The essay sets out to re-examine the events and processes of inter-state and commercial competition that accompanied the arrival of the first Portuguese fleets in the Indian Ocean after the voyage of Vasco da Gama (1497–99). Focusing on the ‘long decade’ from 1498 to 1509, a series of differing perspectives on the challenges caused by the Portuguese to other rival powers is laid out and examined in detail. These include the Venetian conception of the Portuguese enterprise, which tended to be divided between an ‘optimistic’ view (suggesting that the Cape route would collapse quickly), and a more ‘pessimistic’ one, which saw the Serenissima itself as gravely threatened. The geo-political vision of Venetian observers, and the place given by them to the Vijayanagara empire in South India is duly noted with regard to the pepper trade in particular. This view is then contrasted with the abundant but uneven Portuguese documentation available from the time of the viceroyalty of Dom Francisco de Almeida (1505–09). The essay finally sets out to explain and contextualize the Mamluk maritime intervention in the affairs of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, culminating in the defeat of the fleet of Amir Husain al-Kurdi off Diu in 1509.

The paper analyses the multiple ways in which the Sioux have dealt with missionary Christianity between roughly 1860 and 1980, placing this in an international perspective. It addresses the question of how and why Christianity became pervasive among the Sioux despite the avowed purpose of missionaries to extirpate Native culture. It contends that the churches willy-nilly preserved many elements of that culture and provided leadership opportunities for Natives that were not available through other institutions. It examines this process in the light of several interpretations of missionary encounters drawn from other cases, both in North America and Africa. While the Sioux exhibited a variety of ways of adapting to Christianity and combining it with their native religion, the most prominent strategy was dual participation, the simultaneous separate practice of the two.

In the seventeenth century, Chan Buddhist masters from monasteries in South China boarded merchant ships to Chinese merchant colonies in East and Southeast Asian port cities to establish or maintain monasteries. Typically, Chinese seafarers and merchants sponsored their travel, and sovereigns and elites abroad offered their patronage. What were these monks and their patrons seeking? This study will investigate the question through the case of one Chan master, Shilian Dashan, who journeyed to the Vietnamese kingdom of Cochinchina (Dang Trong) in 1695 and 1696. In Dashan, we see a form of Buddhism thought to have vanished with the Silk Road: that is, Buddhism as a ‘missionary religion’ able to propagate branch temples through long-distance networks of merchant colonies, and to form monastic communities within the host societies that welcomed them. This evident agency of seafaring Chan monks in early modern times suggests that Buddhism’s role in commerce, diaspora, and state formation in early modern maritime Asia may compare to religions like Islam and Christianity, and deserves further study.

The present article takes a global perspective on the diasporic networks of Indian revolutionaries that were emerging on the eve of the First World War. It looks particularly at three important headquarters of their activities, namely London, New York and Tokyo. The narrative is centred on the ‘India Houses’ that were opened in these three cities and served as the institutional umbrella units for the revolutionary schemes. Finally, the political alliances forged and the ideological resources tapped in these three settings are sketched out and briefly analysed. The case study makes two points: to begin with, it is important to extend historical scrutiny beyond the geographical bounds of India to fully grasp the development of Indian nationalism in this first peak time of globalization; second, the existence of the sophisticated transnational anti-imperial propaganda networks that are the focus of this study raises doubts about the alleged watershed character of the First World War as the ‘global moment’ that decisively shook the imperial world order. The year 1905, it is argued, was at least as important in this regard.

Interregional communication has been a key constituent of the process of globalization since its very origins. For most of its history, information has moved between world regions and along the routes according to the rationales established by interregional trade and migration. The dematerialization of telecommunication in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century eventually detached long-distance information transmission from transport and transformed the global communication structure. New communication centres (and new peripheries) emerged. Some regions moved closer to the global data stream than others. It is still unclear how such different degrees of global connectivity impacted on local development. This essay contributes to the identification and valuation of global communication centres and peripheries in order to provide suitable candidates for future case studies. To this end, statistical data on the development of domestic telegraph networks in selected countries has been analysed and interpreted. In a second step, Social Network Analysis methods have been employed to measure the centrality of almost three hundred cities and towns in the European telecommunication network of the early twentieth century.

Modern economic globalization would be impossible without our ability to move billions of tonnes of raw materials and finished goods among the continents and to fly at speeds approaching the speed of sound. These realities were made possible by the interaction of economic and technical factors. Much has been written about their organizational and political underpinnings (ranging from the role of multinational corporations to the history of free trade agreements), but much less on the history of the two prime movers that made these realities possible. Neither steam engines, nor gasoline-fuelled engines could have accomplished comparable feats. Diesel engines made ocean shipping the cheapest mode of long-distance transport and without gas turbines there would be no fast, inexpensive, mass-scale intercontinental travel. This paper examines the history, advances, benefits and costs of the two prime movers.