The historiography of the twentieth-century refugee typically unfolds as a tale of national displacement followed by international surrogate protection. This article challenges that narrative by reframing the modern refugee as an emerging category of statistics and demography. Focusing on the world’s first international refugee survey, which was led by former British colonial administrator John Hope Simpson in 1937–39, the article situates the attempt to count and classify refugees across borders within scientific debates on global population control and white resettlement. While refugees’ mobility initially eluded established parameters of national demographic measurement, Hope Simpson drew on precedents of census work and migration schemes within the British Empire to counter their unpredictability. Revealing how the tenet of colonial demography shaped mid-century views on the ‘refugee problem’, the article broadens the space of refugee history beyond nation states and international institutions and emphasizes the relevance of statistics in turning refugees into a global post-war category.

This article addresses two interrelated questions pertaining to the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) attempt to internationalize the Chinese currency – the renminbi (RMB). First, what is the historical rationale of RMB internationalization, and what are its implications? Second, how does the rationale for, and implications of, RMB internationalization distinguish this process from the emergence of the US dollar as the global reserve currency? The article proceeds by framing the RMB internationalization process as a historical palimpsest that emerges from three critical moments following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. It then assesses their collective global historical significance through a comparison with the rationale and effects of dollar internationalization. Through foregrounding the domestic and global path-dependence of the RMB’s historical evolution, the article argues that RMB internationalization does not constitute a rupture in global historical terms by challenging the dollar’s global reserve currency status; rather, it paradoxically consolidates a dollar-centric global monetary system because the CPC is committed to sustaining the Mao-era (1949-76) legacy of absolute macroeconomic control.

This article discusses the material history of coffee and tea by drawing on mid-eighteenth-century substitute recipes collected by physicians in different provinces of Sweden, applying perspectives from economic history, the history of science, medicine, and globalization. The starting point for the analysis is that a substitute can be said to reflect what are perceived as the most important properties, in terms of look, feel, taste, and scent, of the thing being copied. The products of a predominantly self-sustained agrarian world, the tea and coffee substitutes offered a distinctive rural alternative to the new exotic beverages. In terms of ecology and economy, this context encompassed large parts of central and north-eastern Europe; it also involved areas with a history of consumption that differed considerably from those of the cosmopolitan elites which have hitherto dominated the scholarship on eighteenth-century coffee and tea. The article finally suggests that the ways in which early modern substitutes were consumed and processed helped pave the way for the mass consumption of imported goods in rural areas of Europe in the following centuries.