Transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality have both been concerned with the issue of borders and their crossing, but the two fields themselves have not intersected much in the past. This is beginning to change, and this article surveys recent scholarship that draws on both fields, highlighting work in six areas: movements for women’s and gay rights; diverse understandings of sexuality and gender; colonialism and imperialism; intermarriage; national identity and citizenship; and migration. This new research suggests ways in which the subject matter, theory, and methodology in transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality can interconnect: in the two fields’ mutual emphasis on intertwinings, relationships, movement, and hybridity; their interdisciplinarity and stress on multiple perspectives; and their calls for destabilization of binaries.

This article explores the history of a conceptual world economic order of nations created by statistically minded economists over the last seventy years. Drawing upon work by Colin Clark, Richard Stone, and Simon Kuznets from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, it reconstructs the rise of new economic indicators referring to economic inequality. Two forms of intellectual practice can be identified that characterized a remarkable shift in knowledge production in Anglo-American economics in the period of French and British imperial decline. One was new methods of counting and comparing income, which produced a sensational new view of the world as a place of enormous poverty. The other was the belief that these issues could be solved by applying a limited set of policy recommendations to all economies in the world.

At least some ancient civilizations used various risk-management strategies to minimize price volatility. In this article, we examine one such strategy, grain storage, by means of a dataset recently made available that provides agricultural prices for Babylonia during the Late Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods (c.400–65 BCE). A comparative analysis of medieval England and Hellenistic Babylonia reveals a low level of inter-annual storage in both economies, and helps us to compare the costs and benefits in each society. Costs are largely equated with interest rates, and benefits with seasonal price changes. Unlike in England, Babylonia’s dual crop structure (barley and dates) reduced seasonality and thus the potential benefits of storage. There is no evidence, however, that storage costs – that is, interest rates – were likewise lower. This suggests that interest rates were primarily determined in the urban and commercial sectors, not the agricultural one. Consequently, measures of seasonal price changes in pre-modern economies may tell us relatively little about interest rates. While the McCloskey–Nash methodology may be helpful in analysing particular economies, it is perhaps of limited use for comparing them.

During the seventeenth century, the East India Company (EIC) was a minor power in South Asia, repeatedly defeated in battle. However, this changed rapidly, beginning in the 1750s, as the EIC started projecting power from its coastal enclaves into the interior. One after other, the indigenous powers were defeated and destroyed. This article argues that the EIC’s military success was not merely the result of importing the military institutions that emerged in western Europe: there was no military revolution in early modern South Asia. Rather, the EIC blended imported British military institutions and techniques with South Asia’s indigenous military traditions, creating a hybrid military establishment in which South Asian manpower, animals, and economic resources were crucial. The article focuses on the construction of the EIC’s military establishment by concentrating on three spheres: military technology, manpower management, and logistics.

How did medieval builders manage to construct some of the tallest structures in the world without access to modern engineering theories? Construction drawings were limited to details and, with only a handful exceptions, manuals for builders only appeared in the late fifteenth century. By implication, the relevant knowledge had to be transferred on a personal basis. Its underlying principles must therefore have been reasonably simple. This article shows how a modular design, combined with on-site experimentation, guided much of the construction work on large projects such as European cathedrals, Middle Eastern mosques, Indian temples, and Chinese pagoda towers.

The ideas on development issues of two ‘pioneers in development’, Raúl Prebisch and Gunnar Myrdal, are tracked in their formation and evolution. The central role of these two ‘defiant bureaucrats’ in the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) and the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) are used to reflect on the interaction between intellectuals and international institutions in different historical contexts. Both men represented a liberal–universal strand in development thinking. Their divergent conclusions and assessments of the role of international institutions are compared, and are related to their different origins in core and periphery. It is argued that such roots influenced two different approaches to development problems within the UN system.

According to most reconstructions of development debates, poverty and social issues were not part of the development agenda until the late 1960s. In contrast, this article shows that development practitioners and institutions were already addressing poverty and social issues in the late 1940s and early 1950s. However, economic multilateral organizations soon marginalized those inclusive views and focused exclusively on economic growth. This article discusses those early policy options and why they were marginalized. It argues that this happened for ideological reasons, specifically because of the ideological anti-New Deal post-war backlash and the adhesion of Western countries and multilateral organizations to what Charles Maier defined as the politics of productivity. This ideological backlash explains the rise and early demise of Keynesian ideas in international organizations, and, conversely, their stronger influence in developing countries, where the direct influence of the US and Bretton Woods organizations was somewhat mitigated.

Sewing machines, one of the first mechanical consumer goods to be mass produced and sold worldwide, provide an important case study for the understanding of global history in terms of the global diffusion of goods. However, as the case of colonial India demonstrates, it is what happens to such goods on their arrival in the recipient society – their emergent social history and growing indigeneity – that then demands analytical consideration. By tracing the changing nature of India’s sewing culture and sewing-machine use, linking it to occupational shifts, racial identities, and gender roles, to changing marketing techniques and advertising strategies, this article shows how closely the relative success of the sewing machine was bound up with local artisanal practices, commercial agency, and the transformative forces present in Indian society. It further indicates how Indian production of sewing machines by the 1950s built on several decades of acculturation and local experience of their sale and use.

This article examines the political and cultural contexts of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation and the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation. These two League of Nations bodies were charged with fostering international understanding through the promotion of educational, scientific, and cultural exchange. Whereas previous studies have revealed the institutional and diplomatic processes that shaped these bodies, the present article considers their intellectual genealogies and trajectories. Adopting a transnational perspective, it argues that the multi-layered quest for order is central to understanding intellectual cooperation in the interwar years. This concern was reflected in the role of cultural relations within the post-war order, and in the aim of strengthening intellectuals’ position in the social order (both through legal instruments and through new tools for ‘intellectual labour’).

The 1926 International Sanitary Convention, which laid out requirements for port sanitation and quarantine in order to limit the spread of diseases internationally, changed the way that the world approached international epidemic control. The 1926 convention is notable for two reasons: the increased reliance on epidemic intelligence rather than quarantine, and the splitting of the world into a series of formalized regional networks under the auspices of a global agreement. This article explores the creation and the limits of this system as a window into shifting understandings of disease and international relations in the interwar era, arguing that sanitary spheres of influences were shaped by, but not entirely dependent on, political spheres of influence.

This article focuses on the connection between the ideology of neo-Malthusianism and development theory and practice from the mid 1940s to the present. First identified by a few demographic experts, population policies and family planning gradually turned into a global movement for the control of world population. From the beginning, population discourses and policies were intertwined with strategies of socioeconomic development. They were also a reflection of strategic concerns and deliberations about the role of the West in the Cold War and vis-à-vis the emerging Global South. Focusing on the collective impact of individual choices, population controllers assumed that top-down approaches could swiftly change reproductive behaviour. They gave priority to preventing births over health, education, and female empowerment. Family planning began to shift its emphasis from the collective to the individual only in response to outright coercive actions and with the emergence of new actors, most notably feminists, from the late 1970s on.

The 1930s and 1940s saw the rise of a new model of global food politics. This model was strongly moulded by the experiences of the Great Depression and the two world wars, all of which had brought hunger and malnutrition back to Europe. Whereas until the nineteenth century famines and food shortages had commonly been interpreted as regional Malthusian crises, they were now attributed to global economic disturbances and imbalances. This article explores how the far-reaching plans of a World Food Board, advocated by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization under John Boyd Orr, were abandoned and supplanted by a new approach that focused on technical aid and the distribution of surpluses. Moreover, the problems of hunger and malnutrition were embedded in a larger discourse on world population and economic development.

As a historical period, the Cold War may be seen as a rivalry between two nuclear superpowers that threatened global destruction. The rivalry took place within a common frame of reference, in which a new historical relationship between imperialism and nationalism worked in remarkably parallel ways across the superpower divide. The new imperial–national relationship between superpowers and the client states also accommodated developments such as decolonization, multiculturalism, and new ideologies, thus producing a hegemonic configuration characterizing the period. The models of development, structures of clientage, unprecedented militarization of societies, designs of imperial enlightenment, and even many gender and racial/cultural relationships followed similar tracks within, and often between, the two camps. Finally, counter-hegemonic forces emerged in regions of the non-Western world, namely China and some Islamic societies. Did this portend the beginning of the end of a long period of Western hegemony?

The United Nations Technical Assistance Administration (TAA) was the world organization’s main body for development advice throughout the 1950s. In technical assistance, the UN found a global mission at a time when its peace and security functions seemed ineffective. Technical assistance experts preached the need for less developed countries to plan and modernize. This process has been studied with regard to American modernization theory, but the important role of the UN as an autonomous diplomatic actor has been less visible. The UN was a relatively acceptable source of technical assistance for many governments. Among them was Indonesia, which welcomed UN help for its State Planning Bureau. TAA aid to the Planning Bureau advanced the interests of both organizations but both failed to institutionalize themselves enough to survive the decade. Both, however, left important legacies: the TAA for UN development thinking, and the Planning Bureau for the Indonesian developmentalist state.

Two crucial terms in discussions about racial or ethnic relations – ‘discrimination’ and ‘integration’ – first appeared in official French documents in the 1950s. They quickly became key references in the government’s pioneering efforts, in response to the Algerian revolution, to recognize the importance and fight against the effects of French racism on ‘Muslim French citizens from Algeria’. This policy was named ‘integrationism’; its premises and measures had overseas inspirations and it was bureaucrats from an international organization who made such policy models available for French adoption. All of this was possible because of transnational networks of social scientists, which included some who helped author them as well as others who studied and wrote about them. More specifically, it was projects and claims from Mexico that provided the most direct references for French integrationist policies and it was through the efforts of UNESCO that French integrationists gained detailed knowledge about them.

This article studies the activities of American philanthropic foundations in India between the 1950s and 1970s. It discusses why private institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation felt committed to responding to problems of hunger and population growth abroad and how they managed to establish themselves as leaders in the development aid arena. Instead of considering the foundations as handmaidens of US national strategic interests shaped by the Cold War, the article argues that they should be understood as highly flexible transnational agents who, in an ambitious combination of philanthropic motives, institutional interests, and trust in the power of science, diagnosed political problems and developed methods to overcome them in order to reduce global inequality.