Objects can serve as non-living actors in a Latourian actor network which spans not only geography but time. Over this spatial–temporal network, what I call ‘object-actors’ acquire meanings that motivate living actors to use these objects as connecting points between past and present. Object-actors form networks in original exchanges between individuals and institutions, connect the past and present, and generate new and shifting meanings in this global–temporal network. Object-actors work and generate meaning in four dimensions – distance, location, relation, and time. Globally, object-actors can accrue conflicting meanings bound by locality. This article uses the collections of Elihu Yale as a case study in how object-actors constitute an important aspect of networks, and how those networks are not bound to the original transactions between historical parties or to their original geographies.

The study of transregional connections is central to the field of global history. This article reflects on the idea of connections from a conceptual viewpoint and treats them as mediators. This will be exemplified by studying the spatial and temporal dimensions of transoceanic steamship passages. The lives of crew and passengers did not go on ‘stand-by’ during such a passage. The case of the flight and eventual capture of Hawley Harvey Crippen will serve as a case in point. Suspected of murder in London, Crippen tried to escape to North America by transatlantic steamer. The captain, however, recognized the fugitive and informed both authorities and media. The ship, whose movements across the Atlantic contributed to the establishment of global connections, thus became tightly entangled in a global media landscape, with newspapers and readers from all over the globe focusing their attention on the small shipboard community. Simultaneously, the steamer became a profoundly secluded place for its passengers, who were cut off from the media flurry surrounding them. The article shifts the principal perspective of the murder case from a terracentric notion of history to a more sea-based narrative. It offers a new historical interpretation of the events and at the same time reconsiders the analytical concept of connections in a broader historical context.

Early modern Russia sat at the intersection of Eurasian trade networks, which allowed both commodities and information to move from east to west and north to south. Rhubarb exported from China had held a prominent position in Western medical treatments since the classical era, but improved transportation and communication between Europe and Asia through Russia enabled the growth of the medicinal rhubarb trade to unexpected heights after 1760. Earlier studies of rhubarb have focused on European interests in uncovering ‘true’ medicinal rhubarb, but this article will situate the plant as a part of the broader process of scientific exchange across Eurasia. Russia’s unique position in Eurasia ultimately allowed its specialists to contribute to the development of Western science through the importation of information from Asia and its own expeditions in Siberia, Russia’s internal ‘Asian’ territory.

The increased regulation of mobility that accompanied its late nineteenth-century expansion and acceleration is widely recognized. Regulatory practices reached out to distant shores and on board ships, heightening uncertainties and reshaping meanings of voyage and transit, especially for non-white passengers and crews. Travel and mobility are common themes in historical and other literatures. But less is known about experiences of uncertain or thwarted arrivals, involuntary departures, and indefinite transit resulting from practices governing steam-age mobility. People in transit illuminate the conditional openings and closures in such tropes as mobility, transit, and destination. Few spaces embodied and actualized ‘transit’ better than ships, and this article focuses on the role of ships as vessels of confinement. In equal parts about passengers and crews, it explores experiences of nominally free persons uncertainly afloat in a world marked otherwise by assured or accelerated oceanic mobility in three contexts that illustrate physical, political, and cultural constraints on maritime mobility in the age of steam. They are the 1914 voyage of the Komagata-maru, British merchant vessels employing Indian crews, and wartime subjection and resistance of Chinese crews on British and Dutch vessels.

This article explores the relationship between science and empire, through the prism of British botanical engagement with the South Atlantic in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It investigates the logistics of plant exchanges, as information, expertise, and specimens followed the maritime contours of the British empire. The discussion traces the nascent network-building undertaken by officials, residents, and visitors on St Helena and at the Cape of Good Hope, and the exchange of plant specimens with London and, crucially, with other places around the empire. The article suggests that such activities offer perspectives on wider patterns of interaction with an area located at the crossroads of Britain’s maritime empire. In time, the region forged its own botanical networks and created alternative axes of exchange, association, and movement.

This article explores a little known facet of transnational opposition to forced labour through the earliest case of ‘Chinese abolitionism’. It analyses the transnational formation of the first Sino-American actor network in the United States and its deployment in the 1874 investigations of coolie conditions in the forced labour regimes of Cuba and Peru. At the core of this actor network was the Chinese Educational Mission and its milieu of sociability, which served as a crucible of transnational cooperation between the first Chinese America experts and their US supporters. The flows of information, cosmopolitan ideas, and personnel across this network led to an unprecedented reinterpretation of the global coolie trade as a key concern in Qing foreign relations and a serious international problem that paralleled the problem of slavery. Two Qing interventions harnessed the actor network’s social capital, framing coolie abuse as an international atrocity, accelerating the abolition of the coolie trade, and signalling the need for a Chinese Foreign Service in Western countries for the protection of Chinese overseas.

This article provides a history of the First World Agricultural Census of 1930, an ambitious international attempt to evaluate world agricultural resources through the compilation of global statistics on crops, livestock, and agricultural production. Based on primary archival material, it explores how the census emerged from the connections between American and international institutions at a time when food security and the need to address problems of trade and competition appeared as central economic concerns of interstate relations. The article focuses on the role played by the American agricultural expert Leon Estabrook (1869–1937) and a related network of scientists and economists in the preparation and implementation of the statistical survey. By examining how Estabrook’s vision of economic development and scientific planning was shaped by his national background and redefined by his transnational engagement, the article sheds light on the global dominance and limitations of American scientific knowledge and agricultural practices in the interwar years. It uncovers the political manoeuvrings and negotiations that were necessary to move forward with the project, and assesses the survey’s outcome against the backdrop of the global economic downturn of the 1930s.

This article considers the bodily experience of being at sea in the age of sail. Using shipboard diaries written by eight passengers during the high period of free migration to the Australasian colonies, it argues that oceanic journeys disrupted and upended the land-based bodily practices being fashioned in nineteenth-century Britain. At sea, these mechanisms of bodily comportment were rendered fragile and unstable, leaving middle- and working-class bodies alike vulnerable and open to refashioning and reformation. In so doing, it points to the need for scholars to bring together land- and sea-based histories and to historicize and particularize oceanic spaces.

This article analyses international scholarship of the early twentieth century by focusing on scholarly networks and the uncomfortable interplay between their claims to universalism and the realities of an international war with global dimensions. Academics, books, and ideas had traversed the world with relative ease and regularity from the mid nineteenth century. The consequences were the creation of a hierarchical and Euro-American dominated ‘academic world’ where mobility and the transnational transmission of knowledge were key features. The rupture of the First World War tested the durability of these connections but the Paris Peace Conference showed that scholarly connections – through shared disciplinary interests, alumni groupings, or mutual acquaintance – were not only durable but sometimes crucial to the recasting of the world envisaged by the peacemakers. While the scholars present at the Paris Peace Conference were there as representatives of their respective nations, they also demonstrated strong allegiance to disciplines and institutions.

Publishing a newspaper was a popular undertaking for passengers aboard intercontinental vessels during the nineteenth century. Although in almost complete isolation for weeks or even months, many travellers saw the need to issue a regular periodical. This article sheds light on the functions that these publications had for the ships’ on-board communities. On the one hand, passengers used them to inculcate a sentiment of togetherness, no matter how ephemeral their community might initially appear. On the other, the periodicals also served to separate and create boundaries between different groups of individuals aboard. Focusing on these unique historical sources allows us to study the building and dissolving of a community feeling in transit in this era of globalizing intercontinental travel. This article shows that ship newspapers were simultaneously a space for social exchange and a means of establishing social boundaries at sea in an age of increasing global shipboard travel.

From the Counter-Reformation to the present, women in a variety of contexts of colonization, decolonization, and slavery crossed the threshold from missionary congregation to missionary workforce to live in Catholic religious community. Comparative, transnational analysis provides insights from a variety of angles into the myriad local factors that fashioned their understandings of the relationship between the spiritual and material benefits so gained. Their experiences were uneven, shaped by the race, gender, and status politics of each ecclesiastical and secular context, by their usefulness to the wider missionary project and the state, and by shifts in ecclesiastical rulings that were prompted by changes in the Vatican’s temporal status. In the later twentieth century, some became activists and advocates, using their symbolic power to work in the interests of women and poor people, and to reform the patriarchy at the core of the church.

The aim of this article is to show the added value of global history that puts labour and labour relations as independent variables in the centre and uses structured long-term data by collaborating closely with historians in various parts of the world. The first part focuses primarily on the global labour relations approach, within the broader debate on social inequality and migration. The second part illustrates the potential of labour as an independent variable by reflecting on recent innovative work pertaining to labour-intensive industrializations in East Asia and Europe. The third part employs the perspective of migration to show the interrelated nature of labour relations and labour. Using the insights from the global labour relations approach and by taking labour seriously, the article will help to address core questions in labour history in a more structural way: why has work been valued and compensated in very different ways over the past five centuries? And how have people individually or collectively influenced these conditions? To find answers, it is crucial to make use of standardized empirical data, structured global comparisons, and more intensive collaborations.

The emerging cultures of late nineteenth-century steamship mobility can be distinguished broadly by ocean basin and by specific route. In the Pacific, a steamship connection between Sydney and San Francisco was envisaged to forge and sustain strong bonds between regional ‘branches’ of the Anglo-Saxon race. This article moves beyond the rhetorical purchase of assumed affinities, to explore the more layered ways in which difference was articulated in transpacific encounters, and the attendant uncertainties and frictions in these evolving relations. When compared to routes bridging the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, with familiar imperial hierarchies and formalities behind them, British and colonial travellers in the Pacific were frequently unsettled by the more democratic and republican attitudes of the American crews and passengers they encountered. At the same time, Britain’s long-standing supremacy on the high seas provided a benchmark against which American enterprise and power in the Pacific could be assessed and found wanting.

Slave traders forced more than 1.65 million captive Africans aboard illegal transatlantic slave ships during the nineteenth century. This article focuses on the final phase of this brutal traffic, between 1850 and 1866. It argues that slave traders sustained their illicit industry, in large part, by strategically coordinating their financial arrangements against a rising tide of international suppression. One key tactic was for slave trade investors in the United States, Cuba, Africa, and Iberia to lower the risks of interdiction by joining forces and co-financing voyages. Another was to combine with an international cast of merchants and bankers, who helped them launder slave trade capital and transmit it to their distant allies. This capital was concealed within broader currents of global commerce, which was, in turn, spurred by the growth of free trade in the nineteenth century. These myriad alliances and capital flows undergirded the trade until its final extinction in the 1860s.

For half a million ‘Syrian’ Ottoman subjects living outside the empire, the First World War initiated a massive political rift with Istanbul. Beginning in 1916, Syrian and Lebanese emigrants from both North and South America sought to enlist, recruit, and conscript immigrant men into the militaries of the Entente. Employing press items, correspondence, and memoirs written by émigré recruiters during the war, this article reconstructs the transnational networks that facilitated the voluntary enlistment of an estimated 10,000 Syrian emigrants into the armies of the Entente, particularly the United States Army after 1917. As Ottoman nationals, many Syrian recruits used this as a practical means of obtaining American citizenship and shedding their legal ties to Istanbul. Émigré recruiters folded their military service into broader goals for ‘Syrian’ and ‘Lebanese’ national liberation under the auspices of American political support.

During the interwar years, Moroccan anti-colonial activists organized a propaganda campaign abroad to discredit the French and Spanish protectorates that had been established in 1912. Yet it was not the famous nationalist leaders from the country’s major urban centres but a small group from the marginalized northern city of Tetuan that played a pivotal role in the internationalization of the Moroccan question. This article demonstrates that, by analysing the emergence of Morocco’s nationalist movement through a transnational framework, rather than within the confines of the nation-state, we can rearrange the geographical and political hierarchies of local history as previously disregarded individuals and locations suddenly emerge to the forefront of the narrative.

This article uses the history of Japanese emigrants to Hawai‘i as a lens through which to examine Japan’s engagement with the outside world in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on a single journey from Yokohama to Honolulu in 1885, it reconstructs the transit of two migrant labourers as they entered an ‘in-between’ state – between regimes of labour, between freedom and coercion, and between local and national identities. These migrant experiences challenge the teleological discourse of Japanese ‘progress’ that was so popular among political elites across the world in the 1880s, and that was embodied by the very materiality of the ship in which the labourers travelled. But the ‘in-between’ also speaks to the historiographical need to fill the silences that exist between archives across the Pacific Ocean, and thus to the wider challenges of writing global history.