In 1615, a Dutch fleet under the command of Joris van Spilbergen attacked the Mexican port of Acapulco. The port was the eastern terminus of the Manila galleons, the ships that linked Asia and the Americas during the early modern period. In the face of foreign incursion, Spanish officials in Mexico proposed to secure transpacific trade by constructing the Fort of San Diego to protect Acapulco. To build and later repair the fort, they mobilized thousands of Indigenous men through the repartimiento (rotational forced labour system) from what is now the Mexican state of Guerrero. Using the port’s accounting records, this article argues that the novelty of transpacific empire profoundly affected the social and economic lives of Mexico’s coastal and hinterland Indigenous peoples. However, the global histories of the Manila galleons and of early modern Asia–Latin American connections have overlooked the relationship between Spanish Pacific expansion and Indigenous labour in the Americas. Placing the fort’s Indigenous builders at the centre reveals not only the violent outcomes of imperial anxiety, but also how Indigenous people adapted to the advent of transpacific empire.

This article investigates the role of Catholic and non-Catholic local actors in shaping missionary activities in seventeenth-century Ottoman Europe. It examines jurisdictional conflicts and collaborations between Bosnian Franciscan friars, Ragusan merchants, Ottoman officials—particularly judges—and Serbian Orthodox clergy, whose interactions shaped the local landscape of Catholicism and defined the limits of Catholic engagement. Drawing primarily on Catholic missionary sources, the study argues that analysing missions through interconnected local, regional, and global lenses, while foregrounding the agency of local actors, provides a more nuanced understanding of early modern Catholicism. By expanding historiographical approaches that have primarily focused on Catholic missions outside Europe, the article advocates for the inclusion of Ottoman Europe as a significant yet understudied site of Catholic missionary activity. It further highlights the jurisdictional and institutional tensions within Catholic expansion and governance, revealing the complexities of missionary engagement in a politically fragmented and religiously plural environment.

This article challenges the traditional view of the linear causality of technological globalization in the history of modern predictive meteorology. According to this linear narrative, telegraphy, by enabling near-instantaneous communication over vast distances, was the causa efficiens that directly and inevitably produced large-scale weather forecasting. However, the role of Jesuit scientists in East Asia as pioneers of cyclone warning systems not only demonstrates that the linear narrative is too simple but invites a rigorous examination of the relationships between prior knowledge networks and technological infrastructures. This article contends that the expansion of technological networks does not inexorably imply the expansion of knowledge networks. There was not, therefore, a unidirectional causal relationship but a concomitant two-way interaction; that is, there was a coextension of knowledge and technological networks, where both Jesuit scientists and telegraph companies benefited from each other and shared common goals confronting a global threat—cyclones. This offers a new perspective not only on the history of meteorological services but also of science globalization.

The story of the Panama Canal is often framed as a morality tale juxtaposing French tragedy and American triumph (or imperialism). What gets lost in this depiction is a pair of adventurous entrepreneurs, Anthoine de Gogorza and Louis Lacharme, whose efforts led Ferdinand de Lesseps to his doomed canal project. This article shows how the roots of the Panama Canal emerged from the forests of Colombia’s Sinú River Valley, whose settlement, in turn, was fostered by the search for canal routes in the Darien. Yet despite the spatial proximity of these two regions, their overlooked connections were woven together through the ‘lifepaths’ of de Gogorza and Lacharme as they moved from France to Colombia and around the globalizing Atlantic of the nineteenth century. Following their movements, in turn, sheds light on the overlooked figure of the foreign speculator, the business of exploration, and marketing the tropics.

Scholars often analyse Western–Chinese legal conflicts in the nineteenth-century Qing empire through the lens of extraterritoriality. This article examines the 1895 anti-missionary riot in Chengdu and the ensuing dispute over the responsibility of Qing officials. It highlights the protection of foreign lives and property as a key area of contestation between Western powers and the Qing empire. During the riot, Chengdu authorities exploited their discretionary power to challenge missionary presence and undermine treaty obligations. In response, Western powers began a concerted effort to hold local officials accountable by pressuring the Qing state to impose severe punitive sanctions. The riot and its aftermath reveal how a non-Western state negotiated and enforced obligations required by Eurocentric international law. Protection emerges as a multifaceted instrument for the projection of imperial power and a malleable component of the Western-imposed treaty system, mediating the asymmetrical international relations in the nineteenth century.

The global diffusion of sewing machines required concerted efforts from manufacturers, sales agents, and, most significantly, local consumers, who rendered the machine legible and desirable across diverse social settings. As this article shows, however, in politically volatile contexts, it was manufacturers who most decisively shaped these processes. Focusing on the Singer Company—the largest and most influential of its kind—the article examines how this process unfolded in the Ottoman empire during the Armenian massacres of the 1890s. Occurring when ethnic and religious homogeneity was becoming central to the political order, the Ottoman case offers an especially important early example of global firms’ responses to the emerging pressures of exclusionary—and often violent—political and economic reordering. The article traces how Singer tested adaptive strategies that not only sustained its regional presence but also recalibrated its business model. In doing so, it contributes to global history by demonstrating how seemingly localized episodes of political violence became formative sites of adaptation, attuning global corporations to a world increasingly structured by systemic violence, warfare, and demographic homogenization.

Relying on a variety of archival sources, including the recently discovered private correspondence of the Uruguayan diplomat Enrique Buero, this article demonstrates that a Latin American bloc with a common agenda emerged in Geneva during the 1920s and transformed the codification of international law in both the League of Nations and the Pan-American Union. Key pressure groups previously thought to have operated exclusively in the Americas were created in the League by Latin American diplomats who wanted to reform international law to protect small states but had lost faith in Pan-Americanism. The article examines the ideological origins of this bloc and the obstacles that it encountered, including an initial tendency among some diplomats to prioritize status-seeking. It charts the Latin American bloc’s success in dismantling obstacles to the League’s involvement in the Americas. Finally, the article demonstrates that the bloc was able to leverage its influence beyond the League, including during the run-up to the 1933 Montevideo Conference.

As the first foreign policy issue Nigeria debated, the controversy around France’s nuclear tests, conducted in Algeria during the War of Independence there, allowed Lagos to rehearse its envisioned African role even before formal independence in October 1960. Nigerian opposition to France eventually culminated in the expulsion of the French ambassador on 5 January 1961, after the third French atomic test in the Algerian Sahara. This seemingly straightforward anti-colonial and anti-nuclear act was in fact largely driven by inter-African dynamics, particularly Nigeria’s complicated relationship with Ghana. By reconstructing this episode, the article demonstrates how international affairs uniquely crystallized interactions between domestic and regional politics in decolonizing states. This in turn encourages us to look beyond the paradigms of the Cold War and decolonization when writing the Global South into world history.

This article considers the responses of the Indian Workers’ Association (Great Britain) (IWA) to food scarcities in India during the late 1960s. It reveals Maoist optics informed IWA critiques, departing from coexistent appraisals articulated in leftist circles in India. In doing so, the article demonstrates the relevance of worldviews, idioms, and paradigms emanating from global conjunctures beyond places of origin among diaspora. IWA luminaries were embedded in revolutionary anti-colonial networks shaped by decolonization and the global Cold War, and bestowed substance upon Maoism in these contexts. Ultimately, this informed IWA perceptions of causes and solutions to the food ‘crisis’: in their characterizations of reliance on external aid as indicative of post-1947 India’s semi-colonial status; in portrayals of Soviet ‘social imperialism’ in India during the Sino-Soviet split; or in demands for radical land reform based on a selective rendering of the Chinese model, which downplayed the consequences of the ‘Great Leap Forward’.

This article reconstructs the religious and political activities of the Lebanese Shi‘i scholar Mohamad Jawad Chirri, who founded the first purpose-built Shi‘i mosque in the United States in 1963. It uses Chirri’s biography to explain the institutional, ideological, and political concerns structuring the global Shi‘i revival of the mid-twentieth century, as well as the strategies adopted by Islamic revivalist figures to achieve their institutional ambitions in a competitive and increasingly globalized religious marketplace. A hypermobile activist who lived and travelled between southern Lebanon, southern Iraq, Michigan, and West Africa, Chirri’s institutional initiatives and public activism took place outside the purview of the centres of Shi‘i religious authority in southern Iraq and Iran. The article argues that Chirri’s work, thought, and legacy complicate diffusionist understandings of Islamic revivalist activity as an ideologically coherent project of politicization or radicalization in the years surrounding the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. The ‘global’ Shi‘i revival should instead be understood as an entanglement of institutional projects linked by transnational familial, professional, and financial networks emerging in the 1950s.

This article considers the history of Emergency Health Kits established by United Nations agencies and the larger medical non-governmental organizations of the 1980s to analyse the significance of standardized responses in humanitarian emergencies. We argue that, far from being a rigid and immutable response, the kits reflected a (not universally realized) desire to standardize and control both supplies and medical care from international organizations. As such, humanitarian medical practice remained a disputed field in which each object or drug was negotiated at the risk of creating innovation traps. Coming at a time of increasingly global logistics capacities, the Emergency Health Kits became a central feature of a more coordinated global marketplace of humanitarian aid. The kits’ promise to provide rapid transport of emergency supplies to crisis settings across the world was often experienced as a construct, with long delays and logjams in certain regions. Even so, humanitarian organizations were agents of globalization because they imagined a system of centralized production in the Global North and supply to isolated and/or insecure locations across the world.