This collection of essays is one of what appears to be becoming a series of edited books on global history from A. G. Hopkins (the first was Globalization in world history, others are presaged in Hopkins’ long introduction to this volume). What is most remarkable about the book under review is that all but one of the pieces in the volume were written by members of the same history department, at the University of Texas, Austin, and all but two of these were composed by junior faculty. It is a signal feat to get scholars of such diverse specialties to round on a particular topic, no matter how broadly cast. One can only imagine the potential benefits of such an effort, both in terms of intra-departmental conversations and undergraduate teaching. It is also a smart way to get historians to connect disparate topics of interest and research with the growing literature on globalization and its histories. The range of perspectives presented, and the different angles of attack, give the book an edge that keeps the reader engaged.

In the Introduction, Hopkins lays out an ambitious framework for bundling up the essays. Deploying the term ‘universal’ as distinct from ‘global’ (global phenomena are not necessarily universal, he argues, because interactions among them may not be expressions of a quest for commonality), Hopkins wants to put the fictive claims of universals, said to be applicable to the world as a whole, into interaction with various localities in order to trace how universals get bent and appropriated in concrete, historical ways that sometimes help sustain, sometimes undermine, local cultures and practices. The exercise, as represented by these essays, leads him to the conclusion that there are no pristine universals: wherever they appear they ‘bear the marks of the locality that produced them’, thus pointing, not to a world of commonalities (which must also require exclusions), but towards a necessary toleration of difference – cosmopolitanism rather than universalism.

Inevitably, not all the essays in the collection hold to this overview. Roger Hart’s excellent meditation on Hegel’s universalism rightly treats ‘modernity’ and ‘globalization’ as ideological constructs claiming privileged knowledge of the putative outcome of historical processes and ends by warning against turning the local effects of global processes into manifestations of universal principles. It is never quite clear if universals are meant to be ‘real’ or imagined – or simply another word for the generalization of the west in its moment of ascendancy. And in practice, as well as through slips of the tongue, the contributors often elide universalism with globalization. As long as the focus is on ways localities manipulate or appropriate global forces (as in Erika Bsumek’s close study of Navajo weaving) or on the interaction of the global and the local (as in Karl Miller’s interesting links between the global marketing of phonographs and the discovery of ‘local’ music) or on the local uses of competing universal claims (as in Mark Lawrence’s lucid and insightful examination of how leaders in the Vietnamese civil war used Cold War categories to specific ends), this is not a problem. The individual essays carry their own logic and make useful contributions.

But slipping universalism in as a replacement for the global lends an abstract tone to the discussion – universals, as fictive claims, are in the realm of ideology or ideas; local worlds appear, in contrast, as specific and material – in the realm of things. No doubt this helps in working against the recurrent imagery in globalization literature of the local as overwhelmed by global forces (in models of challenge and response, action and reaction); yet it tends to obscure the materiality of global forces themselves. There is, in short, a missing terrain of action. This becomes most evident in Mark Metzler’s wonderful study of Listian economic ideas in Meiji Japan and more indirectly, in Tracie Matysik’s account of the Universal Races Congress of 1911 and Geoffrey Schad’s examination of self-determination in the Ottoman context.

In each of these essays, the authors see contending or rival universals: the sirens of free trade vs. nationally organized capital in Meijii Japan; the imperial transnationalism of the Ottoman Empire vs. the claims of national self-determination; the individually based agenda of human rights in the struggle against racism vs. a community of independent nations in the struggle against imperialism. That less universalist, more parochial, national solutions were adopted in each case certainly reflected local and regional conditions, but it also registered the terms of global competition. Friedrich List may be cast as a ‘universalist’ in his appreciation of the global significance of the industrial revolution, but while influenced by his sojourn in the US and influential in Germany after its unification, Metzler clearly shows that List’s ideas came to Japan (in translation) well after free trade policies had been displaced by a new national agenda of self-mobilization and state-led industrialization. His ideas proved useful and were grafted onto policies already formulated, less from the realm of ideas than from realist calculations about what was required to survive in the global competition of world empires in the late nineteenth century. In the context of such empires, moreover, nationalist imaginings were the most powerful tool at hand for challenging colonial domination and its racial predicates. Again, nationalism as a global idiom of struggle arose, not so much from the realm of ideas, as from the material conditions of colonial empire in the early twentieth century. Indeed, it was precisely the crisis of colonial regimes – especially in the context of a global depression of the 1930s, the deepening impoverishment of agriculture in the context of the continuing extractions of empire, that opened the latent, and in many places, overt civil war between urban centres and countryside which, worldwide, conditioned the struggles in the Cold War that, in turn, got overwritten by the claims of the competing universals of communism and capitalism. It is this middle ground – of the imperatives of survival in a global condition – that gets passed over in the framing of universalism vs. localism. Happily most of the essays are not constrained by this dichotomy and offer lucid and at times striking insights into the very material conditions of globality that shaped twentieth-century world history.