If our aim is to pluralise the ‘subjects, methods, and aims’ of the academic study of international organisations, then one fairly obvious route to follow is that of historicisation. Historians of international organisations have elected a variety of avenues to relate the creation and the design of international institutions. Building on their work, this chapter offers another tool to the methodological palette the present volume offers; on the other hand and more specifically, I want to reflect on what international organisations are from the point of view of their making. To do so, I zoom in on one important moment in the history of modern international organisations: the 1865 international telegraph commission in Paris that convened to determine the scope and purpose of the first formal and permanent international organisation, the International Telegraph Union. I approach this case through the lens of micro-politics, combining biographical and sociological methods. Methodologically I study international organisations by means of biographical membership analysis; theoretically I argue that international organisations cannot be fully understood in separation from the situated political motives of their makers.

As state and local governments moved into the infrastructure field, they also revolutionized public finance and set the stage for infrastructure politics in the twentieth century. Governments at every level broadened their fiscal footprints to accommodate new infrastructure development after the Civil War. Governments were not supposed to direct public money into private hands, but this legal principle was in inevitable conflict with the public–private model of infrastructure development. In any event, state governments created numerous workarounds, most notably by allowing cities to tax and spend instead of states doing it themselves. Finally, the Civil War fundamentally changed the balance of power between federal and state governments. The 14th Amendment seemed to promise a new era of expanded rights for black Americans and other groups against discriminatory state power. As public power spread like a web over economic life, conservative jurists such as Ernst Freund, Christopher Tiedemann, Thomas Cooley, and others asked whether there were any limits at all on government power to advance what legislatures called “the public good.” Their views would inform laissez-faire legalism from its rise after the Civil War until its demise in the 1930s.

Modern means of transportation and communication along water, rails, and roads had a profound impact on the economic and social development of China from the mid-nineteenth century onward. After the arrival of the steamship in the 1840s and the telegraph in the early 1860s, railroad construction began to emerge slowly at the close of the century, followed by bus and motor traffic bringing about macadamized city streets and highway expansion, with a modest level of air traffic taking off in the 1930s. This chapter addresses the structural changes in transportation and communication that characterized the transition from the last decades of the Qing empire (1644–1911) through the Republican period (1911–1949) to the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).