Empires and the Reach of the Global brings the history of empires into sharp focus by showing how imperialism has been a shaping force not just in international politics but in the economies and cultures of today’s world. Focusing on both the strengths and limits of imperial power, Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton describe the creation and disintegration of the reigning world order in the period from 1870 to 1945.

Using the British, Japanese, and Ottoman empires as case studies, the authors trace the communication, transportation, and economic networks that were instrumental to empire building. They highlight the role of empires as place-making regimes that organize geographic space as distinct territories. Militaries and missionaries, workplaces and households, all served as key domains of interaction within these territories, as colonial officials sought to manage the customs and lifeways of indigenous populations. Imperial connections contributed to the shrinking of time and space, but colonial encroachments also provoked opposition, which often played out in locations of everyday activity, from fields and factories to schools and prisons. Colonized territories sponsored a variety of forms of organized resistance, with full-fledged nationalist movements erupting onto the global scene in the interwar period.

Ballantyne and Burton stress that empire was not something fabricated in European capitals and implemented “out there.” Rather, imperial systems, with their many racial, gendered, and economic forms, affected empires in all of their parts—the metropole as well as the farthest outpost.

Offering a fresh look at trade during the second industrial revolution, Global Markets Transformed describes a world of commodities on the move—wheat and rice, coffee and tobacco, oil and rubber, all jostling around the planet through a matrix of producers, processors, transporters, and buyers. Steven C. Topik and Allen Wells discuss how innovations in industrial and agricultural production, transportation, commerce, and finance transformed the world economy from 1870 to 1945.

Topik and Wells trace the evolution of global chains of commodities, from basic food staples and stimulants to strategically important industrial materials, that linked the agricultural and mineral-producing areas of Latin America, Asia, and Africa to European and North American consumers and industrialists. People living a great distance apart became economically intertwined as never before. Yet laborers and consumers at opposite ends of commodity chains remained largely invisible to one another. Affluent American automobile owners who were creating the skyrocketing demand for tires, for example, knew almost nothing about poor Brazilian tappers who sweated in the Amazon to supply the rubber necessary for their vehicles.

As commodity chains stretched out around the world, more goods were bound up in markets that benefited some countries more than others. Global Markets Transformed highlights the lessons and legacy of the early years of globalization—when the world’s population doubled, trade quadrupled, industrial output multiplied fivefold, and the gap between rich and poor regions grew ever wider.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, new railroads, ports, and steamships enabled people to travel faster and in greater numbers than ever before. Migrations and Belongings traces burgeoning population movements across several continents from 1870 to the end of World War II. This study explains the complex variables involved in global migrations and the processes of acculturation by which “belonging” takes shape.

Dirk Hoerder emphasizes the migration systems that emerge when population clusters move between regions over long periods of time. Eschewing a Eurocentric perspective, he identifies five major systems in different parts of the world where men and women left areas with labor surpluses and swelled regions of urban and industrial growth. These include African slave migration from the 1440s to the 1870s; migration of free and indentured men and women across Asia; Russo-Siberian migration across parts of Asia, North America, and Europe; a North China–Manchurian migration; and an Atlantic system connecting Europe and the Americas. Migrations within and among regions and empires both encouraged population mixing and produced new social stratifications.

Questioning the “container” view of states, Hoerder considers instead the dynamic effects of departure, transit, and arrival. Migration, he shows, is both a critique of unsatisfactory conditions in one society and a contribution of human capital to another.

Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World examines the wide variety of social and cultural networks that emerged from the global exchanges of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Emily Rosenberg shows how transnational connections were being formed many decades before “globalization” became a commonplace term in economic and political discourse.

Suggesting crisscrossing flows of power, “currents” provide an especially apt metaphor for transnational exchanges in the age of the telegraph and incandescent light bulb. Rosenberg traces the internationalizing currents that impelled a desire to create global rule-setting institutions, from the Universal Postal Union to the International Olympic Committee to the League of Nations. Other transnational currents coalesced around social networks of class, ethnic, gender, and religious affiliations; around exhibitions such as world fairs, museums, and botanical gardens; around networks of expertise in engineering, medicine, social science, and urban planning; and around mass media and cultures of consumption.

Rosenberg suggests that these currents brought a modernity that mixed faith in the rationality of science and technology with a fascination for emotional and spectacle-driven entertainments. In this age of nationalism and imperialism, they both assisted and disrupted ambitions for territorial expansion; they ushered in a new world in which fast-moving technologies of representation brought multiple and shifting codes of meaning. Often overlooked in histories centered on nation-states, transnational currents highlight the irregular patterns of global change and underscore the fluidity of spatial and personal identifications in the period from 1870 to the end of World War II.

Caterina Bernardini gauges the effects that Walt Whitman’s poetry had in Italy from 1870 to 1945: the reactions it provoked, the aesthetic and political agendas it came to sponsor, and the creative responses it facilitated. Particular attention is given to women writers and noncanonical writers often excluded from previous discussions in this area of study. Bernardini also investigates the contexts and causes of Whitman’s success abroad through the lives, backgrounds, beliefs, and imaginations of the people who encountered his work.

Studying Whitman’s reception from a transnational perspective shows how many countries were simultaneously carving out a new modernity in literature and culture. In this sense, Bernardini not only shows the interconnectedness of various international agents in understanding and contributing to the spread of Whitman’s work, but, more largely, illustrates a constellation of similar pre-modernist and modernist sensibilities. This stands in contrast to the notion of sudden innovation: modernity was not easy to achieve, and it did not imply a complete refusal of tradition. Instead, a continuous and fruitful negotiation between tradition and innovation, not a sudden break with the literary past, is at the very heart of the Italian and transnational reception of Whitman. The book is grounded in archival studies and the examination of primary documents of noteworthy discovery.

Between 1870 and 1945, advances in communication and transportation simultaneously expanded and shrank the world. New technologies erased distance and accelerated the global exchange of people, products, and ideas on an unprecedented scale. A World Connecting focuses on an era when growing global interconnectedness inspired new ambitions but also stoked anxieties and rivalries that would erupt in two world wars—the most destructive conflicts in human history.

In five interpretive essays, distinguished historians Emily S. Rosenberg, Charles S. Maier, Tony Ballantyne, Antoinette Burton, Dirk Hoerder, Steven C. Topik, and Allen Wells illuminate the tensions that emerged from intensifying interconnectedness and attempts to control and shape the effects of sweeping change. Each essay provides an overview of a particular theme: modern state-building; imperial encounters; migration; commodity chains; and transnational social and cultural networks. With the emergence of modern statehood and the fluctuating fate of empires came efforts to define and police territorial borders. As people, products, capital, technologies, and affiliations flowed across uneasily bounded spaces, the world both came together and fell apart in unexpected, often horrifying, and sometimes liberating ways.

A World Connecting goes beyond nations, empires, and world wars to capture the era’s defining feature: the profound and disruptive shift toward an ever more rapidly integrating world.