As a phenomenon accompanying European expansion, piracy and privateering spread globally, beginning in the sixteenth century. These activities, and their handling within transnational relations, shed light on several issues of modern international law, then under formation. They reflect different basic problems that both challenged and structured central aspects of legal relations on an international level: the transformation of ocean spaces into areas of colliding legal strategies, the use of privateers (‘legalized’ pirates) as a tool for extraterritorial expansion, the involvement of non-state players in international legal relations, the fragmentation of maritime sovereignty, and the application of international law to criminalize political resistance as piracy. That said, the international management of piracy shows that international law had the potential to resist its abuse as a mere instrument of politics and special interests. By focusing on piracy and privateering in early modern times, this article suggests a tension within modern international law, between its instrumentalization by particular interests and its status as an independent normative authority to correct or regulate such interests.

From the seventeenth century, the brilliance and permanence of colour and the exotic nature of imported Asian textiles attracted European consumers. The limited knowledge of colouring agents and the general absence of textile printing and dyeing in Europe were, however, major impediments to the development of a cotton textile-printing and -dyeing industry in Europe. This article aims to chart the rise of a European calico-printing industry in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by analysing the knowledge transfer of textile-printing techniques from Asia to Europe.

In his seminal book The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz has argued that access to inputs from the vast acreages available in the Americas was crucial for the Industrial Revolution in Britain. But could no other regions of the world have provided the inputs in demand? Recent research claims that this could have been the case. This article takes that research one step further by studying Britain’s trade with an old and important peripheral trading partner, the Baltic, contrasting this to the British trade with America. The article shows that production for export was not necessarily stagnating in the Baltic, as Pomeranz has claimed. Qualitative aspects of the factor endowment of land did not, however, enable the production of specific raw materials, such as cotton, to meet the increasing demand. Thus, the decreasing role of the Baltic ought to a large extent to be attributed to the patterns of British industrialization, and the demand it created for specific raw materials, rather than internal, institutional constraints in the Baltic region.

This editorial develops two themes. First, it discusses how historical and anthropological approaches can relate to each other, in the field of the highland margins of Asia and beyond. Second, it explores how we might further our understandings of the uplands of Asia by applying different terms such as ‘Haute-Asie’, the ‘Southeast Asian Massif’, the ‘Hindu Kush–Himalayan region’, the ‘Himalayan Massif’, and in particular ‘Zomia’, a neologism gaining popularity with the publication of James C. Scott’s latest book, The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia.1 Through a discussion of the notion of Zomia, I will reconsider certain ‘truths’ regarding highland Asian studies. In the process, I seek to contribute to disembedding minority studies from the national straitjackets that have been imposed by academic research bounded by the historical, ideological, and political limits of the nation-state.

Global history has centred for a long time on the comparative economic successes and failures of different parts of the world, most often European versus Asian regions. There is general agreement that the balance changed definitively in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when in continental Europe and England a transformation began that revolutionized the power relations of the world and brought an end to the dominance of agrarian civilization. However, there is still widespread debate over why Europe and England industrialized first, rather than Asia. This article will propose an explanation that will shed new light on Europe’s and England’s triumph, by showing that the ‘water system’ factor is a crucial piece missing in existing historical accounts of the Industrial Revolution. It is argued that this great transformation was not only about modernizing elites, investment capital, technological innovation, and unequal trade relations, but that a balanced, inclusive explanation also needs to consider similarities and differences in how countries and regions related to their particular water systems, and in how they could exploit them for transport and the production of power for machines.

The Indian Uprising of 1857–59, during which thousands of Indian soldiers serving in the British army mutinied, joined by many civilians, led to the identification of a vast number of ‘rebels’ and discussions as to the most appropriate means of punishing them. The wholesale transportation of insurgents was considered a likely scenario in the charged atmosphere of late 1857. The uprising coincided with dramatic increases in the world market price for sugar, prompting British colonial producers to extend cultivation of cane and their political agents to suggest that the need for further plantation labour be met from among the likely Indian convict transportees. The empire-wide response to the events in India during 1857–59 is assessed in this article as an interesting case study of both reactions to a sensationalist news story and the manner in which British officials, keen to exploit the outcome of the revolt and to manipulate the labour market to the advantage of their respective colonies, competed with and contradicted one another. At the same time, the authors contend that arguably the more interesting aspects of the relationship between the Indian Uprising and the surge in numbers migrating to the sugar colonies were either neglected or carefully ignored by policy makers and commentators alike at the time, and have scarcely been investigated by historians since. The article suggests that many individuals who participated in the insurgency in India did indeed make their way overseas, quietly ignored, and only mentioned in subsequent decades when ‘scares’ about mutineer sepoys in their midst were raised in the colonial press as explanation for strikes and labour agitations on colonial sugar estates.

For several decades, theorists have challenged notions of geographical space as fixed, instead arguing that spatial scales and regional configurations respond to transformations in politics and economies. This has raised questions about permanent regional studies configurations (such as Southeast Asia), sparking the proposal of ‘Zomia’, an alternative region focusing on Asia’s highland borderlands. Building on these developments, this article employs ‘process geography’ methodologies to reconstruct trading networks through the mountains and river valleys of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Inner Asia’s Kham, East Asia’s Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces, and Southeast Asia. In doing so, it reveals who traded commodities, on what scales they operated, and how their increasingly complex networks were imbricated with state and local power. These networks linked Zomian communities to Chinese and global transformations and influenced local cultural and political changes, suggesting that studies of mobility can uncover hidden geographies of social, political, and cultural change.

Western expansion and domination through colonial systems served as a form of globalization, spreading white hegemony across the globe. While whites retained the monopoly on ‘modernity’ as the exclusive writers of historical progress, ‘backward’ African Americans were perceived as ‘outside’ Western culture and history. As a result, there were no African American individuals perceived as succeeding in Western terms in the arts, humanities, and sciences. In response, African American intellectuals forged a counter-global bloc that challenged globalization conceived as hegemonic Western domination. They sought to insert African Americans as a whole into the history of America, (re)creating a local black American history ‘forgotten’ because of slavery and Western power. African American intellectuals thus created a ‘usable past’, or counter-memory, to reconstitute history through the inclusion of African Americans, countering Western myths of black inferiority. The devastating legacy of slavery was posited as the cause of the African Americans’ lack of Western cultural acclivity. Due to the lack of nationally recognized African American figures of Western cultural achievement, intellectuals constructed Dumas as a lieu de mémoire as part of wider efforts to appropriate historical individuals of black descent from across the globe within a transnational community produced by the Atlantic slave trade. Since all blacks were perceived as having a uniting ‘essence’, Dumas’ achievements meant that all blacks had the same potential. Such identification efforts demonstrated African Americans’ social and cultural suitability in Western terms and the resulting right to be included in American society. In this process, African Americans expressed a new, local black identity by expanding an ‘African American’ identity to a wider range of individuals than was commonly applied. While constructing a usable past, African Americans redefined ‘America’ beyond the current hegemonic usage (which generally restricted the term geographically to the US) to encompass an ‘Atlantic’ world – a world in which the Dumas of memory was re-imagined as an integral component with strong connections to slavery and colonialism.

This article explains how oil as an energy carrier evolved alongside the technology of the steam engine. In practical terms, fuel oil was adapted to machines that were originally devised to be coal-fuelled and this led to the flexible switchover between energy carriers. The article links the micro account of technological developments with the macro records of energy consumption, to reveal how steam technology set the stage for the commoditization of oil, the customary fuel of the internal combustion engine. The analysis of the oil–steam combine embraces its diffusion across leading producing nations such as Russia and the United States, the diffusion in industrial and transport activities in South America, and the diffusion throughout European navies. What was at stake was the transformation of oil into a geostrategic good and the triggering of an international race for the seizure of fossil fuels.

It is the contention of this article that historians of the nineteenth century need to think about notions of empire, nation, and race in the context of the social production of space. More specifically, it posits that the moving space of the steamship functioned as a particularly important site in which travellers reworked ideas about themselves and their worlds. Supporting this contention the article pays close attention to the journeys of J. T. Wilson, a young Scottish medical student who between 1884 and 1887 made three voyages to China and one to Australia. For it was in the space of the ship, literally moving along the routes of global trade, that Wilson forged a particular kind of British identity that collapsed the spaces of empire, elided differences among Britons and extended the boundaries of the British nation.

Historically autonomous and fiercely egalitarian, yet far from isolated and extensively implicated in regional, and global, economies of trade and exchange, the Wa people on the Burma–China frontier stand out in the history of marginal peoples refusing to be marginalized. This article addresses the place of mining in the political history of the Wa area – a key part of what has recently been called the Zomia region, but one which differs from many other cases because of its activist statelessness. The history of the Wa areas is outlined and discussed with reference to larger debates over agency, autonomy, and state formation, with particular attention to mining resources and their relation to Wa politics before the mid twentieth century.

In this article I examine the relevance of utilizing a ‘Zomia-like’ approach to interpreting upland livelihoods in the China–Vietnam borderlands, rather than the more commonly employed nation-state lens. I explore the challenges and opportunities presented by the international borderline between the provinces of Yúnnán, southwest China, and Lào Cai, northern Vietnam, for local populations, namely ethnic minorities Kinh (lowland Vietnamese) and Han Chinese. Investigating the creation and solidification of this borderline and border space, I undertake a historical and contemporary analysis of cross-border trade networks. This focuses on two time periods in which global–local linkages have been especially important in directly shaping border negotiations: the French colonial period and the contemporary economic reform era. Present-day border narratives collected in both countries during ethnographic fieldwork with local traders managing important highland commodities shed light on the means by which the borderline and borderland spaces are continuing to shape both prospects and constraints.

Chinese emigration was part of the global wave of mass migration in the nineteenth century. After establishing the main quantities, sources, destinations, and timing of emigration, this article analyses trends in return and female migration, two quantifiable phenomena that are often said to distinguish Chinese from other migrations. These trends are compared between different flows of Chinese migration, both overseas and to Manchuria, and with non-Chinese migrations. The most interesting conclusions have methodological implications: first, comparisons should be situated as historical trends to better understand patterns of convergence or divergence between flows; second, some cycles and patterns may grow more similar across migration flows even as others diverge; third, the results of comparison will change along with the scale of units being compared; and finally, both extensive comparisons of specific flows and an awareness of the global context are necessary to understand the patterns and causes of mass migration.

Colonial tax systems have shaped state–economy relationships in the formative stages of many present-day nation-states. This article surveys the variety in colonial tax systems across thirty-four dominions, colonies, and protectorates during the heyday of British imperialism (1870–1940), focusing on a comparison of colonial tax levels. The results are assessed on the basis of different views in the literature regarding the function and impact of colonial fiscal regimes: are there clear differences between ‘settler’ and ‘non-settler’ colonies? I show that there is little evidence for the view that ‘excessive taxation’ has been a crucial characteristic of ‘extractive institutions’ in non-settler colonies because local conditions (geographic or institutional) often prevented the establishment of revenue-maximizing tax machineries. This nuances the ‘extractive institutions’ hypothesis and calls for a decomposition of the term ‘extractive institutions’ as such.

How could labour be mobilized for the production of agricultural commodities in colonial lands? This question was discussed by European powers on many occasions between 1895 and 1930, within the International Colonial Institute (ICI). Three key phases and issues can be identified in these debates relating to Africa: the recruitment of Indian indentured labour (1895–1905); the recruitment and management of indigenous peoples as paid labourers (1905–1918); and the mobilization of indigenous smallholder agriculture (1918–1930). During the whole period under study, the use of constraint, and its legitimacy, appear as a permanent feature of ICI debates. Associated first with European plantations, the use of force became a means to mobilize native farmers in accordance with the conceptions of colonial administrations regarding good agricultural practices. In addition, the ICI’s vision of colonial realities evolved from an out-of-date position during the first and second phases to a forward-looking one during the third phase, albeit one quite unrealistic in the scope of its ambition.

This article examines the applicability of the Zomia concept for social scientific studies of the Himalayan region, with a focus on the Central Himalayas. While for both empirical and political reasons the term Zomia itself may not be entirely appropriate to the Himalayan Massif, the analytical imperatives that underlie James C. Scott’s usage of it – particularly the emphasis on the ethnic, national, and religious fluidity of highland communities, and their intentionality and agency vis-à-vis the states with which they engage – can be of great utility to those working in the Himalayan region. Through a historical review of the area tradition of ‘Himalayan studies’, as well as an ethnographic sketch of the cross-border Thangmi community of Nepal, India, and China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region, I argue that the potential power of the Zomia concept hinges on its ability to provide an additional framework for analysis (and perhaps political struggle), that adds value to, rather than replaces, ‘traditional’ nation-state rubrics.

This article analyses the patterns and dynamics of the global social insurance movement since the 1880s through the framework of ‘interactive diffusion’. It argues that two principal models of social insurance – the German capitalist and Soviet socialist – diffused around the world throughout the twentieth century. It contends that global forces conveyed basic ideas while national forces determined the timing and specifics of the adoption of global models. From the 1980s, however, a new global model of privatization emerged with the rise of neo-liberalism and support from the World Bank. Privatization partially replaced public pension systems in Latin America, then in the former socialist countries in Europe and in a few other countries. Nevertheless, national compulsory social insurance has remained the predominant form for social protection in the world.

Globalization can be interpreted as a dialectical process of de- and re-territorialization. The challenges to existing borders that limit economic, socio-cultural, and political activities, and the establishment of new borders as the result of such activities, bring about certain consolidated structures of spatiality, while at the same time societies develop regulatory regimes to use these structures for purposes of dominance and integration. Global history in our understanding investigates the historical roots of those global conditions that have led to modern globalization and should therefore focus on the historicity of regimes of territorialization and their permanent renegotiation over time. There is, at present, a massive insecurity about patterns of spatiality and appropriate regulatory mechanisms. This article begins with a sketch of this current uncertainty and of two further characteristics of contemporary globalization. The second part examines discussions in the field of global history with regard to processes of de- and re-territorialization. In the third part, we suggest three categories that can serve both as a research agenda and as a perspective according to which a history of globalization can be constructed and narrated.

Against the simplistic thesis that hill peoples are marginal and unruly groups by choice, in conflict with state power, this article shows that, in the context of mainland Southeast Asia, hill peoples develop relationships with lowland state societies that are more complex and ambiguous than usually portrayed. Ethnographic and historical evidence reveals that they compromise and cooperate with the lowland state more often than they oppose it. Although hill peoples are commonly conceived as ‘barbarians’ of the periphery, and ill-treated or instrumentalized accordingly, in some circumstances they played a central role in the defence and the reshaping of pre-modern and modern Southeast Asian states. Moreover, their political and religious acculturation by lowland societies sometimes proves to have been instrumental in the perpetuation of a specific identity under the guise of surface assimilation. This article not only highlights the dynamics of past and present interactions between lowland and upland societies but also questions the future of the latter, in the context of an increasing engulfment by nation-states and, conversely, of new perspectives offered by globalization. The analysis thus demonstrates that hill peoples often take advantage of new forms of partnership resulting from globalization to renegotiate their image and status more favourably, and to counter the pressure exerted by the dominant society. Finally, they appear to be neither Zomian – that is, uncompromising rebels to ‘stateness’ in James C. Scott’s formulation – nor zombies, unable to adapt.