Visions of media spanning the globe and connecting cultures have been around at least since the birth of telegraphy, yet they have always fallen short of realities. Nevertheless, with the internet, a global infrastructure has emerged, which, together with mobile and smartphones, has rapidly changed the media landscape. This far-reaching digital connectedness makes it increasingly clear that the main implications of media lie in the extent to which they reach into everyday life. This article puts this reach into historical context, arguing that, in the pre-modern period, geographically extensive media networks only extended to a small elite. With the modern print revolution, media reach became both more extensive and more intensive. Yet it was only in the late nineteenth century that media infrastructures penetrated more widely into everyday life. Apart from a comparative historical perspective, several social science disciplines can be brought to bear in order to understand the ever more globalizing reach of media infrastructures into everyday life, including its limits. To date, the vast bulk of media research is still concentrated on North America and Europe. Recently, however, media research has begun to track broader theoretical debates in the social sciences, and imported debates about globalization from anthropology, sociology, political science, and international relations. These globalizing processes of the media research agenda have been shaped by both political developments and changes in media, including the Cold War, decolonization, the development of the internet and other new media technologies, and the rise of populist leaders.

This article argues for the importance of an exploration of sporting interactions in the British world. In addition, it presents the case for the adaptation of borderlands theory to the British world framework. Such study of British world borderlands is capable of more accurately capturing the spatial and regional variety of this British world and, in particular, the nascent national identities of dominions such as Australia. Sport is a particularly apt vehicle for the examination of such issues in an Australian context, since playing to the ‘imaginary grandstand’ of international spectators has always occupied a central role in the construction of an Australian national identity. This article uses three brief case studies – cricket, swimming, and Australian Rules football – to explore these theoretical claims.

By offering a particular interpretation of the new evidence on historical national accounting, Goldstone argues for a return to the Pomeranz (2000) version of the Great Divergence, beginning only after 1800. However, he fails to distinguish between two very different patterns of pre-industrial growth: (1) alternating episodes of growing and shrinking without any long-term trend in per capita income and (2) episodes of growing interspersed by per capita incomes remaining on a plateau, so that per capita GDP trends upwards over the long run. The latter dynamic pattern occurred in Britain and Holland from the mid-fourteenth century, so that Northwest Europe first edged ahead of the Yangzi delta region of China in the eighteenth century.

Many societies became Muslim gradually, without conquest by Muslim rulers. Explanations of this process typically focus on Muslim traders, proselytizing ‘holy men’, and the conversion of ruling elites, as the limited sources suggest. Yet it cannot be assumed that Islamization always made sense for elites as a power-enhancing stratagem, or that rulers or holy men were willing or able to shape the religious allegiances of commoners. In fact, studies of contemporary Islamic societies demonstrate the relative autonomy of commoners’ religious observance, and the tendency of elites towards accommodation. Evidence from a recently Islamized region in East Africa shows that, rather than following elite converts, ordinary villagers initiated rural Islamization. They learned from coastal Muslim ritual rather than scripture, and evoked Islam to challenge social hierarchies and assert a more egalitarian social ethos. The possibility of similar processes also exists in other sites of gradual Islamization.

The article uses comparative Indian material from British India and later, the Pakistani Punjab to ask new questions of the standard accounts of Egypt’s post-1890 cotton boom. It also argues for the particular relevance of the rich Punjabi green revolution data to the Egyptian case, and more generally, for the rewards to be obtained from an academic dialog between selected aspects of late nineteenth and of late twentieth century globalization. Topics analyzed include the impact of the various agricultural revolutions on social and regional inequalities, the issue of sustainability, the role of experts and the impact on health of long-term environmental degradation.

The structure of the USA and the countries that emerged from the remains of Gran Colombia ultimately took different shapes from those suggested in the era immediately after independence, particularly in regard to the extent of each state's fiscal and monetary capacities. This article applies Oszlak's model of ‘stateness’ to the early financial and monetary histories of the USA (roughly 1776–93) and Gran Colombia (roughly 1819–35) to assess and compare the role of financial and monetary capacities in long-run state consolidation and economic development. The US was ultimately more successful than Gran Colombia at adapting its financial and monetary capacities and institutions, creating better conditions for the attainment of ‘stateness’, stronger economic growth, and greater endurance as a national entity. The comparison ultimately suggests a reciprocal relationship between the legitimization of a state's authority (that is, state consolidation) and the development and solidification of fiscal and monetary capacities.

This article examines two tutelage campaigns launched by Japanese social reformers targeting Japanese emigrant women in Manchuria and California in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It reveals how these two middle-class-based social campaigns jointly paved the way for the Japanese state's ‘continental bride’ policy in the late 1930s, which mobilized and exported women from across the nation to Manchuria on an unprecedented scale. Synthesizing the stories of Japan's colonialism in Manchuria and Japanese labour migration to the American Pacific coast, this study traces the convergence and flows between the women's education campaigns in Japanese communities on both sides of the Pacific. It moves the debate of Japanese imperialism beyond Asia and situates it in a transnational space encompassing the local, the national, and the global.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, as the US launched the Point Four initiative of overseas technical assistance programmes, a number of American officials, academics, and analysts saw valuable global lessons in the US Bureau of Indian Affairs’ development interventions among Native Americans. These interests culminated in a suite of professional training experiments, involving trainees from around the world, which emphasized cross-cultural development methods and used certain south-western Native American communities as field ‘laboratories’. A foundational seminar programme, coordinated by Cornell University social scientists, inspired additional training initiatives, tied to Point Four projects abroad, which brought foreign government officers from South Asia and the Middle East for similar training in New Mexico and Arizona. These training experiments not only placed Native American situations at the centre of significant transnational conversations about development, but also reinforced and widely circulated particular ideas regarding ‘underdevelopment’, ‘experts” prerogatives, and the politics of development relations.

This article will examine the structural evolution of China’s maritime trade with South Asia from 1684, the year in which the Qing dynasty legalized private commercial voyages, until about 1740. It concludes that, initially, most of the Chinese goods that entered the Indian Ocean destined for South Asian markets were first exported by Chinese merchants to Southeast Asian ports, and were then relayed from there to the Indian Ocean. The two most important hubs in this indirect trading system were Ayutthaya and Johor. However, between about 1715 and 1725, political changes in these two centres, combined with a short-lived Qing ban on Southeast Asian trade, encouraged South Asian-based merchants to increase the number of direct voyages they made to China each year. The result was an expansion of direct trade between South Asia and China at the expense of the indirect routes.

Following independence in 1958, hundreds of Guinean soldiers, students, and politicians fled their home country in order to build an opposition to President Sékou Touré in exile. This article examines how these exiles built regional and global networks in order to effect political change. In turn, West African states sought to manage exiles in order to apply political pressure on regional rivals. Despite their liminality in a region increasingly dominated by national politics and international organizations, exiles were at the centre of political contestations surrounding citizenship, sovereignty, and human rights that emerged in the three decades following decolonization. Their history underscores the importance of regional frameworks in shaping the post-colonial order in West Africa.

Western expansion and domination through colonial systems served as a form of globalization, spreading white hegemony across the globe. While whites retained the monopoly on ‘modernity’ as the exclusive writers of historical progress, ‘backward’ African Americans were perceived as ‘outside’ Western culture and history. As a result, there were no African American individuals perceived as succeeding in Western terms in the arts, humanities, and sciences. In response, African American intellectuals forged a counter-global bloc that challenged globalization conceived as hegemonic Western domination. They sought to insert African Americans as a whole into the history of America, (re)creating a local black American history ‘forgotten’ because of slavery and Western power. African American intellectuals thus created a ‘usable past’, or counter-memory, to reconstitute history through the inclusion of African Americans, countering Western myths of black inferiority. The devastating legacy of slavery was posited as the cause of the African Americans’ lack of Western cultural acclivity. Due to the lack of nationally recognized African American figures of Western cultural achievement, intellectuals constructed Dumas as a lieu de mémoire as part of wider efforts to appropriate historical individuals of black descent from across the globe within a transnational community produced by the Atlantic slave trade. Since all blacks were perceived as having a uniting ‘essence’, Dumas’ achievements meant that all blacks had the same potential. Such identification efforts demonstrated African Americans’ social and cultural suitability in Western terms and the resulting right to be included in American society. In this process, African Americans expressed a new, local black identity by expanding an ‘African American’ identity to a wider range of individuals than was commonly applied. While constructing a usable past, African Americans redefined ‘America’ beyond the current hegemonic usage (which generally restricted the term geographically to the US) to encompass an ‘Atlantic’ world – a world in which the Dumas of memory was re-imagined as an integral component with strong connections to slavery and colonialism.