In September 2000, the United Nations (UN) presented the ‘Millennium Development Goals’, a universal political agenda to tackle what it perceived to be the most pressing problems of the coming century. The Millennium Development Goals featured strategies for the fight against extreme poverty, hunger and malnutrition, the improvement of public health, the protection of the environment and the build-up of global developmental structures and partnerships. The achievement of these goals was scheduled, somewhat optimistically, for 2015. The brief time span was intended to illustrate the urgency of the issues and to spur the world into action. Just over a decade after their announcement, and not unexpectedly, the realisation of these goals has proved to be fraught with problems and by now the prospect of their universal achievement has receded into the distant future. Despite huge publicity and public endorsement, the UN's expectations for progress or at least alleviation of major problems are now difficult to maintain as the situation has been exacerbated by global food, economic and financial crises. Comprehensive global success stories, such as the eradication of certain infectious diseases, are rare. As the UN's progress review shows, the close and complex entwinement of these problems within the context of globalisation remains a major challenge.

Historians of the inter-war period usually view economic nationalism (in the form of protectionism) and internationalism (in the form of free trade policy) as conflicting concepts. This article argues that the transnational networks of sugar interest groups provided a new form of internationalism compatible with the policy of agricultural protectionism. By tracing the origins of the concept of international market intervention, the article also suggests a new perspective on the economic aspects of the League of Nations’ work and offers an insight into early attempts at agricultural Europeanisation.

From the late nineteenth century onwards, the danger of animal diseases crossing national borders became increasingly apparent. The vast increase in the global trade in animals and animal products turned such diseases into a threat to both economic relations and public health, and called for international attention. Governments and groups of transnational experts began to develop cross-border networking strategies to counter the spread of animal diseases. Significant new developments started after the First World War with the establishment of a number of international animal health institutions, along with the Office International des Epizooties in Paris and the Veterinary Subcommittees of the League of Nations. This article traces the work of these two international animal health agencies and the interaction between their role as intergovernmental platforms and their capacity to define their own terms of reference.

The economic, political and social imperative of reforming working conditions in agriculture, improving rural living standards and promoting rural development emerged as an international issue in the inter-war years. Despite a growing interest in the history of international organisations, historical research has hitherto made little reference to co-operative efforts and standard-setting in agriculture before the Second World War. This article seeks to fill the gap by examining the process whereby the International Labour Organization (ILO) learned about the specificities of the agricultural sector. It illustrates the ILO's early interest in rural workers and agricultural issues, which it addressed through special committees. Hampered by the challenging diversity of agricultural work and the perceived lack of national organisations and legislation, it was not until the late 1930s that the ILO carried out proper surveys on social issues in agriculture. Set up in the late 1930s, the history of the ILO's Permanent Agricultural Committees illustrates the results of a learning process which eventually positioned the ILO as a focal point of technical expertise, and enabled it to embrace an ever widening and interdisciplinary vision of agricultural labour and labour relations.

The pursuit of nature conservation was central to the scientific section of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) from the outset. In order to build a network of expertise and practice, UNESCO supported the establishment of a non-governmental organisation, the fledgling International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN). This small core of non-governmental actors found itself thrown into the arena of global politics and was forced out of its conservation niche. In August 1949, UNESCO and IUPN jointly convened a global conference on ecology and education. The genesis and progress of this conference highlighted the growing prominence of environmental issues and the increasing reciprocity between these issues and questions of nutrition, development and health in the immediate post-war era.

In ‘Interpretations’ the editors invite scholars to explore and debate central issues, concepts or problems encountered in the study of contemporary European history. Recent sections have dealt with ‘Political Religion’ (18:4) and consumerism (20:1). Here, Peter Baldwin takes issue with Richard J. Evans's characterisation of British historians as peculiarly ‘cosmopolitan’. Evans provides an energetic defence of his thesis, and Baldwin responds with an equally robust rejoinder.

My book Cosmopolitan Islanders derives from the Inaugural Lecture I delivered in 2008 as Regius Professor of Modern History in Cambridge. The brief of such a lecture is a tricky one – you have to say something about yourself, something about your field, and something about the discipline of History, and you have to appeal both to colleagues and to the wider world. In addition, in both Oxford and Cambridge, the only two universities with Regius Chairs of History, there have been many famous Inaugurals, by historians as varied as J. B. Bury, Hugh Trevor-Roper and, most famous of all, Lord Acton. In some universities, where professors are all-powerful, the Inaugural has served as a means of laying down the law about how the subject should be taught and researched. But in recent times this has been rare, and it has never really been true in Oxford or Cambridge; the one time that an Oxford Regius, the seventeenth-century specialist Sir Charles Firth, tried this, he ran into a huge amount of trouble and was more or less ostracised in the Faculty for the rest of his career.

Because my article was not a review of Richard J. Evans's book, but a thought piece on broader topics prompted by his work, it does not stick only to issues discussed by him. What a shame that Cosmopolitan Islanders was largely ignored, as Evans reports, for he raises important questions. Part of the reason for the book's stillbirth is exemplified in Evans’ response here: the self-isolation of the historical profession that is met by increasing indifference from the rest of the thinking world. Evans's concern to draw fine distinctions and quarantine history apart from all other social science is telling. Yes, Myrdal was a sociologist (well actually an economist, but no matter). And, yes, some of the foreign scholars I mention who write about the Anglosphere work on literature, not history as such. Why such vigorous policing of the disciplinary boundaries when larger issues are at stake? No wonder historians now have their largest audiences among the military history buffs while the more adventurous social sciences cash in on our work in ways we spurn. What William McNeill used to do has become the province of Francis Fukuyama.