The question of ‘nodes’ in the Armenian commercial network, it is argued here, cannot be separated from a larger process, which helped places such as Madras to rise as alternatives to New Julfa, from as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century. The network of Armenian commerce did not have a single strong centre with many peripheries, but a chain of multiple nodes functioning as crucial linking points. This paper focuses on one particular trade route, from Madras to Manila, in the eighteenth century. The Philippines attracted Spanish American silver, which was then pumped into various regional economies of Asia – China and India in particular – in the shape of investment. A Spanish ban on European shipping at Manila made Armenians (and Indians) indispensable partners for European trade to Manila. This gave Armenian trade to Manila a strong European flavour. Armenians helped to camouflage this trade, and enriched themselves from it at the same time, operating often independently of New Julfa.

However an active network once frustrated always has a tendency to compensate for its losses. Driven out of one region, it may press its capital and the advantages it offers upon another. This seems at any rate to have been the rule whenever a really vigorous and accumulative form of capitalism was concerned.1

This article considers how the existence of an ancient community, the Jews of Cochin on India’s Malabar coast, was transformed by the force of two powerful twentieth-century nationalisms – Indian nationalism and Zionism. It does so through telling the story of a remarkable individual, A. B. Salem, a lawyer, politician, Jewish religious reformer, and Indian nationalist, who was instrumental in promoting the Zionist cause and facilitating the mass migration of the Cochin Jews to Israel. Salem’s story illustrates how the prioritization and translation of kinds of identity into the public sphere is fluid and contingent upon a variety of circumstances, personal as well as the outcome of changes in the wider world.

The trajectories of German nationalism in the late nineteenth century were deeply affected by the process of globalization. While the literature on the subject has largely remained within the confines of a national history paradigm, this article uses the example of mobility and migration to show to what extent German nationalism was transformed under the auspices of global integration. Among the effects of cross-border circulation were the emergence of diasporic nationalism, the racialization of the nation, the implementation of new border regimes, and the hegemony of ideological templates that linked nationalist discourse to global geopolitics. This article is intended as a contribution to a ‘spatial turn’ in the historiography of nationalism, in arguing that not only the ‘nation form’ but also the way that the nation was defined, understood, and practised – the particular contents of nationalism – owed more to the global context in which it was constituted than is usually recognized.

Scholarly literature on nineteenth-century nationalism concentrates on its strong exclusionary tendencies, while studies of the Cuban independence leader José Martí (1853–95) focus on his articulation of Cuban nationalism and pan-Latin American regionalism through his political activities and writings. This article identifies the globalism of Martí’s nationalism, moving beyond the national and regional frameworks to which studies of Martí have consigned the Cuban freedom fighter. It argues that the global history narratives that Martí wrote for children constitute critical and innovative components of his programme for national liberation and nation building, and encapsulate his nationalist ideology through three key components: the right to self-determination at the national level, the right to self-determination at the personal level, and a sense of global humanitarianism. The article’s transnational perspective places Martí, through his inclusionary, racially blind, humanitarian form of nationalism, as contradicting late nineteenth-century nationalist doctrines, and begs for ideas about the general intellectual climate of the period to be rethought.

Organizing trans-Saharan camel caravans was a complicated business requiring skills, stamina, resources, and human capital. This article focuses on the contractual world of caravanning in the nineteenth and early twentieth century based on interviews with retired caravanners, original trade records, and legal sources mined in private family archives. It surveys the different contractual agreements that featured commonly in this ‘paper economy’, which was based on a reliance on literacy and Islamic law. It is argued that contracts were key instruments for accounting and accountability even between traders with kinship ties and other sources of solidarity, and that they were often the only channel for women to engage in long-distance trade via proxy.