The introduction outlines the volume’s main impetus: to encourage historians, global and not, to reflect on ‘their daily task’, as Marc Bloch put it – on their methods, craftsmanship, and conceptual basics. It is an invitation to rethink the field’s forms of inquiry and argumentation and the tacit assumptions underlying its practice, at a time when the ground under global historians’ feet – with globalisation in crisis – is moving fast.

Global history and other relational approaches to history, the introduction holds, have methodological implications and require theoretical reflection: because many of the classic analytical instruments commonly employed by historians require some reduction of complexity – to explain, to periodise, or to compare – a task naturally more difficult when scholars deal with an unusual abundance of factors; because the field’s assault on Eurocentrism requires reflection on the matter of perspective and authorial vantage point; or, indeed, because of the field’s inherent teleology, with its understanding of history inseparable from the telos of continuously increasing global integration.

This chapter studies global histories that consider aspects of the material world. It exposes the – often tacit – assumptions that guide these global material histories and holds them up for careful inspection. Its particular interest is in the grounds on which global material historians associate matter and material culture with a specific scale, context or level of observation: with world-making, the global scale and ‘connectivity’, but also with the concrete, the ‘micro’ and the intimate. In that context, the chapter discusses a wide range of themes, from the risk of fetishising material things – as in, reverencing them for properties, including ‘global’ ones, merely projected onto them – to the inevitability of canvassing some forms of materiality on a global scale: the pollution of air, for instance, or, for the post–Cold War era, the issue of resource shortages. The chapter argues that, like any form of historical writing, global material histories are under the influence of their practitioners’ own times’ socioreligious texture, global imaginary and discursive habits; mindful of the telos and conceptions that pervade their work, they will be better prepared to see the world of matter and material culture in all its changeability, elusiveness and polysemy.

By the late 1700s and early 1800s, cinchona bark was, to many, ‘the most important, and the most usual remedy that medicine possessed’. Though of limited repertoire – cinchona trees prospered only on the precipitous eastern slopes of the Andes at the time, in the Spanish American Viceroyalties of Peru and New Granada – and comparatively recent acceptance into Old World materia medica, the bark had, by the turn of the eighteenth century, woven itself into the texture of everyday medical practice in a wide range of societies within, or tied to, the Atlantic World. It was everywhere attributed ‘wonderful’, ‘singular’, even ‘divine’ medicinal virtues, the knowledge of which, so it was said, had come to mankind from its simplest, and humblest, specimens, ‘wild Indians’ close to nature and privy to its most coveted secrets. Bittersweet ‘febrifugal lemonades’ and bottled wines of the bark sat on the shelves of Lima apothecaries, the counters of Cantonese market stands and in the medicine chests of Luanda hospital orderlies. They were routinely concocted, and administered at the bedside, by Moroccan court physicians, French housewives and slave healers alike and they accompanied, tucked into their pouches, Dutch sailors to febrile environs, Peruvian soldiers to the battlefield and North American settlers westward. Scottish physicians, creole botanists and French writers alike were unanimous not only in according the bark ‘singularity’, and ‘the first place among the most effective remedies’ (die erste Stelle unter den würksamsten Arzneimitteln), but also in holding it to be ‘more generally useful to mankind than any in the materia medica’. It was commonly agreed upon that there was ‘no febrifuge of such well-known virtue in all of medicine’ (por que no se halla en la Medicina febrífugo de virtud tan conocida), and that not a single remedy ‘more estimable and precious [than the bark] had been discovered unto this day’.