radically inclusive yet claustrophobic vision of the globe as a closed sphere from which there is no escape. Building on earlier closed-world and one-world discourses, this thinking gained prominence after the Second World War in the face of the threat of nuclear destruction and environmental degradation. I then move to think about the globe as composed of many bounded spheres – geopolitical but also social. Here, I take central examples from the realm of communication and language and discusses the public sphere as an exclusionary rather than inclusionary figure of thought.

After the Green Revolution successfully raised wheat and rice yields in more auspicious farming contexts, attention in agricultural development turned to crops that grew on poorer soils and in regions of indifferent rainfall. When Rockefeller Foundation agronomists reached out to India with an urge to establish an international center for research on such crops in the 1970s, they found eager hosts. The foundation’s agronomists had been active in India during the 1950s and 1960s and built a community of local collaborators. Indian scientists saw the proposal for an international center as offering the next frontier in crop development. The possibility of a center also met with considerable appeal among the political establishment in India. Two prime ministers from opposite political camps, Indira Gandhi and Chaudhary Charan Singh, came to support the eventual International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) due to common ground in their respective politics of the poor and farmers’ politics. As the chapter shows, the circumstances of postcolonial India allowed for the emergence of institutionalized expertise outside the direct realm of the local state.

Distance is a central concern for global historians. It is a physical and external condition of social life that global processes bridge. Exchanges, encounters and conflicts between strangers are common themes of global historians. Distance is also a cultural and conceptual condition, one that defines relations between strangers far – and near. Mobility and the advent of new modes of transportation and communications had ambiguous effects of closing the gap between strangers while heightening social distances, the need to explain them and policies to redress them.

This chapter explores the changing imaginaries of technological governance in the European Union (EU), on the basis of one increasingly significant element of the EU policy: ecodesign. The grounds for treating ecodesign as especially significant are at least twofold. First, ecodesign presents a success story in governmental steering of technological development in the EU. Remaining for the most part on the sidelines of public discussion, ecodesign has fundamentally impacted the daily life of all Europeans, making a very broad swathe of everyday products (vacuum cleaners, lamps, or washing machines) more energy efficient and longer lasting. Second, the expansion and deepening of ecodesign framework creates important background conditions for shaping technological futures. It sets the grounds for the conversation on how technology relates to a sustainable economy; what kind of technological advances are necessary; the desirable relation between production, distribution, and consumption; and finally, the distributive consequences of both technological and legal interventions. These questions will become ever more salient as the EU pursues sustainable futures, from the digital economy to the energy transition, from a more balanced transportation mix to sustainable food provision.