This article compares European nationalism and earlier notions of political community in Europe and Asia. Without denying the discursive novelty of post-1750 nationalism, it argues that eighteenth-century social and economic incentives to ethnic integration in individual European countries accelerated much older dynamics. Moreover, in the same period, c. 1400–1850, as state-centred ethnicities cohered in Europe, similar processes produced broadly comparable formations around the rimlands of Asia. Together, Europe and the Asian rimlands thus generated an early modern cultural system – distinctive from both nationalism and universal empire, but possessing features of both – that I term ‘political ethnicity’. The novelty and idiosyncrasy of this Eurasian-wide formation has yet to be recognized. Why, then, in Europe alone did political ethnicity eventually produce nationalism? Using Myanmar and Britain as case studies, the article argues that in Europe distinctive medieval legacies joined religious ruptures and exceptionally rapid commercial expansion to compress religious authority, to diffuse metropolitan norms with unprecedented rapidity, and to transfer sovereignty from the crown to propertied interests speaking in the name of the ‘nation’.

The study of aphrodisiacs is an overlooked area of global history which this article seeks to remedy by considering how such substances were commercially traded and how medical knowledge of them was exchanged globally between 1600 and 1920. We show that the concept of ‘aphrodisiacs’ as a new nominal category of pharmacological substances came to be valued and defined in early modern Latin, English, Dutch, Swiss, and French medical sources in relation to concepts transformed from their origin in both the ancient Mediterranean world and in medieval Islamicate medicine. We then consider how the general idea of aphrodisiacs became widely discredited in mid-nineteenth-century scientific medicine until after the First World War in France and in the US, alongside their commercial proliferation in the context of new colonial trade exchanges between Europe, the US, Southeast Asia, Africa, India, and South America. In both examples, we propose that global entanglements played a significant role in both the cohesion and the discreditation of the medical category of aphrodisiacs.

Drawing on a far-flung, multilingual archive of contracts and financial instruments from around the western Indian Ocean, this article highlights how cross-cultural trade depended on the ability of groups to translate between one system and another, rendering one commercial lexicon legible to another so as to produce commensurability and allow for conversions to take place. Law constituted a foundational building block of this process: Indian Ocean merchants drew on a deep well of legal concepts and forms as they attempted to make their worlds legible to one another, mobilizing the grammars of law to bridge commercial systems. We situate these dynamics within the context of the Indian Ocean ‘bazaar’, establishing it as a site for thinking about the place of cross-cultural trade in world history, and the histories of global capitalism more broadly. We suggest that Euro-American capitalism’s very agents had to adapt their commerce to the idioms, logics, and contracts of their business partners around the Indian Ocean – a vernacular world of the bazaar that was itself already in motion.

This article addresses the question of the geographical scope of the ‘age of revolutions’ (c.1750–1850) through the case of a peasant uprising in Mount Lebanon in 1821. This uprising had similarities with recent and contemporary revolutions and rebellions, which have led some to suggest the influence of the ideas of the French Revolution of 1789 or the Greek Revolution of 1821. This article argues that influence at the level of ideas was unimportant, but that the similarities can plausibly be traced to similar and connected contexts at the level of political economy, as the expansion and crisis of military-fiscal states provoked opposition ‘from below’ and renegotiations of sovereignty. This focus on political economy rather than genealogies of ideas can then help define an ‘age of revolutions’ extending beyond Europe and the north Atlantic into the Ottoman empire, Latin America, and other regions.

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.

Were the effects of First World War truly similar globally? A comparison of how the conflict was perceived by two extremely different groups of rural people – southern Americans of the Jackson Purchase region of far western Kentucky and Africans in the small British Protectorate of Nyasaland in south central Africa – makes their microhistories significant rather than trivial by placing them a global context. In the early twentieth century, both groups were not only rural, but removed, decidedly disconnected from each other. Yet, drawing on documentary evidence, especially interviews with the last generation of First World War survivors in both regions, offers a significant perspective on how similar their experiences actually became in the crucible of a global war. The call to arms, their recruitment and resistance to service, combat adversities and cultural experiences, post-war disillusionments and triumphs, and especially the economic consequences of their war provide penetrating insights into the wide-ranging ordeals and opportunities that this first truly global event offered peoples worldwide.

This article examines global processes of decolonization through an analysis of Indian women’s interactions with world governance during the interwar ‘crisis of empire’. This distinct form of activism asserted anti-colonial claims through engagements with transnational civil society networks and the social work of the League of Nations and the International Labour Office. In doing so, it undermined imperial legitimacy, shifted the terms of liberal internationalism, and prepared the ground for later developments at the United Nations.

This article takes a fresh look at the history of private colonial enterprise in order to show how companies influenced British settlement and emigration to South Australia and New Zealand in the 1830s, thus connecting the settler revolution to global capitalism. Bringing into a single analytical frame the history of company colonization in the antipodes and its Atlantic predecessor, it examines how and why the actors involved in the colonization of South Australia and New Zealand invoked North American precedent to justify their early nineteenth-century colonial ventures. The article shows how the legitimating narratives employed by the colonial reformers performed two key functions. On the one hand, they supplied a historical and discursive tradition that authorized chartered enterprise in the antipodes. On the other hand, they furnished legal arguments that purportedly justified the appropriation of Aboriginal Australian and Māori tribal land. In illuminating how language and time shaped the world-making prophesies of these colonial capitalists, the article aims to extend recent work on corporations in global context.