Global history has come under attack. It is charged with neglecting national history and the ‘small spaces’ of the past, with being an elite globalist project made irrelevant by the anti-globalist politics of our age, with focusing exclusively on mobile people and things, and with becoming dangerously hegemonic. This article demonstrates that global history is intertwined with the histories of the nation and the local, individuals, outsiders, and subalterns, and small and isolated places. Moreover, global history has directly addressed immobility and resistances to flow, and remains relatively weak in the discipline, versus the persistent dominance everywhere of national history. The article offers a new short history of the rise of the contemporary idiom of global history, and a prospect for a future in which scholars may find, through collaboration, alternatives to the European weights and measures of the past, and to the dominance of Anglophone historians. It argues that we should no more reverse the ‘global turn’ than we should return history’s gaze only to propertied white men. Rather than a retreat from global history, we need it more than ever to fight against myths of imperial and national pasts, which often underpin nationalist populisms.

This article argues that Flowers (flores sanctorum), collections of saints’ lives arranged by the liturgical calendar, were the first genre of devotional literature to have a global reach during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This article begins with the medieval origins of Flowers before analysing their dispersion in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by the Franciscans and Jesuits. By taking a temporal long view and a transoceanic perspective, the article contributes to the scholarship on early modern evangelization, translation, global networks, and the historiographies of the Franciscans and Jesuits.

This article presents a preliminary survey by which to track, in the longue durée, the path of the nail of the Gran Bestia (great beast), a remedy that appeared in therapeutics on both sides of the Atlantic. The Gran Bestia is mentioned in the natural histories, books of remedies, and medical handbooks that proliferated in the Old World and European settlements from the seventeenth century onwards. From the point of view of global history, it is a revealing case from which to investigate, first, how the transfer of a name between continents involved the associated transfer of medical virtues and properties and, second, long before Linnaeus, how the commerce in medicines, skins, and other animal products contributed to associating different animal kinds from different cultural worlds. Far from human universals, the history of the great beast seems to refer to common meanings created by commerce. This article therefore argues for a new investigation into the global and transdisciplinary dimension of objects that is not limited to exclusively local traditions, and may instead reflect the living remains of a long history of exchanges, translations, and transfers that de- and re-functionalized nature in evolving geographies over several centuries.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru were among the countries participating in the most important world’s fairs in Europe and North America. These mass gatherings focused on national self-images as well as technological development and commodities, but the Latin American exhibition organizers also understood them to be transnational spaces that contributed to the mobility of persons, objects, and knowledge. In this context, the scientific display of pre-Columbian ‘antiquities’ was regarded as being as important as the participation in archaeological and anthropological congresses. By understanding the world’s fairs as ‘spaces of global knowledge’, this article highlights the agency of Latin American scientists, intellectuals, and collectors in the transnational endeavour to create a ‘Latin American antiquity’ at the fairgrounds. Although most fair attendees sought to study and display the pre-Columbian past in an objective manner, the older dream of (re-)constructing the splendour of America’s ancient civilizations never completely vanished.

With the advent of new media technologies and approaches in the twentieth century, public health officials became convinced that health needed mass media support. The World Health Organization believed that educating people, as well as informing them about the health situation around the world, could assist in the enduring fight against disease. Yet in an increasingly competitive media landscape, the agency recognized the need to persuade people and hold their attention through attractive presentation. Public information, the name given to the multiple strategies used to communicate with the public, was rarely straightforward and required the agency not only to monitor the impact of its own efforts but also to identify opportunities to further enhance its reputation, especially when this was in danger of damage or misappropriation. The WHO’s understanding of public information provides insights into the development of international information, communication, and education networks and practices after 1945, as well as the increasingly central position of these processes in generating support for and evincing the value of international organizations.

This article examines a 1956 United Nations effort to respond to decolonization, by supplying newly independent governments with international administrators to help build sovereign nation-states out of the disintegrating European empires and anchor them firmly within the capitalist world. The article reveals the UN as a significant historical actor during the Cold War beyond the organization’s function of providing a forum for intergovernmental debates and lobbying. While the initiative never resulted in a large-scale response to decolonization, it ultimately effected a substantial shift in the practice of development assistance: from advisory services to a more paternalist approach that focused on ‘getting the work done’ on behalf of aid recipients. Recovering this history helps account for the strange triumph of state sovereignty in the second half of the twentieth century: its global proliferation at a time when international actors became increasingly active in the management of the public affairs of developing countries.