This article analyses some of the transformations in economic vocabularies, practices, and institutions that accompanied the turn towards high value-added and technology-driven industrialization in late socialist Romania. It investigates the challenges posed by increasing integration of the country’s commodity production into the world market in the 1960–70s and assesses the measures adopted by its economic executives as a response to these challenges: the reorganization of production; the reconfiguration of planning mechanisms; and the strategies of keeping labour cheap. This article shows that planners behind the Iron Curtain wrestled with similar problems to their Western counterparts. It demonstrates that the solutions of the socialist economic executives not only mirrored, imitated, and translated Western managerial ideologies and practices but also represented creative local responses to the challenges of the world market. I argue this constellation of solutions constituted a fully fledged form of ‘socialist flexibility’. Analysing how these flexible solutions paralleled the neoliberal deregulation in the capitalist core helps us question the analytical separation between centrally planned and market economies and the still powerful narrative of 1989 as a historical fracture.

This introductory article sets out the global historical approach adopted by the articles in this special issue, focusing on the circulations of goods, peoples, and ideas in ancient Afro-Eurasia (300 BCE-700 CE). Special attention is given to the overland Silk Road and Indo-Pacific networks of maritime exchange. Our aims are to apply globalization thinking to a wider (macro) frame than has arguably been done in existing ancient world studies, to ensure that sufficient focus is maintained on how the local and global intersect, and to demonstrate the analytical utility of concepts connected to globalization and glocalization. Ultimately, we seek to go beyond merely applying theories of globalization to new data, but to use these data to offer an alternative approach to the study of global Antiquity.

This article analyses the resilience of domestic textile production in Java and sub-Saharan Africa to uncover how local industries coped with the effects of broader global and colonial forces in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. We demonstrate that many domestic handicraft manufacturers managed to survive due to specific competitive advantages. Strategies of product differentiation, responsiveness to shifting consumer needs, and flexibility in manufacturing methods enabled local producers to remain competitive in confrontation with mounting imports from early factories, typically constituting cheap, but lower quality and less unique products. Some local manufacturers could even compete based on price given the very low labour costs associated with seasonally-oriented handicraft production, which raises questions about the extent of the comparative advantage enjoyed by early-industrializing nations in the Global North. The capacity of domestic textile producers to remain competitive amid colonial policies aimed at capturing local markets – and raw cotton sources – highlights not only the importance of product differentiation and the specificity of local demand, but also the agency exercised by both producers and consumers under colonial rule.

This article offers a fresh approach to the study of ‘Indo-Roman’ trade by defining the ‘players’ of the ‘game’ of Indian Ocean commerce in the early centuries of the Common Era. Numerous specialized personnel hailing from the Mediterranean, Near East, and Indian subcontinent were involved in the movement, processing, and sale of Indian Ocean commodities. Players throughout the ancient world formed principal-agent relationships, corporate structures, and diaspora communities based on shared heritage and profession to facilitate their efforts. These tactics lowered the transaction costs of commerce arising from a combination of factors: the seasonal monsoon winds restricting wind-powered travel; the asymmetry of information for traders operating abroad without a strong support network; and state interventions (e.g. targeted infrastructure projects and tariffs). Certain individuals attained competitive advantages by cooperating with states to regulate the very commerce in which they engaged (e.g. tax-farmers).

The Anthropocene epoch, characterized by human-caused planetary-scale transformations like climate change and ocean acidification, today is usually associated with the period beginning in the mid-twentieth century. Taking an oceanic perspective on the Anthropocene in Asia, the article argues that oceanic and terrestrial energy regimes synchronized since the 1950s when, for the first time in history, oceanic ghost acres turned marine spaces into a major fuel source. Despite global connections between offshore oil regions located in North America, Asia, and other places going back to the late nineteenth century, Asia’s contingent offshore oil field locations and their physical geographies, combined with political factors, inhibited large-scale offshore drilling before the 1950s. These characteristics of marine spaces meant that Asian political elites and their developmentalist agendas became the guiding force in exploring offshore fields, a process that was hardly dominated by corporate capitalism or structural choice limitations due to the legacies of colonialism.

Zen may be most commonly associated with Japan, but the ‘art of Zen’ was made in Germany. This article reconstructs the reception of Zen Buddhism in Nazi Germany as an extension of the regime’s project to transform Christianity. Although Japanese reformers emphasized Zen’s universal qualities, in Nazi Germany it became associated instead with a combination of völkisch nationalism and spiritual mysticism mirroring Nazi aspirations for a ‘positive’ German form of Christianity. That project may have been discredited after 1945, but the image of Zen cultivated by Nazi ideologues transitioned more or less seamlessly into the post-war New Age movement. This phenomenon thus merits attention not only for what it reveals about the extent to which Germany remained engaged in global intellectual and cultural currents during the Nazi era but also in complicating our historical understanding of how Zen came to be part of the contemporary global vernacular.

This article analyses how the first circumnavigation of the world, from 1519 to 1522, introduced South America as a key space in the formation of the ‘global’, thus producing a historical point of inflection. We examine the commercial and political plans and networks that began to function as a result of this new connectivity, which turned the American continent into a major global axis. The analysis focuses on the way in which this voyage gave new prominence to an unexplored region of the world, namely the southernmost tip of America, thus changing the notion of habitability that had prevailed for centuries in Europe. These changes questioned the authority of ‘ancient’ Greek thinkers and strengthened a European historical narrative that appropriated the discovered territories and distinguished the extreme southern part of America from other southern regions, as symbolized through figures such as the Patagonian giants. I consider these changes based on evidence from Spanish sources.

With the rise of post-colonialism during the latter part of the twentieth century, more focus has been given to non-western perspectives (the so-called nativist turn). In the case of Indian Ocean trade during the early first millennium CE, the view that ‘Roman’ merchants and sailors were the near-exclusive movers of goods, who were also (indirectly) responsible for commercial developments within South Asia, has largely fallen into abeyance. Rightly, the agency of those in South Asia has been acknowledged. The present article goes beyond this basic premise and considers how we can assess evidence demonstrating the role played by sailors and merchants from South Asia. In particular, it is suggested these merchants and sailors played an important role in connecting the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal regions.

The transnational campaign against the Italian invasion of the Ethiopian Empire (1936–36) has been widely acknowledged as a turning point for antiracist and anticolonial political organizing in the African continent and diaspora. This article seeks to reconstruct the South Asian participation in the Hands Off Ethiopia protests, to expand historical knowledge of the early-twentieth-century development of Afro-Asian solidarity ties as well as the intersection of anti-Fascist and anticolonial struggles. It examines the institutional responses to the invasion on the part of the Indian Legislative Assembly, and a series of demonstrations, local meetings and boycotts whose implications reverberated in the local and international press as well as in the concerns of British colonial authorities. As will be argued, this mobilization was fueled by feelings of racial solidarity, anti-imperialist analyses, anti-caste critiques, scriptural interpretations and religious universalisms.

This article traces the circulation of newspapers and journals as physical objects to reconstruct Middle Eastern communists’ global connections. I argue that post-First World War Middle Eastern and North African revolutionary militancy was closely linked to global networks. The extensive transregional and transimperial circulation of the communist press discussed here traces these close connections. The Communist International represented a novelty as a self-proclaimed centralist worldwide party. Distinctively, it brought together the means and the will to centralize (much of) global radicalism. This argument also serves to locate the early and mid-1920s as a transitional period in the history of left-wing movements: the means provided by a World Party intersected with the network-like structure of the pre-Comintern revolutionary milieux. The article aims to contribute to global history by discussing a regional – Middle Eastern – political current, not as the aggregate sum of its national components, but as a product of a global process.

This article analyzes and narrates the history of a clandestine propaganda project known as the Loyal African Brothers series. At the height of the Cold War, African leaders of public opinion received unsolicited leaflets from a group styled the Freedom for Africa Movement (FFAM). Addressed to ‘our Loyal African Brothers,’ the leaflets decried Communist penetration of Africa by connecting topical regional and global events with local histories meant to resonate with an African readership. Unknown to the recipients was that the leaflets were in reality a fabrication of the British Foreign Office’s clandestine propaganda arm, the Information Research Department. Examining the content and distribution of the series, this article uses newly declassified documents to situate Loyal African Brothers within a global ecosystem of Cold War propaganda, decolonization, and print culture. In doing so, it positions Africa as a key battleground in the cultural front of the Global Cold War.

This article analyses recent archaeological work on the flow of materials and their influences on the communities in the South China Sea maritime regions, primarily from a local, Taiwanese perspective. The intertwined Austronesian Routes and maritime Silk Road acted as the primary conduit for the movement of both people and materials. Archaeological findings demonstrate intermittent interaction and cultural exchange between Taiwan and the regions around the South China Sea during the period 1,500-500 BCE. However, starting from 500 BCE, the gradual increase of glass beads, agate beads, and metal products which were made in mainland Southeast Asia and adjacent regions indicate an intensified interaction between Taiwan and Southeast Asia via the Maritime Silk Road and the Austronesian Routes. The author hypothesizes that trade diasporic craftspeople were the carriers of these exotic materials and knowledge, and that external cultural elements had a profound impact on the development of contemporary prehistoric Formosan society. This can be seen most notably in the shifting of decoration systems, the changing methods of subsistence, and technological leaps. Some of the impacts have faded into the archaeological records, but others are still traceable in the modern Indigenous society of Taiwan.

A new liberal international order was born in 1918. Many rejected this regime embodied by the League of Nations and attempts to restore free trade. Among the critics were a host of European ‘regionalists’ who envisioned a world organized into federal super-states. They feared that geopolitical hegemony would soon belong to territorially contiguous super-states, such as the US and the Soviet Union. If the historiography has focused on the varieties of interwar internationalism, it has underplayed the extent of this regionalist challenge. This paper proposes to take seriously the dialectic between internationalist and regionalist visions of world order by charting the half-century political career of British imperialist and statesman Leopold Amery: from his lifelong campaign for British imperial economic union organized around preferential tariffs, through to his fervent critique of both the League and post-1945 American internationalism. Amery’s exploits demonstrate that one of the most significant revolts against the liberal international order originated not only from the revisionist powers—the USSR, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan—but also from the supposed heartland of liberal internationalism itself: the British Empire.

Much of the literature on the Ancient Silk Road has examined its operation through the prism of empires and East-West connections. Yet in the last few decades several scholars have sought to re-examine this framework, with a number suggesting that the roots of the Silk Road exchange network should be sought instead in the many polities which lay along its routes. This article similarly seeks to challenge the traditional ‘Silk Road of Empires’ concept by applying approaches from global history and examining both archaeological and written sources from the third- and fourth-century kingdom of Kroraina in the south-eastern Tarim Basin in Xinjiang, Western China. The first goal of this article is to consider Kroraina’s inclusion in the wider Silk Roads network and how this network influenced local elite consumption. The second is to examine Kroraina’s role in the Silk Road network. It is argued that polities like Kroraina played a crucial role in facilitating and maintaining trans-Eurasian trade in Late Antiquity.

This article focuses on debates about the relationship between religion, science and national identity that unfolded in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengal. Combining perspectives from religious studies and global history, it offers a specific approach to theoretical and methodological issues revolving around entanglement, agency and modernity. This will be operationalized, first, through an exploration of personal networks surrounding the Bengali Tantric pandit Shivachandra Bhattacharya Vidyarnava; his Bengali disciple, philosopher and nationalist educator, Pramathanath Mukhopadhyay and Shivachandra’s British disciple, the judge John Woodroffe. Second, an investigation of the connections between self-referentially ‘orthodox’ societies, so-called reformers, and the Theosophical Society will further illustrate the global exchanges that conditioned and shaped contemporary debates about religion, science and politics. This will complicate and shed new light on the contested relationship between modernity and tradition, or reformism and orthodoxy, opening new perspectives for further dialogue between religious studies and global history.

At its founding in 1919, the International Labour Organization (ILO) selected its Governing Body from eight ‘states of Chief Industrial Importance’. The ILO’s attempt to define industrial importance was predicated on its seemingly expert-driven and statistical impartiality. As a technical organization, this standard was created to depoliticize the selection of its Governing Body. Yet, with its utilization of relative economic indicators, the standard ended up recreating a highly Eurocentric Governing Body. Resistance to these metrics by aggregately large but relatively underdeveloped economies, such as colonial India, reveals the inherently political nature of attempting to define industrial ‘importance’. This article examines the little-known history of how the Indian delegation to the ILO challenged the ILO’s Eurocentric metrics, constituting what it meant to be industrially important. In doing so, this article questions to what extent ‘technical’ international organizations can remain apolitical spaces and how our contemporary international institutions are responding to the increasing politicization of their function.

This article examines globalization in an Asian context through the lens of two Buddhist concepts: the cakravartin and the bodhisattva. A cakravartin is a ruler who fuses spiritual and political power in his global reign. This article argues that the cakravartin represents one model of Buddhist globalization where the spread of the religion coincides with the growing military dominion of a BuddhGist king. A bodhisattva, on the other hand, is an enlightened being who has chosen to be reborn out of compassion with the entire suffering world. A bodhisattva watches over a ‘Buddha field’, or spiritual realm. Each Buddha field has its own laws, culture, language, or even separate forms of time and space. The bodhisattva provides a new model for understanding cultural diversity in the absence of a unified political power: the Buddhist world is a transnational network where new identities are negotiated.

This paper provides a broad overview of spatial, architectural, and sensory relationships between rats and humans on British and American vessels from approximately the 1850s–1950s. Taking rats as my primary historical actors, I show how humans attempted to prevent the movement of these animals between ports across three periods. Firstly, the mid- to- late-nineteenth century, where few attempts were made to prevent rats from boarding ships, and where a multiplicity of human/rat relationships can be located. Secondly, the 1890s–1920s, in which port authorities erected anti-rat borders to lock these animals on land or at sea. Finally, the 1920s–50s, where ships were reconstructed to eliminate all possibilities of rodent inhabitation and to interrupt their transit between ports. Ship rats, I argue, not only demonstrate the fragility of historical rodent-control efforts, but also encourage oceanic historians to consider how animals have negotiated and shaped boundaries between spheres of land and sea.

Solar energy often appears a resource without a history, perpetually novel and promising futuristic abundance. This overlooks a long episode of ‘low-modernist’ solar research in and for the global South. Focusing especially on India and detouring through Mexico, two important arenas for early solar experimentation, this article traces an alternative history of solar technologies as austere everyday fixes for developing countries. In parallel with the well-known postcolonial focus on high-modernist energy mega-projects, the narrow transnational community of solar experts retained a competing tendency to think small. At its heart lay a dualistic conception of the modern energy economy: flexible and resource-intensive grid electricity for urban centres, inferior off-grid devices to meet the minimal and static needs of the rural poor. This impoverished, feminized Third World projected user base resulted in persistent underinvestment and failed commercialization, helping to explain why solar technologies did not take off earlier. While solar experts emphasized the regional exceptionalism of the arid tropics, the teleological linkage between modernity and ever-rising energy abundance was rejuvenated from below as rural communities began to imagine the high-energy good life as a universal aspiration.

This article examines the emergence of global environmental perceptions and policies in the preparatory phase of the UN Conference on the Human Environment 1968–1972, based on an internationally comparative study of sixty-three preparatory country reports. Located at the intersection of global, knowledge, environmental and political history, the article raises two theses. First, that ‘the environment’ emerged as a field of knowledge in not only capitalist industrial societies but globally, thus in socialist and non-industrial societies too. Second, the article demonstrates a large overlap of environmental policies taken across geographical and ideological lines. Thus, the article sheds light on the understanding of environmental problems as well as national and international environmental policy measures around 1970 and thereby contributes to the question of how environmental governance emerged as a global field.