This article situates early Soviet studies of the press, a specific academic field called gazetovedenie, within the global history of mass communication research. While scholarship often portrays Soviet media theory as entirely subordinate to agitational practice, this situation only became established by 1930, when well-known Soviet orthodoxies on the nature and role of propaganda fully solidified. In the 1920s, Soviet press scholars actively engaged with contemporary global debates about the press's role in mass society, how propaganda functioned, and why it often failed. Far from working in isolation, they drew upon thinkers such as Karl Bucher, Grant Hyde, and Walter Lippmann, while developing distinctive approaches, including applying Formalist methods to media texts, that resonated internationally. Viewing this intellectual activity as part of a global exchange redefines the origins of propaganda studies, not as a Cold War divide, but as diverging, yet deeply entangled, responses to modernity, war, and mass politics.
The copra industry that developed in the Pacific region from the mid-nineteenth century was a global, thriving enterprise. Imperial powers and trade companies jointly set up palm tree plantations that shaped the livelihoods of island societies and recruited Chinese contract labourers. Such monocultural territorialisations also radically transformed the environments and lives of non-humans (plants, insects, fungi), creating ecological conditions that challenged the same economic endeavours at work. 'Economic entomology', a novel branch of the scientific study of insects related to profit-oriented land management, emerged globally in the early twentieth century to protect plantations more efficiently from insect pests and other plant diseases. By focusing on the unprecedented outbreak of rhinoceros beetle (Oryctes rhinoceros) in the Samoan islands during German colonial rule and its aftermath in the Pacific world, this article examines the history of coconut capitalism in this region as a more-than-human history and explores the potential of reading the global archive against the grain while applying a multispecies ethnographic lens. In so doing, it reconsiders both the colonial anxieties exposed by the beetle outbreak and the kind of multispecies spaces that this insect opened up for Samoan resistance. This paradigmatic case of the global co-constitution of plantation economies and transimperial pest control research sheds light on the intersections of capitalist expansion in the modern era and the correlated environmental transformations that forged a new epistemic and ecological regime in commodity frontiers during the early twentieth century.
Abstract In August 1949, the first Social Research Seminar for the Arab States convened in Beirut; five further seminars followed over the next decade. Drawing on Arabic-language seminar proceedings and UN archival records, this article recovers these largely overlooked gatherings to analyse how a distinct regional developmental field took shape in the post-war Arab East. UN institutional uncertainty in the late 1940s allowed the Arab League to capture this format, to authenticate global development through civilisational framing—most visibly in a lexical shift from emancipatory inʿāsh (reinvigoration) to custodial riʿāya (guardianship)—and to consolidate a self-sustaining professional field. The resulting regional arena mediated between global circulation and national implementation while proving durably compatible with the authoritarian welfare regimes emerging across the region.
Abstract This article recentres East Africa in the global history of cowrie shells by tracing the trajectories of Monetaria annulus —the East African cowrie species—across interconnected monetary arenas in the nineteenth century. Situating African monetary history within transoceanic processes, it argues that the ‘great cowrie inflation’ in West Africa was closely tied to the reorganization of procurement networks, labour regimes, and commercial infrastructures in the Western Indian Ocean. Viewed from Zanzibar, the massive export of East African cowries emerges as the outcome of intersecting processes: price fluctuations in Maldivian shells, the expansion of the palm oil trade, extractive labour networks, and imperial interests. The article further shows that the same infrastructures were later reoriented toward the Great Lakes region, tracing how a single commodity connected East and West Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic world. Following cowries across these overlapping spaces demonstrates that monetary history—wherever it is written—cannot be fully understood without attending to the supply-side infrastructures that made money available.
Abstract Twenty years after the founding of the Journal of Global History , this anniversary article takes stock of global history: its trajectory, its markers of disciplinary maturity, its political sense of purpose, and the difficulties and limits of the enterprise. Concerns after 2016 that global history might lose its relevance in a changing political climate have, thus far, not been borne out. By many measures, global history is both a flourishing field and an influential sensibility. Its enduring contribution, this article argues, lies in how it has helped, and continues to help, bring about a fuller, more accurate, and more complete understanding of the ever-incomplete ‘selection of facts’ that constitutes history, our humble truth. Twenty years on, global historians know their field’s limitations but also its value. They know that they have brought the world into history—and that this is no small thing.
