At a ‘conjuncture’ in pre-modern global history, labelled by previous generations of historians as the ‘Scientific Revolution’, the societies and states of western Europe established and promoted a regime of interconnected institutions for the accumulation of useful and reliable knowledge. This placed their economies on trajectories that led to divergent prospects for long-term technological change and material progress. Although the accumulation of such knowledge takes place over millennia of time, and in contexts that are global, critical interludes or conjunctures in a ‘dialogue of civilizations’ have remained geographically localized, and indigenous in nature. Determining the locations, origins, and forms of this particular conjuncture is often dismissed as an exercise in Eurocentric history. Modern scholarship has also preferred to emphasize the roles played by craftsmen in its progress and diffusion – ignoring metaphysical and religious foundations of knowledge about the natural world. My survey aims to restore traditional perceptions that the West passed through a transformation in its hegemonic beliefs about prospects for the comprehension and manipulation of that world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It will suggest that the Scientific Revolution's remote antecedents might be traced back to Europe's particular transition from polytheism to monotheism. Thirdly, it summarizes literature that analyses how centuries of tension between Christian theology and natural philosophy led, during the Renaissance, to a displacement of scholastic and beatified Aristotelian conceptions and obstacles to understandings of the natural world. Finally, the survey will elaborate on how new knowledge flowing into Europe from voyages overseas, and medieval advances in technology, together with scepticism arising from religious warfare, stimulated a widespread search for more useful and reliable forms of knowledge throughout the Catholic and Protestant West.

Diamonds have a long global history in which India plays a pivotal though little-known role. Indeed, it was in India that diamonds were first mined, finished, and worn. Diamonds and their finishing techniques reached Europe in the fifteenth century. Subsequently, part of the industry moved from India to Europe, where manufacturing shifted from one city to another, before returning to India in the twentieth century. These shifts, I argue, are determined by changes in one or more segments of the global commodity chain and they reveal the global interconnections between mining, trading, polishing, and consuming. Furthermore, these shifting centres are themselves a sign of the globalized character of diamond production, exchange, and consumption.

This study focuses on disputes among Dutch Calvinists (Reformed Protestants) in Asia and in Europe over how to administer the sacraments of baptism and communion to people with little or no exposure to Protestant Christianity. Historians have tended to view these conflicts as evidence of Calvinist rigidity and the incompatibility between Protestantism and non-European societies. When examined within global patterns of Christianization, however, it becomes clear that Calvinists had much in common with Roman Catholic missionaries in trying to convert people across cultural borders. All missionaries had to negotiate the inherent tensions between accommodation and orthodoxy in early modern missionary programmes. Many Calvinists on the missionary frontier, like their Catholic counterparts, opted for syncretistic strategies over objections from authorities in their religious heartland.

This article proposes a new framework of analysis for studying inter-imperial spaces in global history. The analytical construct developed here – that of the inter-imperial microregion – highlights the density of networks and interactions found in certain areas with multiple competing polities. It provides a relational approach to the study of transnational and inter-polity exchanges that challenges traditional imperial narratives and suggests a more direct engagement between global, regional, and local histories. After discussing the theoretical and historiographical implications of this model, the article goes on to look at empirical evidence from the case of the Danish West Indies. It analyses the role that these Caribbean colonies played within the inter-imperial microregion of the Leeward Islands during the century from 1730 to 1830. The case study is structured around three central elements of colonial life – geography, security, and commerce – showing how these created the conditions for a high level of interdependence between colonies of multiple empires in the region.

Contrary both to Pomeranz's argument for the comparability of pre-industrial living standards across Eurasia and to the accumulating evidence of the extent of growth in the Japanese economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, quantitative historical comparisons of living standards consistently place Japan on a level with the least developed parts of Europe and imply that the living conditions of ordinary Japanese people only began to approach those of the industrialized West once imported modernization had been absorbed. This article uses concepts derived from comparative consumption history to go deeper into this issue, arguing that, from at least the late eighteenth century, Japanese living standards were changing in ways that paralleled equivalent developments in Europe. Through the consumption histories of a set of ‘transformative’ products – rice, tea, tobacco, and sugar – it seeks to demonstrate the potential for comparative qualitative analysis of living standards and to show that, in Japan as in Europe, the ‘transformation of desire’ paved the way for industrialization.

Research is now turning to the missing place of technology and ‘useful knowledge’ in the debate on the ‘great divergence’ between East and West. Parallel research in the history of science has sought the global dimensions of European knowledge. Joel Mokyr's recent The Enlightened Economy (2009) argued the place of an exceptional ‘industrial enlightenment’ in Europe in explaining industrialization there, but neglected the wide geographic framework of European investigation of the arts and manufactures. This article presents two case studies of European industrial travellers who accessed and described Indian crafts and industries at the time of Britain's industrial revolution and Europe's Enlightenment discourse on crafts and manufactures. The efforts of Anton Hove and Benjamin Heyne to ‘codify’ the ‘tacit’ knowledge of a part of the world distant from Europe were hindered by the English East India Company and the British state. Their accounts, only published much later, provide insight into European perceptions of India's ‘useful knowledge’.

This article examines Asian and Japanese American participation in a post-Second World War global movement for Buddhist revival. It looks at the role that Buddhism and the World Fellowship of Buddhists organization played in shaping transnational networks and the development of a global Buddhist perspective. It contextualizes the growth of a ‘Buddhist world’ within the history of decolonization and Japanese American struggles to reconstruct individual and community identities thoroughly disrupted by the war. The article considers Asian Buddhist approaches toward recognition as national and world citizens rather than colonial subjects and their influence on Japanese American Buddhists’ strategies for combating racial and religious discrimination in the United States. Finally, the article examines how Japanese Americans joined Asian efforts to formulate a distinctly Buddhist response to the Cold War. Buddhists hoped that Buddhism might serve as a ‘third power’ that would provide a critical check on a world increasingly polarized by Cold War politics and threatened by the prospects of nuclear war.

The 1973 Chilean coup gave rise to an unprecedented growth in a global human rights consciousness. In its aftermath, transnational activists from a diverse array of political and ideological backgrounds found common cause – indeed, a common language of human rights – in campaigns to ameliorate the repressive acts of the Chilean military junta. This article focuses on two models of activism in particular: Amnesty International, whose 1973 investigative mission set the terms of the global debate about human rights in Chile; and transnational solidarity activists, especially Chilean exiles from leftist parties, whose vision of social activism narrowed as their interest in human rights surged. These campaigns – while not without tensions over the role of politics in the moral appeal to human rights – both articulated a transnational discourse of human rights and created new activist techniques to foment moral outrage by revealing the prevalence of torture through the power of personal testimony.