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"The history of globalisation is usually told as a history of shortening distances and acceleration of the flows of people, goods and ideas. Channelling Mobilities refines this picture by looking at a wide variety of mobile people passing through the region of the Suez Canal, a global shortcut opened in 1869. As an empirical contribution to global history, the book asks how the passage between Europe and Asia and Africa was perceived, staged and controlled from the opening of the Canal to the First World War, arguing that this period was neither an era of unhampered acceleration, nor one of hardening borders and increasing controls. Instead, it was characterised by the channelling of mobilities through the differentiation, regulation and bureaucratisation of movement. Telling the stories of tourists, troops, workers, pilgrims, stowaways, caravans, dhow skippers and others, the book reveals the complicated entanglements of empires, internationalist initiatives and private companies."--Publisher's website

This article revisits the origins of internationalism in the field of health and shows how the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century, much like the current coronavirus crisis, brought global differences such as social inequalities, political hierarchies, and scientific conflicts to the fore. Beyond drawing parallels between the cholera epidemics and the current crisis, the article argues for combining imperial and social histories in order to write richer and more grounded histories of internationalism. It explores this historiographical and methodological challenge by analysing the boardrooms of the international sanitary conferences, Middle Eastern quarantine stations catering for Mecca pilgrims, and ocean steamships aiming to move without delay during a worldwide health crisis.

Introducing the special section on histories of social planning in late colonial and postcolonial societies (1920s–60s), this article argues that we have to take the global origins and reverberations of discourses on planning seriously. It outlines the field of planning and the historiographical debates around it, which mainly centre on European, US and Soviet history. It then checks the viability of the concept for late colonial and postcolonial contexts. In this way, it demonstrates how planning discourses, for instance in recently decolonized states, became global and how they reflected back onto Europe and the USA for example. Beyond summarizing the contributions of the special section, this article raises wider issues concerning the potentials of a dialogue between European, Soviet and US American contemporary history and (post)colonial history. It shows how the paradigm of planning can be applied to settings outside of Europe, the Soviet Union and the USA, and how in turn postcolonial history can contribute to a new understanding of the global history of planning.

What can we gain by looking at maritime spaces? Does this enable us to work towards a global history of the Middle East that moves beyond at times arbitrary geographical and disciplinary borders? In this essay I argue that maritime spaces might be particularly suitable for exploring the boundaries of Middle East studies and their interconnection with global history. By implication, the study of Middle Eastern maritime connections might be especially well fitted to develop new and more complex global histories. To make this point, a specific and perhaps unusual maritime site in the Middle East will be assessed. The Suez Canal opened in 1869 and quickly turned into a major artery of traffic between Europe on the one side, and Asia, East Africa, and Australia on the other. More importantly for our purposes, it is located at the very heart of the Middle East, where Africa and Asia, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea (and with it the Indian Ocean world), and water and desert intersect.

Education is largely absent in recent work on the history of development and modernization. Yet it was central to the political project of many leaders of decolonization and figured prominently in five-year plans and other development schemes. The article highlights the central role of education in concepts of development and social planning in the Middle East. This could take the form of central plans but also of statistical and computer-generated projections of future educational and manpower needs. After showing how different concepts of planning education were circulated at the level of international organizations, the article investigates the first Egyptian five-year plan. It looks at the Egyptian Institute of National Planning in Cairo, highlighting that Egyptian planners drew on a variety of different experts and institutions from the US and the Soviet Union to the GDR and India. While the late 1960s ushered in more scepticism toward formal planning and projection, the emphasis on expertise, knowledge and skills as central variables of modern societies has endured.

This article examines the "new professions" as alternative settings where women thought and wrote about the international. Presenting the case studies of Fannie Fern Andrews, Mary Parker Follett and Florence Wilson, it shows that, in emerging professional and disciplinary contexts that have hitherto lain beyond the purview of historians of international thought, these women developed their thinking about the international. The insights they derived from their practical work in schools, immigrant communities and libraries led them to emphasize the mechanics of participation in international affairs and caused them to think across the scales of the individual, the local group and relations between nations. By moving beyond the history of organizations and networks and instead looking for the professional settings and audiences which enabled women to theorize, this article shifts both established understandings of what counts as international thought and traditional conceptions of who counts as an international thinker.

This volume combines a present-day and historical concern on the topic of global publics between the communication revolution of the 1870s and the digital age. Building on earlier theories of public spheres, Valeska Huber and Jurgen Osterhammel expand the notion of global publics not only geographically but also by charting new thematic territory, describing global publics as courts of global opinion, as market places, or as arenas for competition. As the first historical volume ever to combine different facets of global publics ranging from infrastructures, the press, film and theatre to human rights politics, it brings together established and emerging authors in the field of history and from related disciplines such as geography, sociology, and literature who explore how global publics were configured, imagined, and fragmented. In this way, Global Publics: Their Power and Their Limits not only provides a new conceptual framework and important case studies but also shows how histories of global communication might be studied in the future