Transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality have both been concerned with the issue of borders and their crossing, but the two fields themselves have not intersected much in the past. This is beginning to change, and this article surveys recent scholarship that draws on both fields, highlighting work in six areas: movements for women’s and gay rights; diverse understandings of sexuality and gender; colonialism and imperialism; intermarriage; national identity and citizenship; and migration. This new research suggests ways in which the subject matter, theory, and methodology in transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality can interconnect: in the two fields’ mutual emphasis on intertwinings, relationships, movement, and hybridity; their interdisciplinarity and stress on multiple perspectives; and their calls for destabilization of binaries.

How did medieval builders manage to construct some of the tallest structures in the world without access to modern engineering theories? Construction drawings were limited to details and, with only a handful exceptions, manuals for builders only appeared in the late fifteenth century. By implication, the relevant knowledge had to be transferred on a personal basis. Its underlying principles must therefore have been reasonably simple. This article shows how a modular design, combined with on-site experimentation, guided much of the construction work on large projects such as European cathedrals, Middle Eastern mosques, Indian temples, and Chinese pagoda towers.

Sewing machines, one of the first mechanical consumer goods to be mass produced and sold worldwide, provide an important case study for the understanding of global history in terms of the global diffusion of goods. However, as the case of colonial India demonstrates, it is what happens to such goods on their arrival in the recipient society – their emergent social history and growing indigeneity – that then demands analytical consideration. By tracing the changing nature of India’s sewing culture and sewing-machine use, linking it to occupational shifts, racial identities, and gender roles, to changing marketing techniques and advertising strategies, this article shows how closely the relative success of the sewing machine was bound up with local artisanal practices, commercial agency, and the transformative forces present in Indian society. It further indicates how Indian production of sewing machines by the 1950s built on several decades of acculturation and local experience of their sale and use.

The 1926 International Sanitary Convention, which laid out requirements for port sanitation and quarantine in order to limit the spread of diseases internationally, changed the way that the world approached international epidemic control. The 1926 convention is notable for two reasons: the increased reliance on epidemic intelligence rather than quarantine, and the splitting of the world into a series of formalized regional networks under the auspices of a global agreement. This article explores the creation and the limits of this system as a window into shifting understandings of disease and international relations in the interwar era, arguing that sanitary spheres of influences were shaped by, but not entirely dependent on, political spheres of influence.

As a historical period, the Cold War may be seen as a rivalry between two nuclear superpowers that threatened global destruction. The rivalry took place within a common frame of reference, in which a new historical relationship between imperialism and nationalism worked in remarkably parallel ways across the superpower divide. The new imperial–national relationship between superpowers and the client states also accommodated developments such as decolonization, multiculturalism, and new ideologies, thus producing a hegemonic configuration characterizing the period. The models of development, structures of clientage, unprecedented militarization of societies, designs of imperial enlightenment, and even many gender and racial/cultural relationships followed similar tracks within, and often between, the two camps. Finally, counter-hegemonic forces emerged in regions of the non-Western world, namely China and some Islamic societies. Did this portend the beginning of the end of a long period of Western hegemony?

This article examines ‘the village’ as a category of development knowledge used by policymakers and experts to remake the ‘Third World’ during the Cold War. The idea of the village as a universal category of underdevelopment, capable of being remade by expert-led social reform, structured efforts to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of people from Asia to Latin America and Africa. Rooted in a transnational interwar movement for rural reconstruction, village projects were transformed in the 1950s and 1960s by a scientization of development that narrowed the range of experts in the field and by Cold War politics that increasingly tied development to anti-communism and counterinsurgency. From India to Central America, strategic efforts to control rural populations won out over concerns for rural welfare.

This article questions a prevailing bipolarity of traditional Cold War history by examining commonalities and interactions between the Soviet Union and Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s. After outlining the common characteristics of both states around 1960, it analyses the cultural diplomacy of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union towards Brazil. Transforming its hitherto prevailing image as the cradle of world revolution and communist class struggle, the USSR now represented itself as a role model for the quick industrialization of the economy and education of the masses. Many Brazilian intellectuals and political reformers from President Kubitschek to President Goulart shared with the Soviets an interest in what is here called ‘socialist high modernity’. Contacts with the Soviet Union were connected to the putsch and the end of Brazilian democracy in 1964. However, the new military leaders also had their own interests in, and surprisingly good relations with, the stagnating Soviet Union. This was again based on a set of commonalities in the historical development of the two ostensibly idiosyncratic and distant states on either side of the Iron Curtain. Eschewing teleological interpretations of the period and exploring the ideational basis of actors in the conflict, this article – based on new documents from Moscow archives and recently declassified sources from the Brazilian Foreign Ministry – aims to link Cold War historiography to the debates on global history, which have lately neglected both Latin America and eastern Europe.