This volume takes the reader to a wide variety of places across the globe and travels through time from chapters beginning in the eighteenth century to those focused on twentieth-century topics. I’ve been invited to introduce China historians to what this book might teach us. From the vantage point of Chinese history, this book could be one that helps us locate our historical studies of China within a global history context. One editor, Robert S.G. Fletcher, is a British historian working on imperial and global history; the other editor, Alec Zuercher Reichardt, is an early American history specialist. Together they have created a thematic framework for the book’s chapters, each of which focuses on some “inland” place that is part of some larger geographical space. Some of the chapters move from their inland space out, often to reach maritime ports which have been the nodes connecting a well-studied set of early modern and modern era global history themes. The editors propose “inlands” as “a new analytical unit” to “focus attention on that pressing historiographical issue of the origins, contours, and consequences of uneven global interconnection” (5). Noting David Christian’s studies of an Inner Eurasian region that is a unit of world history, they suggest that their focus on “inlands” takes place as they see “a more general revival of interest in the uses and viability of the region as a unit of historical analysis” (5).

As someone who has longed admired studies of early modern world regions and has written on the subject, I anticipated that the editors would be showing how “inlands” fit within different world regions.Footnote ¹ This would have helped the reader move through local inland histories in a more systematic matter. Instead, the section entitled “Routes and Resources” begins with French imperial ambitions in the eighteenth-century era of the Chickasaw Wars in the American interior, moves in the next chapter to China’s Huizhou merchants’ eighteenth–nineteenth century commercial networks along different routes from a lake in the north of Jiangxi Province, and in the third chapter to markets and railroads on the Indo-Gangetic Plain, 1840–1900. Chapter 4 takes the reader to British-managed estancias (ranches) in inland Tierra del Fuego, 1897–1944 and Chapter 5 puts the reader among the mines in Broken Hill located on the western edge of the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia. The variety may be interesting, but it is not systematic.

The first chapter of “Routes and Resources,” by Alec Zuercher Reichardt, offers a useful framing of the political space of this “inland” North American region in political competition between the French and British. That competition took place amidst their respective shifting collaborations with different Native American groups, who were trying to retain their social and environmental world as Europeans aspired to establish themselves on this land. The four chapters that follow all have some basic economic concerns spanning production and commerce. Chapters 2 and 3 contribute to well-developed historiographies analyzing early modern Chinese commerce and the impact of nineteenth-century railroad construction on the development of markets and commerce in India. Chapter 2, the Huizhou merchant chapter, by Anne Gerritsen, contributes a granular view of the flows of grain, tea, and porcelain from an inland location—the Lake Poyang area of northern Jiangxi Province—to other parts of the Chinese empire and to its maritime port, where Europeans could buy the tea and porcelain, new commodities in both European and colonial American markets. The Indian history chapter, by Aparajita Mukhopadhyay, makes clear that the uneven market development along the rail networks on the Indo-Gangetic Plain meant that markets and railroads benefited people in some areas, but not others in this inland space.

Moving to the southern tip of the South American mainland in Chapter 4, Nicolás Gómez Baeza points out the sharply different experiences of the British on one hand, as they shipped wool and meat from their estancias into global networks of trade, and the isolated, largely Chilean working class on the other hand. The roads and communication infrastructure enabled the elite and their capital to garner wealth from their node in the expanding set of global trade routes. The common people remained isolated. “Routes and Resources” closes with Chapter 5, by Katie Holmes and Lilian Pearce, a study of mining in an area where water was in short supply, both for the residents of the mining town and for working the mine itself. The shortage was mitigated only after World War II, when hydroengineering advances made possible the construction of a 60-mile pipeline to channel water from a set of seven lakes. These technological feats did little or nothing for Indigenous people, who still had great difficulty gaining access to the water to grow crops they depended upon for their livelihoods.

If pressed to say how I would envision these five studies contributing to the study of history more generally, I could anticipate ways in which a global economic historian might draw on Chapters 2–5 for some set of themes regarding production, commerce, and consumption, mindful of both the shared and distinct features of economic history themes across world regions. For Chapter 1, I can only imagine how historians of imperialism would want to consider how Europeans competed and collaborated with each other and with Indigenous peoples in different world regions. The European political, economic, and cultural impact varied both because the peoples they encountered in different world regions were politically, economically, and culturally organized in distinct ways, and because Europeans themselves had varied capacities and agendas in different historical moments from the early modern era forward.

The second section of this edited volume, “Realms and Resistance,” has seven chapters, each of which focuses on competing groups of actors seeking to establish claims to an “inland” space. Some groups had long lived in their “inland” space, while others more recently arrived with their own agendas. Again, the chapters in this section move across several world regions with no clear expositional logic for the order in which they are presented.

In Chapter 6, Marcus P. Nevius explores a Virginian swamp during the American revolution; this is followed in Chapter 7 by Alexander Morrison addressing Russia’s limited sovereignty on the steppe from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth century. In Chapter 8, David M. Anderson takes the reader to the Caprivi Zipfel in southwest Africa, 1890–1990, while Patrick Lozar shifts in Chapter 9 to Northwest North America from the early nineteenth century to the present. Then Ivan Sablin and Amgalan Zhamsoev take the reader back to the Russian presence on the steppe, specifically in Mongolia from 1919 to 1940. In Chapter 11, Robert S.G. Fletcher addresses the British war on desert locusts in Arabia and East Africa in the twentieth century; and Kristin Hoganson, in Chapter 12, returns the reader to the American Midwest, an inland region that includes the Ohio River Valley where readers first met the competing aspirations of the French, British, and Native Americans to possess space—back in Chapter 1. Had the first and last chapters of this edited volume been presented sequentially, the reader might have been able to consider different moments along the historical trajectory of what this inland region became in the context of the formation of the United States and that country’s relationships with people and places in other world regions. Were the chapter on Russia’s limited sovereignty on the early modern Steppe immediately followed by the chapter introducing the twentieth-century Russian agenda for organizing Mongolian society, the reader could, once again, have considered the history of a world region across early modern and modern global history. If the reader thought in terms of how inlands fit within different world regions, two pairs of two chapters would give the reader a way to connect inlands to world regions. Given that four chapters could be conceptually connected through one of several economic history lenses, there remain four of the eleven chapters that I could not relate to one another within some larger historiographical framework.

The editors do present, in their introduction, what they intend to be their historiographical contribution with this volume. They consider inland historical studies to be a kind of local history with global connections that the editors believe global historians have not considered. They therefore propose to bridge local and global history studies. They write:

In conclusion, being presented with seven big questions that the editors suggest the chapters of their edited volume address led me to anticipate that each of the chapters would directly address one or more of the big questions, but perhaps that was too much to expect. The editors could have demonstrated the significance of their questions to connecting inland local histories to global history in a conclusion explaining the chapters’ responses to the seven big questions. Having suggested the ways historians could read some of the chapters in this book in a somewhat systematic rather than a haphazard fashion, I admit to having found no way to link all the chapters, nor do I see any clear answers to the editors’ seven big questions. For a China historian seeking to place in a broader historical frame a Chinese historical topic like the spatial reach of Huizhou merchants’ activities, this book will not help very much.