Using the examples of plague, smallpox, and HIV/AIDS, the present essay argues for the benefits of incorporating the evolutionary histories of pathogens, beyond visible epidemic spikes within human populations, into our understanding of what pandemics actually are as epidemiological phenomena. The pandemic arc - which takes the pathogen as the defining \"actor\" in a pandemic, from emergence to local proliferation to globalization - offers a framework capable of bringing together disparate aspects not only of the manifestations of disease but also of human involvement in the pandemic process. Pathogens may differ, but there are common patterns in disease emergence and proliferation that distinguish those diseases that become pandemic, dispersed through human communities regionally or globally. The same methods of genomic analysis that allow tracking the evolutionary development of a modern pathogen such as SARS-CoV-2 also allow us to trace pandemics into the past. Reconstruction of these pandemic arcs brings new elements of these stories into view, recovering the experiences of regions and populations hitherto overlooked by Eurocentric narratives. This expanded global history of infectious diseases, in turn, lays a groundwork for reconceiving what ambitions a truly global health might aim for.

In this commentary, we discuss three major themes that Sidaway raises in his article, \'Beyond the Decolonial: Critical Muslim Geographies\': the problem of Muslims as \'others\'; the fraught role of religion as a universal category; and Muslim geographies as perceived in area studies and global history. Along these lines, we argue that Sidaway makes a number of important interventions aimed at changing the social science focus on Muslims in the West, highlighting the importance of Islamic concepts, and dislocating spaces of Islam from predefined geographical areas. After a critical discussion of the specific approaches presented in the article, we follow up on Sidaway\'s encouragement to think beyond the decolonial. We see this as an invitation to formulate our own vision of a new global history of Islam that takes into account traces of the influence of Muslims and of Islam more broadly speaking from Indigenous Australia to China to the Americas, and from everyday culture in Europe to extinct empires in Iberia, Sicily, and the Balkans. From this perspective, we argue, a more serious engagement with the multitude of global Islamic influences beyond Muslim communities might turn into a powerful force of decolonization.

Climate variability and natural hazards like floods and earthquakes can act as environmental shocks or socioecological stressors leading to instability and suffering throughout human history. Yet, societies experience a wide range of outcomes when facing such challenges: some suffer from social unrest, civil violence or complete collapse; others prove more resilient and maintain key social functions. We currently lack a clear, generally agreed-upon conceptual framework and evidentiary base to explore what causes these divergent outcomes. Here, we discuss efforts to develop such a framework through the Crisis Database (CrisisDB) programme. We illustrate that the impact of environmental stressors is mediated through extant cultural, political and economic structures that evolve over extended timescales (decades to centuries). These structures can generate high resilience to major shocks, facilitate positive adaptation, or, alternatively, undermine collective action and lead to unrest, violence and even societal collapse. By exposing the ways that different societies have reacted to crises over their lifetime, this framework can help identify the factors and complex social-ecological interactions that either bolster or undermine resilience to contemporary climate shocks. This article is part of the theme issue \'Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture\'.

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This paper uses zone electrophoresis, one of the most frequently used tools in molecular biology, to explore two ideas derived from Hans-Jörg Rheinberger\'s reflections on experiments. First, the constraining role played by technical objects-instrumentation and material conditions-in the production of knowledge or epistemic things. Second, the production of interconnected experimental systems by such technical objects, which results in the unexpected entanglement of research fields and experimental cultures. By the beginning of the 1960s, the inception of zone electrophoresis in laboratories around the world transformed-some say, revolutionized-the study of proteins. Even today, electrophoresis continues to open research venues and questions in biomedicine, molecular biology, human genetics, and in the field of molecular evolution. In my essay, I seek to look at the interconnected lives of zone electrophoresis and address the broader social, and even global context, in which this apparently humble technique became a salient tool in the production of biological knowledge. In so doing, I aim to take the past and present of the history and historiography of experimental systems to the future, where experiments and technologies are interrogated as they are used in different geographies and contexts, including contexts of poverty.

What did science make possible for colonial rule? How was science in turn marked by the knowledge and practices of those under colonial rule? Here I approach these questions via the social history of Madras Observatory. Constructed in 1791 by the East India Company, the observatory was to provide local time to mariners and served as a clearinghouse for the company\'s survey and revenue administration. The astronomical work of Madras\' Brahmin assistants relied upon their knowledge of jyotiśāstra [Sanskrit astronomy/astrology], and can be seen as a specialized form of the kind of South Indian scribal labor and knowledge that also staffed the company\'s tax offices. If at Greenwich the division of labor meant observatory work bore resemblances to the factory and the accounts office, in Madras, astronomy and accounting drew on similar labor forms because they were part of the same enterprise. But the company did not just adapt preexisting forms of labor, it also attempted to produce its own at a school built near the observatory to train \"half-caste\" orphans as apprentice surveyors and assistant computers. The school, staffed by the Brahmins, drew upon knowledge and pedagogical practice associated with the tinnai, the schools in which upper-caste children learned to read, write, and calculate. For a time, the observatory\'s social order was literally \"half-caste.\" The paper also considers how the relationship between caste, status, and instrument was reflected in the visual and material culture of the observatory, such as in Indian-language inscriptions on its central pillar. For company astronomers, the measurement of time meant reworking the relationships among the Indian past, the colonial present, and an imperial posterity. Science under colonial rule spanned multiple temporal and social registers because it was the result of negotiations between the demands of political economy and the knowledge and practices of colonized others.

This essay outlines the various analytical frameworks related to the history of race science that contribute to a \"Latin\" intellectual culture and tradition. In addition to defining Latinity as applied to the history of science, this article examines the troubled relationship between Latin American history and histories of science characterized as global. Similarly, it explores intellectual linkages across the Global South regarding racial mixture and the legacy of colonialism. It concludes by considering how a Latin perspective can illuminate the continued hegemony of ideas and scientific practices originating in North America and northern Europe.

Our understanding of body-world relations is caught in a curious contradiction. On one side, it is well established that many concepts that describe interaction with the outer world - \'plasticity\' or \'metabolism\'- or external influences on the body - \'environment\' or \'milieu\' - appeared with rise of modern science. On the other side, although premodern science lacked a unifying term for it, an anxious attentiveness to the power of \'environmental factors\' in shaping physical and moral traits held sway in nearly all medical systems before and alongside modern Europe. In this article, I build on a new historiography on the policing of bodies and environments in medieval times and at the urban scale to problematize Foucault\'s claim about biopolitics as a modern phenomenon born in the European eighteenth-century. I look in particular at the collective usage of ancient medicine and manipulation of the milieu based on humoralist notions of corporeal permeability (Hippocrates, Galen, Ibn Sīnā) in the Islamicate and Latin Christendom between the 12th and the 15th century. This longer history has implications also for a richer genealogy of contemporary tropes of plasticity, permeability and environmental determinism beyond usual genealogies that take as a starting point the making of the modern body and EuroAmerican biomedicine.

The term \"globalization\" doesn\'t refer to a current epoch of world history, but to an undulated process interrupted by harsh setbacks. Its phases of upswing are characterized by exponential growth. They end when tipping points arrive. For globalization inevitably has its winners and losers, these phases are paralleled by processes of fragmentation in other countries, macro-regions and societies. The article provides a sketch of both types of processes, illustrated by examples from world history. It thereby shows that they must not be considered mere byproducts of technological development in transport and communication, but also depend on institutions that guarantee \"International Public Goods\" (IPGs), above all safety, stability and connectivity. Only great powers can provide this type of goods, for only they have the resources to do so, then again for only they are confronted with a volunteer\'s dilemma. Moreover globalization depends on a grand narrative that marginalizes competing schools of thought. Crises emerge either when transactions driving the process reach a tipping point, or when great powers decline and are no longer ready or able to provide IPGs. Now critical discourses emerge and become hegemonic in the face of successive crises undermining the grand narrative. This results in social division between cosmopolitans and populists. Both \"big players\" currently face different dilemmas conditioned by their positions as hegemonic power (USA) and freerider (China), in each case causing them to act neo-isolationist. The result: IPGs are no longer guaranteed, globalization is in crisis. This development has been catalysed by the Corona-pandemic.
Le concept de mondialisation ne désigne pas une période actuelle de l’histoire mondiale mais un processus se déroulant par vagues et entrecoupé de brusques reculs. Les phases d’expansion se caractérisent par une croissance exponentielle jusqu’à ce que soient atteints des points de bascule. Parallèlement se déroule un processus de fragmentation touchant certains pays, régions du monde ou parties de la société, la mondialisation produisant toujours des gagnants et des perdants. Ces deux processus sont esquissés à l’échelle mondiale à l’aide d’exemples historiques. Ils ne sont pas simplement la conséquence des transformations techniques dans le domaine des transports et des communications mais nécessitent des institutions encadrant la fourniture de biens publics internationaux tels que la sécurité, la stabilité et la connectivité. Ceux-ci sont fournis par les grandes puissances qui seules disposent des ressources suffisantes et sont confrontées au dilemme du volontaire. Un grand récit de la mondialisation qui marginalise les doctrines concurrentes est par ailleurs nécessaire. La mondialisation entre en crise quand les transactions qui alimentent ce processus atteignent des points de bascule ou quand les grandes puissances sont en déclin et ne sont plus disposées ou en mesure de prendre en charge les biens publics internationaux. C’est alors qu’émerge le discours critique de la mondialisation qui devient hégémonique quand des crises se succèdent qui délégitiment le discours de la mondialisation. Il en résulte un clivage au sein de la société entre cosmopolites et populistes. Actuellement, les principaux acteurs sont confrontés au dilemme hégémonique (USA) ou au dilemme du passager clandestin (Chine) et réagissent de manière néo-isolationniste. Les biens publics internationaux se trouvent ainsi remis en question et la mondialisation entre en crise. La pandémie de coronavirus a catalysé cette évolution.

Since the rise of a \"scientific\" historiography in the nineteenth century, the role of ideas in history versus that of material forces has been a key philosophical problem. Thomas Piketty\'s Capital and Ideology (2019), read as a work of global history, offers a provocative rehearsal of this question. On the one hand, the book is an attempt to provide a narrative historical frame for the hard data of the World Inequality Database. On the other, paradoxically, it offers a defiant conclusion that ideology is, or at least could be, the key driver in social and institutional change towards universal progress. St Simon, Comte and Spencer have found their twenty-first century heir. How can we historicize Piketty\'s impetus, both understanding its provenance and making sense of its limitations? One key issue is its roots in the traditions of National Accounts, which leads to an approach to the global which is stresses comparison over connection, and to an uncritical reproduction of the portrait of an egalitarian non-capitalist Twentieth century painted by Kuznets during the Cold War. Another is its presentism, with the historical argument driven by an attempt to understand the c.1980-2020 conjuncture and its alternatives, and a connected overdependence on the support of a few historians. A third, a consequence in part of the inequalities between the quality of data we have for different parts of the world, and of Piketty\'s provenance and imagined audience, is a Eurocentric, even Gallocentric approach. A fourth is a very French republican refusal to address how class is complicated by identities of race and nation so that neither egalitarian policies nor ideologies provide remedies for the populist politics of right. None of these criticisms are in contradiction with our view that Capital and Ideology is a work of social theory of world historical importance.