STEVEN C. TOPIK AND ALLEN WELLS war and debilitating economic depression. Tens of millions of deaths and eco nomic stagnation brought widespread disillusionment and revolutionary flrvo. Peering back at the world of more than sixty years ago, we need to conjidc which are its most important legacies. This was both the triumphant era of th railroad, airplane, and radio, of mass production and mass consumption, av.t' the era of wealth concentration, two world wars, the Russian Revolution, and tin atomic bomb. Accelerated economic interactions led to cultural diffusion am syncretic amalgamation. Greater communication only sometimes yielded in-caic understanding. It was an era of sharp contrasts. The telegraph, steamship, ant global markets led some people to think of One World, shorn of divisive differ ences. They launched the League of Nations, the International Court, Espc ranto, and NGOs like the Red Cross and the Boy Scouts to traverse nations, borders. World fairs and the Olympics brought people together from mar-) cor ners of the Earth. But the urge to compete was probably stronger than the c.esnc to cooperate. Intensified international transactions also intensified nation and imperialism. The fleshing-out of the international commodity chains of some key illi tive goods shows that the concept of "the market" is simplistic, that mark* more fragmented, unstable, and heterodox as new products became more , finable for different reasons. Certainly people in places geographically rcmo-.l from each other began to affect each other in unexpected and unforeseen w.ivs. Whether chaining farmers together in networks of commodity exchanj-.. positive or detrimental depended upon specific historical circumstances. Oue-comes were not uniform, foreordained, consistent, or constant. The genie rcle.w.ii by new energy forms, new mechanical and chemical techniques, new means transport and communication, and new products was not necessarily bcnmiknt or malignant. Human history and the environment in which people lived bkipcd the consequences of this first modern age of globalization as commodity cii.uni linked areas and peoples that historically had limited interactions. The global forces unleashed in that period still reverberate today. As William'.FaiArwi warned us: "The past is never dead, it is not even past." •[five]- Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World Emily S. Rosenberg Introduction "'i HE extension and use of railroads, steamships, telegraphs, break down nationalities and bring people geographically remote into close connection.... Jhf y make the world one." So wrote David Livingstone, the famed British iniiiionary-explorer whose accounts of Africa became widely influential in the VCijsc.1 By the late nineteenth century, this commonplace sentiment echoed ili oughout the world, expressed in some form or other both by those who cele-, ed the shrinking world and by those who feared it. Ihe observation that the late nineteenth-century revolutions in transportation, communication, finance, and commerce were transforming loyalties and si nubilities, limiting or even eliminating spatial distance, animated the creation ul' .in ever-widening array of international and transnational networks during :!ic era from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. C. A. Bayly has -.ntly called the steps toward what is now often termed globalization the "Great AcLeleration." In many older historical writings it was assumed that Europeans Oaped the onset of the "modern" age during this era and then, for better or se, exported its characteristics to other regions through emerging structures of empire, trade, and cultural hegemony. Bayly, however, conceives of the world during this era "as a complex of overlapping networks of global reach, while at the same time acknowledging the vast differentials of power which inhered in then." Europeans were often able to "bend to their will existing global net-Hoiks,'' he writes. Yet "it was the parasitic and 'networked' nature of Western OiKiination and power which gave it such strength, binding together, and tapping into, a vast range of viable networks and aspirations."2 Iliis chapter follows Bayly and other recent scholars in suggesting that although Euro-Americans played a significant role in the creation and spread of modernity in this era, the many social and cultural networks that increasingly miicrossed the globe helped to coproduce and accelerate the transformations, h recognizes that state-building projects, imperial dynamics, demographic EMILY S. ROSENBERG movements, and economic interrelationships leave significant glob.il inturfo nections unexamined, and that todays dense and varied social networks a d, cultural entanglements have important forerunners. A wide range of ni'w in*. national agreements and institutions expanded the realms of interguvcTiinvmal connections. In addition, many non-state networks existed more or less indepen dentiy from governments (or sometimes operated loosely through flier.i). Thcs. networks connected people through aspiration, expertise, and affiiirtion cil'vir" ous kinds. This chapter, in short, is concerned with how transnational social ,mJ cultural currents circulated across and beyond national states and drew the world together in new ways.3 To begin, it will be helpful to imagine the usual territorial map of ilu- world with pastel-colored countries and empires grouped into continents jepai.ittd by blue seas. It is within the invisible assumptions of such a map th.^v most hisimy has been written. The conventions of professional history writing. :iftL| emerged in the late nineteenth century in association with the accdirr-ed processes of state building, empire building, and mapmaking. Textbook' u.i example, often use maps to illustrate the rise and fall of territorial concnl. Contrasting colors display the before-and-after borders of controlled or? J.umcd realms. Examples would be the common use of before-and-aftcr mup o\ \ n ! War I, the partition of Africa, the expansion of Japan in the i$i;os and lj.1v 1940s, the shrinkage and then enlargement of the Soviet empire iriei ilu Bolshevik Revolution, and so forth. Such maps exemplify how history is gei c 1 ally taught and learned with reference to geographically bounded na::onal > tares, and they exemplify the extent to which history centers on questions related to why and how those shirting borders moved. Of course, such maps s 11 enormously helpful in visualizing the world, and one would not seek their „'iadii..i-tion. Geographical information provides a solid basis for visua. i'/ing woihi history. But such maps also silently construct realms of inquiry that mostly 1 el.ict to the decisions and actions of those expanding and contracting, appca 1., iii J disappearing, yellow, pink, and green entities named states. Other kinds of maps can be, and have been, devised. If the world is .rapped according to population, for example, the "sizes" of countries or region* kmk tar different from when they are plotted according to geographic tuntoi; ( 'insider, further, how the world changes shape when remapped according to data •[ 816 1- TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD p„ ner capita income, urbanization, energy consumption, numbers of people Sjiyjnglesstnan m'les from their place of birth, or any other of dozens of in-Sl llicators. Even though less common, these kinds of maps may track historical I K£&rmat'on tkat seems just as important for understanding the world's past as ■ r those more familiar maps delineating territorial borders. Iliis chapter tries to construct, through words, yet another kind of map that , c\c i more intricate. Perhaps possible to conjure only in the flexible dimensions )f die imagination, this map directs attention not to a particular territorial place or 10 the information that might be contained therein but to the dynamic connections, both visible and invisible, between and among places. Such networks jml connecting flows, in all their variation, cannot literally be charted onto geo-y graphical space, but they nonetheless constitute a mental map that may recast the terrain of history writing. Livingstone and so many of his contemporaries an Hind the world claimed to be witnessing a revolution in geographic space and ' the allegiances it commanded. Historians need to conjure new maps in order to ~b*jjjp»r • capture and then raise questions about the amazing acceleration of interconnec-S " tivity that was shrinking distance and complicating identities. The sections that follow suggest some of the interwoven pathways that might nuke up a mental map of social and cultural transnational history. No world or global history can be comprehensive, and this one does not attempt to cover every transnational network in every area of the world through this long and complicated era. Because the idea of transnational history remains a concept under construction, however, I have tried to map what might be some major categories and interpretive themes for these networks. I have then illustrated these with lAiiinples from throughout the world, sometimes making reference to the more conventional realms of national states ("Japan," "Argentina," "the United States," ' tjennany," and so on) while still attempting to hold at bay the assumptions of S:BH19n"s,:ate primacy conveyed through their naming. The focus is not primarily * - on separate geographies but on those flows that spanned geographical boundar-■ '£ ici. The concern of this chapter is the fluid realm of the "trans-." lb illuminate transnational networks, the central metaphor of currents provide; appropriate imagery for this age of electricity. The globalizing currents ex-•■inined here emerge unevenly and in complex fashion. The metaphor of currents moves away from a spoke-and-wheel, center-and-periphery framework to suggest •[ 817 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG crisscrossing flows of power and an interactive, though usually iisv-vni.t.- -i reciprocal dynamic. The idea of "currents" suggests a number of associated words h v illuminate the global interactions analyzed here. Currents, for example c-n ru through circuits. They may pulse in one direction or be interacuvc; ilw flow from point to point or charge a more generalized field. They come .ck<.c!,.. in nodes, which are points of collection and retransmission. They maj bt a„ veyed along lines that may be singular or of blended and woven < haractcr "ihc have both a visible and an invisible quality. Currents move, connea, anr Jra together but are also subject to disruption, overload, and shock. C u i ions u.-i b smooth, even pleasing, but always carry the danger of interruption. In short, ihc vocabulary of currents suggests linked contingency and variability, piotess and transformation rather than static structure. All of these connotations pr ivc u<;e. ful in schematizing the world as it came into being during this e, ,i of zczAt. ,umg interconnections. It seems helpful to elaborate further on some of the ways that rhi:, mctaplif>rL will do its interpretive work in the sections that follow. i. Currents, of course, move through networks. Networks amoiv; sL.tes and interconnections among peoples often transcended boundaries ar.d drew different nationalities and cultures together. Some of these networks v. etc highly utilitarian and served an array of specific functions. Many new organizations, for example, sought to facilitate global connections through the intciiiaiion il sun-dardization of norms and through institutionalizing regulatory and legal regimes. Other networks were more visionary, linked to ideas and nf::[i.:n onrthe-less participated in other kinds of boundary drawing. In fact, the inoie thai ^:nie types of boundaries were challenged and erased, the more new m works m:ght shore up others in new ways. The simultaneous erasure and creation of cli ftaetipc and distinction, of course, were interrelated. The language and cmegorii * ot disease, gender, race, cultural affinities, religion, and science, for example, often ■r 8181- TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD ■ ranSCended geographical boundaries at the same time as they created new gram-.- iars and registers of difference. Cultural currents could foster inclusion, exclu-. ■ i; and rearrangement of human relationships; their effects could be some-nines transitory and sometimes more lasting. i. Although global networks were not coterminous with bounded states nr imperial systems or regional affiliations, neither were they free of them. Trans-■i ■ i ional currents complicate the interpretive terrain of world history along both i spatial and a chronological axis. First, the globalizing networks in this era turned shape within the context of Western Europe's nation building, empire building, and growing economic and cultural hegemony. Nations and empires wctc spaces, themselves assembled through networks of various kinds, that attempted to regularize and delineate the movement of people, goods, and ideas. Secondly, in the West most conceptions of what was "global" and "international" implied an inevitable and presumably progressive universalizing of cer-?aiiv Western ideas and experiences. The extension and imposition of Western iiiiiversalism played an important role in constituting many global networks, '[■uis transnational networks developed not necessarily in opposition to the hardening boundaries of nationalism or of empire, or as a stage ofprogress beyond them, but sometimes as necessary counterparts to state and empire building. 5. An examination of global currents helps direct attention to particular pjoplc who shaped the emergent networks and affiliations and who served as conduits for exchanges connecting several planes of analysis. A focus on people and :heir connections can help make visible how the realms of the transnational, the national, and the local intersected in ways both dangerous (for whom?) and liberating (for whom?). Using the metaphor of currents with nodes of connectivity fuilittites an analytical process that scales back and forth, seeing large and seeing Midi while concentrating on the interactivity and often unevenness among local, - n\\wnal, and global levels? -(.. Historians writing within a postcolonial sensibility have tried to break igpoje from the earlier eras rigid conceptions of territorial boundaries and from uo ideological assumptions of geographic, racial, and class destiny. Many have , sought to build a new appreciation for the networked interactivity that charac-• Prized what Mary Louise Pratt has called "contact zones." Contact zones are sui-ij. spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in •[ 819 ]• EMILY S. ROSENBERG contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, sia or their aftermaths." Pratt sees a shrinking world's clash of cultures not simply as a story of loss, imperialism, and oppression, but also as one about mutual rowings, diverse if unequal forms of power, trickster reversals, possible harm -nies, and substantial confusion. Anthropologist Anna Tsing suggests that n-transnational space, the global and the local meet in unpredictable encourten which she calls moments of "friction."5 Within thefriction of contact zones, u multiplied within the connective currents that networked the globe in this pi . there was creativity as well as oppression, coproduction as well as imposition of "imperial knowledge." Currents brought diverse kinds of transformations. 5. Thus, this chapter endorses anthropologist Arjun Appadurai's insistence that the presumed universalism of modernism nested together with diverse op-positions. Claims of universalism and particularism bred each other; the ™„bal and the local interacted to produce uniformity as well as diversity. The world became increasingly characterized by what I will call "differentiated common.ilHu that is, commonalities that nevertheless manifested themselves differently dep ing on the unpredictable frictions arising from geographical, temporal, .iwi sociocidtural locations.6 6. Currents also appropriately connote the age of electricity. 'Ihe gl iba! spread of electricity was a feat of science, engineering, and finance that em'x-d-ded almost mystical qualities within this age of rationality. It aptly cxcmtil fied the unity between two often-dichotomized aspects of "modern" life- tca\on tun- ' ported by exacting taxonomies and accounting practices, and emotion ch.it«ed throughfluidspectacularity. By dramatically shrinking time and space, < W nic , progeny—illumination, telephony, movies, and much more—all seemed cr.s part science and one part miracle. Concepts of "modernity" are the subjects of an enormous scholarship, jf course, and this chapter develops a particular view. It projects "the moderr emerging from two, seemingly contradictory, impulses. Promises of "order and progress" expressed one impulse. It emphasized rationality, science, engineering, corporate organization, and classification. It exalted the application of exjiei t m: and often worked to stabilize hierarchies of gender and race and geographical space. A second impulse arose within various new forms of entertainmcn- ind . the changing media of mass communications. Characterized by spccui-lc. i:n.ijjc ■ Sill I TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD [low, surprise, and disjuncture, it appealed to a kind of emotional knowledge that v/as often self-styled as "popular." Science/spectacle, expertise/entertainment, order/disorder are, of course, only schematic opposites. It was within the combinations and clashes of these false poles that emerged the messy diversities and contradictions that have characterized modern life.7 7. The metaphor of currents whose dynamics are driven by polarities presents an even broader interpretation of modernity. Currents carry power, experience charge, and often activate their energy through polarities. Similarly, the emerging modernism of this increasingly networked era was one in which seemingly binary poles emerged as coproductive counterparts: homogenization and differentiation, the global and the local, trans- or internationalism and nationalism, reason and spectacle. All of these sets are composed not of opposites but of nested complements that operated in creative tension with each other. There are dangers in any interpretive or metaphorical schema, and two of these need to be considered at the outset. Electricity brings with it a language and presumption of "enlightenment," of bringing "light" to and illuminating, "dark" continents and peoples. The metaphor itself can frame the discursive constructions of the age of electricity, hiding as much as it reveals. Authors, and readers, however, cannot escape the entrapments of language and discourse; they can only strive for the kind of critical reflection that will mitigate the hazards. In addition, the idea of mapping networks and currents may leave invisible the many people in the world who remained relatively untouched by them or who became more now an enormous amount of research on transnational networks, their rcpremutations in this chapter are necessarily partial and contain overlapping thronolo gies. Chronological time is important: the kind of networks that oixe mostly abetted the rise of European dominance developed circuitry that help • \ undo'I mine European power as the twentieth century wore on. Still, chroiv logical time, like geographical space, is less important in this chapter than the ihimauc-" elaborations. The five themes that follow suggest that "complex m:erconnci.tiV ity," a term that John Tomlinson has given to the era since 1970, is no hss 1 descriptor for the period 1870 to 1945.' n J. Currents of Internationalism IN the early twentieth century, the British writer Norman Angell electrified the imaginations and hopes of people who called themselves "internationalists." A siv.all man scarcely five feet tall who had officially dropped his given last name "L.ne" to become known by his penultimate name "Angell," Norman had moved to America at the age of seventeen and headed west. In his six years in America, he worked briefly as a tutor on a southern plantation, a cowboy, a homesteader near the "fearful, weary, merciless desert" around Bakersfield, California, and a journal-is:." From 1905 he began serving as the Paris editor for the Daily Mail and, after returning to England in 1911, he took up politics. Angell's short book The Great Illusion (1910) made him famous. Angell was a complicated man—sickly, moody, sky—but his ideas resonated internationally, and he proved to be a compelling speaker. The Great Illusion was translated into twenty-five languages, sold over two million copies, and briefly spurred a movement called "Norman Angellism." The thesis of The Great Illusion (from which the famous antiwar film The Grand Illusion would later derive its mocking title) held that military clashes h.id become obsolete because the integration of finance and commerce in European countries made war counterproductive. Conquest, he argued, added nothing to the wealth of a nation or its citizens. Reworking the popular Darwinian beliefs of his day, Angell wrote that war "involves the survival of the less fit.... Warlike nations do not inherit the earth" but "represent the decaying human element" of "primitive instincts and old prejudices." In many nations of the world "Norman Angellism" had its converts. In the United States in 1913 no less a figure that the president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan, proclaimed that war was "impossible." "The bankers will not find the money for such a fight, the industries will not maintain it, the statesmen cannot."11 Angellism was only one manifestation of a widespread conviction that the revolution in communications, travel, and trade would shrink the world and create greater harmony. In China, the reformist ideas of Sun Yat-sen, Kang Youwei, •[ 82.1 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG and Liang Qichao, for example, had taken shape from these men's late n incu-cr h century travels around the world. Kang cited the telegraph, the ['mVp^] p, \ Union (UPU), and international law as evidence of a trajectory frort: \vh ic isl lt might one day organize themselves into a world parliament, Lian^, wh0 |,L.tW(.e 1902 and 1907 published an influential biweekly journal called the A"( ■ Cm >f, expressed the hope that emerging international news services might prompt» cosmopolitanism that would eliminate national and factional hosti'i The world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries di.l indeed sc the development of newly established "international institutions," criincd by some scholars today as "persistent and connected sets of rules, often attiluicd with organizations, that operate across international boundaries. Imiiui[:üns range from conventions to regimes to formal organizations."13 A seeming paradox lay at the heart of these newly institutionalized .111 ^national networks. The rhetoric of internationalism often suggested tlu. its advocates transcended "narrow" nationalism and embraced a progrcss:ve uiiiwis,d-isrn that would, incrementally, come to replace national states.: People who considered themselves internationalists frequently lashed out against u ihey regarded as excessive or militant nationalism. Yet, as the very word inis\;t,uvind suggests, the "national" constituted the building block of the " international" realm, and most internationalists pursued projects that created cooperative tb-rums and regulatory regimes among bounded states—states that were consolidated along a European model. The boundary-strengthening moves of states and of empires rhi:s e iicigcd not as preconditions for or in opposition to internationalism but ofte:- is ics necessary accompaniments. Indeed, most of the international regulatory peacekeeping regimes that took shape in the nineteenth and twentieth ccnturus attracted support precisely because so many people believed they might sei vc, 01 even universalize, the interests of their national states. A close look at the emergence of international networks dissolves anj («i>i«-ble paradox involved in linking the emergence of "internationi-.!ism:: crgcthct with the attempts to harden the delineation of national and imperial boiu.it. In this period the most successful international institutions sprang primary from a Euro-American impulse that sought to refashion the world into ar. assemblage of "advanced" states that could project and protect their imperial rcaln.s whiie •[ 8x4 ]• TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD ■ „ cooperative institutions to spread a universalistic Western ethos. Interna-[joIlil[ism most often came dressed as a Western project, but as we will see, its visions also contained many variations that inspired movements in diverse directions, including nationalisms linked to anticolonialism. Tiiis section positions World War I as a major watershed for internationalism. In tne ^ate nineteenth century, the promise and problems of accelerating technological change drew delegates from states together to regularize practices, particularly related to global communication and transportation. The shrinking globe also spurred ideas that international law might broaden its scope from addressing specific practices (such as navigation) to shaping larger regimes of arbitration and peacekeeping. Before the Great War, a wide variety of associations blossomed under the sunny optimism that international political institutions might keep pace with the globalization occurring in the economic and technological realms. International networks were generally elite affairs, and many Euro-American leaders assumed that nationalistic warfare had become a relic of a less enlightened past and that imperialism and internationalism would eventually uplift the globe into an era of shared "civilization" and progress. World War I dealt a blow to such dreams. Specific internationalist projects continued, and many of the international regulatory regimes developed over the period remained as vital mechanisms that promoted the connectivities of the age. The war's destruction, however, shattered prewar optimism, and interwar ' internationalism seemed propelled more by fear than by hope. Could international rivalries and militarism be contained? As a greater diversity of people and ideas entered the international arena, disagreements widened rather than narrowed, and the label internationalism became fraught with ever more contradiction and multiplicity of meaning. As first one and then another world war wreaked its incomprehensible devastations, fewer and fewer people could assume that movement toward a common definition of "civilization" provided the inevitable telos of history. Ordering Space and Time In the second half of the nineteenth century, the telegraph became the most visible symbol of a shrinking and interlocking world. Facilitating communication •[ 815 ]• EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD across distances through telegraphy, a task driven by strategy an- k interests, became one of the earliest arenas for the creation and coo-dm -tion international norms and practices. Underwater telegraph cable:, suifs(.fu|| spanned the English Channel in 1851 and only fifteen years later, arunngh era versed the Atlantic Ocean. Connecting first Europe and North Anvi.ca, ic|c >n phy spread into the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America during :he i^o, gf| ain's extension of telegraph lines from London to India in 1870, to :.o'_rhcLn /Uric in the 1880s, and between Australia and Canada in the early 1900s llusiratcs th importance of telegraphy to imperial systems. World War I proved 1 ie z-h g, Ap\^ significance for national war strategies, including intelligence gathrriiiu.'1 The International Telegraph Union, founded in Paris in iS^ and suby. quently retitled the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), joughc to standardize and regulate international telecommunications. Inccrn.1r.0nal telegraph lines had adapted a version of Morse code, a system of short and lone clicks that Samuel B. Morse pioneered in the United States in the 1840s fo. his Western Union company. The ITU made this practice its global -ta-.idatd. "[Vie new organization also, in rime, came to allocate radio spectrum and Jcv-se t-ia-cedures for international telephone calls. Europe developed in iiiLcination.il telephone system in the 19x0s, but reliable transoceanic telephone ar.p a functioning global network did not emerge until well after World War II. H I 1 p. states owned telegraph and telephone services, and the United States, where ownership by private business generally prevailed, remained reluctant to |oin die ITU as a formal partner until after World War II. Still, the United St.3:cs nonetheless sent observers and participated in various standard-sci 1 iug urn \c:-ences. Both states and enterprises embraced these emerging international norms that, by helping curb monopolistic or overly nationalistic practices, facil.tated commercial and social connections across the entire system. T.ie srcL'mincnr historical account of the ITU claims that, as the first genuine international organization, the ITU became the model for subsequent international bo li ■■ .1 eluding the League of Nations.15 The ways in which telegraphy n.iAcd n.-.tion.".l and imperial aspirations with international regulation are illustrative oi cnieig-ing international regimes. Closely related in structure and function to the ITU, the Uniwrial Postal Union (UPU), founded initially as the General Postal Union in 1S-4, icgulai- Wmsmm I ] nicrnicional network of major telegraph and cable lines, 1914 ized the carrying and delivery of international mail. Nationalized, government-run postal services had emerged along with the nation-building efforts of modern states. The United States, for example, had consolidated its services into a single postal district and had, in 1863, introduced free home delivery of mail in its largest cities. Hoping to expand the possibility of correspondence worldwide, US officials then called for an international postal congress. Similarly in England, Rowland Hill's midcentury reforms had introduced inexpensive, prepaid, and uniform rates. Building on such beginnings, Heinrich von Stephan, the German postal minister who had standardized postal exchange in Bismarck's Germany, led an effort to form an ongoing international organization. In 1874, European nations, the United States, Russia, Turkey, and Egypt entered an agreement to cooperate in creating a shared postal space, and within two years Japan, Brazil, Persia, and many European colonies joined. The Union soon included ev-crycountry in the world. The Union sponsored ingenious efficiencies. Before the UPU, each country had to negotiate a separate treaty with every other; after the UPU's establishment, one treaty would link a country to the Union. Then all correspondents in the participating nations could post to each other by paying a flat, relatively inexpensive 8z6 •r 8*71- EMILY S. ROSENBERG rate that did not depend on distance or on diplomatic status. Stamps n[ nKmbt nations were accepted for the whole international route, making ad J mom" stamps from countries along the route of transit unnecessary. Each counrrv r ■ tained the monies it collected for international postage. As with ■'the Y\ \j t]. UPU compellingly illustrated how national objectives dovetailed \uth tin. ation of international rule-setting and enforcement mechanisms:16 The rapid spread of a coherent global postal system under the Ul'U spuired the growth of literacy and of letter writing. It helped generate a 'J dilution in written communication and print media. Postal reform coincided. . ..... with the rise of postcards, which Austria introduced in 1869 and (jeim.uiv embraced during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 to facilitate njihi.11 \ 01m-munications. The Americans introduced a "penny postcard" in th<- i3 v,, hij> ing democratize letter writing by encouraging inexpensive, brieta .md more casual communication.17 Soon advertisers discovered that efficient .X sul sci-vices and postcards could create bonds with customers. Mass letter writ1.:;; :00k on a new commercial function. Book and magazine publishing also acinic global industries that continued targeting their elite purchasers but also dtvcl-oped new products to appeal to new middle- and working-class buyers. 3y 191.) the major industrial nations in Europe, the United States, and Japan all had mandated schooling for children up to age fourteen, and all had reached :o jghlv 90 percent literacy fifteen years after that. International regulatory ■reginii-s often benefited the largest companies within the countries with greatest litcinrj rates because those firms could most easily profit from a globalizing market. The burgeoning industry of publishing, benefiting from streamlined postal I systems and a rising literacy rate, also turned to international rule setting to -sale-1 guard authors' rights and bolster markets. The Berne Convention of 1886 jcgan 1 to unify procedures related to literary property, and a Publishers' International 1 Congress, formed at the end of the century, tried to secure the interest1: of the I huge international publishing houses in Germany, France, Britain, and America. It would be hard to overstate the importance of the revolution in print media in this era. Fueled by growing literacy, revolutions in technologies of production, and regulatory agreements, it linked people and spread ideas even as 11 eiitimched inequalities between those who were part of the world of print and thm' who were not. TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD As international rules for electronic and written communications became standardized and more businesses and individuals broadened their contacts, the ((,gU]arization of time seemed urgent. Cycles of sun and moon had governed the breindustrial world, but a predictability that transcended distance was critical to n interconnected and industrial world. In the mid-nineteenth century, as Britain irid then Germany moved toward regularized time zones within their national spaces, the rules about time in the United States and most other countries remained chaotic and governed by local authorities. In 1870 Philadelphia's noon came twenty minutes after Pittsburgh's. An American train traveler from Washington to San Francisco would have to reset his or her timepiece over two hundred times in order to be current with each locality through which the train passed. Ships could not clearly communicate their positions at sea because of multiple national meridian systems; Greenwich, Paris, Berlin, Bern, Uppsala, St. Petersburg, Rome, and others each promoted its particular status as an anchor for a different prime meridian. The new speed of railroads, shipping, and telegraphs necessitated the coordination of global space and time. Without a standard time, how could business .■pDointments be kept; how could travelers meet; how could trains and ships stay i.ile? With their special need for rationalized scheduling, railroads often led the way. In the United States in 1883 railroads standardized their time zones to accord to Britain's Greenwich-based system, and most towns embraced this reform tli.it some opponents derisively called "Vanderbilt time." Ihe International Meridian Conference, held a year later in Washington, DC, brought together twenty-five nations, which represented most countries in liic Americas and in Europe in addition to Turkey, Japan, and Hawai'i. Al-thut.gh France had been committed to its Paris prime meridian (and did not accept the new system until 1911), Britain prevailed in the diplomatic wrangling. The conference accepted the Observatory of Greenwich as the initial meridian for longitude. Establishing longitudes west and east from Greenwich unc:Lchey met at an "international date line" in the Pacific Ocean, the conference s technicians of time also urged the universal adoption of a standardized :wtnty-four-hour day. Although most of rural China, India, and elsewhere i-i>p.t inued to use sundials and to observe a plethora of local times, over the next M-Vtial decades most nations gradually adopted a system of twenty-four time •[ 828 ]• •[ 829 ]• EMILY S. ROSENBERG zones—a system that the Meridian Conference of 1884 had discussed Im- ,l0 mandated. As much of the world was standardizing time, new inventions and'pr,n.ri-e readjusted how time might be valued, understood, and experienced. The id.. phone collapsed distance into simultaneity. Stop-action photography fitIlmc in a moment. The electric light pushed back the hours of darkness. Rjiln.id sleeping cars (pioneered by Pullman in the United States and Wagon' I,it, i(1 Europe) sped passengers with great comfort across much longer ':'diii.i,i(.ei including the fabled Orient Express route that opened from Paris to Istanbul n 1889. Automobiles spurred construction of more and better roads. The di\rric clock, invented in 1916, introduced a fluid motion to the second hand, .Motion pictures played with time by slowing, accelerating, and punctuating it; Aic;«.tic and literary modernism broke with established traditions to toy with new scnn-bilities of time and space; Salvador Dalis The Persistence ofMemory'11911, fa. mously bent and distorted watches that symbolized time's passage: I iedun.k Taylor chopped up time and motion to accelerate the work processes of induitml labor, while typewriters sped up the pace of office work. The intcmatiou .1 >ur-works that synchronized the world and its people thus altered economics liIl 11 ii, and emotional realms, stimulating new visions of globalky that sparket' both hope for universalist understandings and dread of machinelike conformity' The rationalization of time gave encouragement to other standards 1:1011 movements. Efforts emerged to coordinate railroad track gauges and sc. Ils The Treaty of the Meter, signed by many industrial countries in 1875, created ar International Bureau of Weights and Measures to monitor the spreading intu.i system. (Britain and the United States remained outside of the metric zone ) I he International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), formed in 1906 as one ol che I earliest nongovernmental standardizing bodies, codified electrical sr.* idards I and symbols. Its 1938 International Electrotechnical Vocabulary container o\a I two thousand terms in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, ai iu t spe-1 ranto. Engineers, the new professionals who seemed to be the heroes 01 :h~ era, led many of these movements toward the coordination of national, region d, .uid international systems. Supporting such efforts, the International Stati.ti..i. Institute (ISI), founded at The Hague in 1885 as a semigovernmen— or^ani/.iiion, linked the statistical offices of various governments. The statistic* g.ithcrn|l of « TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD -he League of Nations assumed some of the ISIs tasks in the inrerwar era, when he trade among ninety countries began to be monitored in statistical terms, v mistical calculations emerged to track international comparisons in balance of ■nients, unemployment, price levels, and national income. Tlie expanding matrix of statistics, especially after World War I, elaborated a nev branch of knowledge in which the very conception of an "economy" was iijt.orial in its orientation but transnational in its scope. The Weimar Republic mJ the Third Reich led the way in using economic statistics as a way of engineering national power. Yet the emergence of economic analysis became itself a transnational endeavor, as professionalizing "economists" borrowed and adapted ways of examining the "economy" as a sphere separated from "politics" and "society."20 International standardization, dominated by European governments and •.he United States, cascaded from one arena of life into others.21 Enthusiasm for the principles of uniformity and efficiency, of course, mingled with foreboding ťind with nostalgia for local practices. International networks emerged in tandem with localized, sometimes anti-imperial, resistance to their spread, and they also took shape within competing claims on universality among clashing national standards. Still, the importance of the standardization movements of the era can hardly be overstated. They provided the infrastructure for the spread of all kinds of transnational currents in a shrinking world. International Networks for Sports in a movement parallel to the ordering of communication and time, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) sought to facilitate and standardize competition in sports. French nobleman Baron Pierre de Coubertin, an early champion pfthe Olympic Games, convened the initial IOC in 1894, and Athens hosted the first modern games in 1896, attracting three hundred athletes from thirteen countries. The next two games became appendages of world fairs, one held in Paris in 1900 and one in St. Louis in 1904. Coubertin and the IOC then tried to establish a regularized tradition by holding games in Athens in 1906 and in London in 1908. Coubertin promoted the Olympic Games as a way of fostering an interna-"iľľi .1 community around sporting events. The games, he argued, would bolster •[ 830 ]• Ii VILV 6. ROiEKUFRG A postcard depicting the Panathinaiko Stadium in Athens, site of the first modern Olympic ( „ , s in 1896. As international mail improved, picture postcards became a popular way of cbri\mmii,:.u-ing without having to write long, descriptive letters, (© Rykoff Collection / Co rbis) ■ ■■ ■ manliness, transcend national differences, and foster respect for others. With the theme of "peaceful internationalism," he aimed to inspire young men to build strength of body and character. Such idealistic notions of transcending the state through state-sponsored competitions were consistent with rhc pre World War I internationalist spirit, but critics emerged even from the beginning. Some charged that the games were insignificant, while others suggested chat cninp.n-tions might stir, rather than dampen, nationalism. Indeed, the games in Stockholm in 1911 foreshadowed the tensions that were mounting toward war. Moreover, sporting events tended to be the province of elite and male parcjcipjnc. linked as they were to presumed qualities of leadership. Controversy grew nwithe issue of female participation. The push to bring women into the Olympics accelerated in view of the growing popularity of the Women's World G.111...v, held in 1911 and every four subsequent years until the late 1930s.22 The popularity of international sporting competitions in the early twentieth century sparked the creation of a body to oversee the worldwide game offi--irii.il! TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD {soccer). The Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), founded in Paris in 1904, held an unsuccessful international competition in 1906 but established recognition for itself after a competition held in conjunction with the I ondon Olympics of 1908. FIFA's membership expanded beyond Europe before \v/orlcl War I, as South Africa, Argentine, Chile, Canada, and the United States made application. The world wars illustrated how both nationalism and internationalism became woven into the fabric of sporting events. The disruption in travel, the military enlistment of athletes, and the national hatreds generated by World War I hurt international sport. The Olympic movement and FIFA both foundered. The Olympic Games scheduled for Berlin in 1916 were not held, and the immediate postwar Olympic and FIFA matches attracted fewer nations and even less public interest than their prewar counterparts. The mid-i9ios and early 1930s, however, brought some recovery. FIFA introduced the World Cup competitions in 1930, and the IOC successfully staged Olympic Games in Paris in 1914, in Amsterdam in 1918 (where female athletes finally participated in five track-and-field events), and in Los Angeles in 1932 (made famous by the amazing all-around athlete Mildred "Babe" Didrikson).23 At the infamous Berlin Olympics of 1936, however, Adolf Hitler tried to showcase the Aryan race and German power. His ethno-nationalistic displays, very visibly challenged when the African-American Jesse Owens won four gold medals, tarnished the rhetoric of internationalism that surrounded the games.24 The global military struggles of the World War II erapostponed any revival of a supposedly harmonious "Olympic spirit." Although many scholars of the Olympics present international and national impulses as being contradictory, they clearly were also complementary. One had first to be national in order to compete in international games. Sports projected the hegemonies found in other internationalist arrangements. Both the Olympics and football (soccer) claimed to symbolize a global community united in sport, but the organizing bodies reflected not only national loyalties but also imperial and gender allegiances. Universalized values and rules, in sports as in other domains, emanated from the powerful states and citizens who could view international rules and gatherings as being consistent with their own views. As football spread to European colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia, and as baseball spread to zones of American influence, each •[ 833 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD colonial power portrayed the expansion of its favorite sport as the elixir t'i t , moted civilization and manliness. Officials, missionaries, and education,.] n,|tl tives in both informal and formal colonies became associated with the ■ pt»ad f national sporting preferences. Gender and racial distinctions were 'lorh rci forced and challenged within the expansion of international sports. Legal Internationalism and Arbitration The proliferation of international institutional structures dating frbrri tin, 'K. nineteenth century seemed to confirm the possibility that nations could develop supranational regulatory regimes. It was only a short leap from devi^ug spCCif|c functional collaborations such as the ITU and the IPU to imagining thai states themselves might form leagues or federations for even more ambitious .imposes especially legal arbitration or multilateral peacekeeping. Some theorists proclaimed that the global networks of trade and corvmini-cations would make sovereign states obsolete. In the 1860s, lawye is fiom ioui European countries began to assert a "scientific" view of law, suggest lg chat universal legal principles should gradually be codified and spreads5 Unnei ,icic established chairs in international law, and professional gatherings of lawven discussed how to standardize legal systems. Creating law for the world was bound up in the sense of civilizing m. ssion, so strong in the West, and fit with the evolutionary, progressive view ul"his 01 \ that was becoming hegemonic. The idea of an emerging legal order both spiead a sense of one-world universalism and also became a way of dividing "cr\ ili/vd"' nations from the "backward" areas that seemed in need of transformation \V ;thin this discourse of transformative universalism, the turn of the century ^ tntsstd many attempts to develop a body of international law and to create venues for its enforcement and for the arbitration of disputes." Most scholars agree that the emergence of the concept of internatioml law generally developed from the law of the sea. Hugo Grotius's interest: in dew loping international law, for example, had stemmed from his reflections on i"-<..dum of the seas. As the largest arena of space between and among national states, the seas raised complicated issues of jurisdiction, and the 1913 International Convention on Safety of Life at Sea (formulated in the wake of the TitMiic disaster) i provided an important step toward a multilateral process of lawmaking and law enforcement. This and other international legal agreements, which attempted to ensure free flow of maritime transport and to protect innocent passage through territorial waters, aimed to convert the world's waterways from arenas of conflict to safe commercial highways. Many late nineteenth-century European politicians and jurists pursued the dream that international arbitration could replace war as a means of settling disputes. An active group of legal internationalists, operating through several influential associations, had been building a context for legal arbitration over the course of the late nineteenth century. The so-called Alabama Treaty of 1873 between Britain and the United States, for example, dealt with claims arising from the British-made Confederate cruiser that had sunk seventy Union ships during the American Civil War. Setting a precedent for the competence of arbitral tribunals, the treaty defined the rights and duties of neutrals and provided momentum behind the inclusion of arbitration clauses in other multilateral treaties, such as the Congo Act of 1885 and the Anti-Slavery Act of 1890.27 In 1889 the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), formed by peace activists William Randal Cremer and Frederic Passy, joined together countries with parliaments (twenty-four by 1913) to advance methods of international arbitration. The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 represented the high point of prewar internationalist attempts to substitute law and arbitration for war and force. International politicians, intellectuals, and jurists had picked up on an idea promoted by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia to hold a major international conference to standardize precepts of international law and procedures for arbitration. The idea of convening such conferences at The Hague electrified many of those who were advocating diverse forms of peace activism and international lawmaking. Henri Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross, played a significant role in persuading world powers to accept the tsars proposal. Austrian baroness Bertha von Suttner, a prolific journalist and author of a widely translated 1889 bestseller Die WaffenNieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!), helped galvanize the burgeoning international peace movement behind the idea. She had earlier helped convince Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, to dedicate money in his will to establishing a prize for a person who would work "most effectively for the :fraternization of mankind, the diminution of armies, and the promotion of EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD Peace Congresses."28 The eccentric British journalist William -Thorn i- Stca founded a new weekly in London called War against War to further his Inn-i tional Peace Crusade and to promote the gathering at The Hague 1 he Univtrsa| Peace Congress, composed of a growing number of men and women .umivis who met yearly to advance the cause of arms limitation, also backed ihc ,Jcl The conferences at The Hague did not simply endorse lofty goals .-.bo- it pcit-they attempted to devise practical measures to build a structure ofinrerniriorr1 law. The internationalism represented at The Hague, although limited :n s/-0.x. transcended Europe and the United States to include China, Jaor.-i, Sian Tu -key, Persia, and Mexico (in the 1907 conference, seventeen other dclei'.itims from the American continent also joined the New World conting;n:l D;Wu-« pursued three specific aims: to promote the peaceful settlement r-l" dispute-, tfj restrict the "excessive" cruelty of warfare (for example, restrictions on "dumdum" bullets and projectiles that would harm civilians), and to limit arm-, rates and the burdens they placed on national treasuries. The idea of arbitration as a way not of ending but of preventi no, con H:ct may have been the most important concept to come out of meetings at The Hague, although specific problems of jurisdiction remained. Participating narium si»ncd a convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes-, 'ihey created the Permanent Court of Arbitration, or World Court, which operated beftre ths outbreak of World War I and was reconstituted after the war as the In:crna:ional Court of Justice (1912.-1945), associated with the League of Nations. Agreements also codified laws of war, including rules for the opening of hostilities, the rights, of neutral nations and persons, the status of merchant ships, and r>e conduct of naval and land warfare.29 Set against the stirring speeches, the expectations set by the participating luminaries, and the lavish ceremonies, banquets, and press coverage, :hc outcomes of The Hague conferences have often been trivialized. The conferences were, after all, followed closely by outbreak of the Great War. But they did clearly : ip into important characteristics of the age—the interest in establishing international standards and the vision that legal regimes could gradually.transcend r.a-tional borders and come to govern the behavior of states just as they gmtrned individuals within successful states. The conferences comprised expression-, K'th of the fear that national competition might lead to devastating warfare and of ■[ 836 ]• he hope that global communications and other networks might facilitate a new . llcrnational order with mechanisms to keep the peace. Before the outbreak of the Great War, coinciding with the optimism that helped promote The Hague conferences, the idea that major wars had become obsolete circulated among "internationalists" around the world. New England inti-iniperialist Raymond Landon Bridgman, for example, published "The First Hook of World Law" in 1911. Bridgman proclaimed that "for more than a genera- - Hon true world law has been growing," and he provided a compendium of agreements relating to everything from communications to sanitation to world government. He wrote that "within a comparatively short time the organization of /-all mankind into a political unit has advanced rapidly" and that an unwritten World Constitution of widely accepted tenets already formed the basis for an emerging World Organization.31 In many parts of the world, as has been noted, people read Norman Angell's The Great Illusion and hailed him as a prophet. The "guns of August" that touched off World War I, of course, proved that nationalism easily trumped the internationalists' dreams of convergence and peace. Efforts to build international institutions, however, persisted through the war and after. A League of Nations The staggering casualties that the Great War inflicted on a generation of European men (almost ten million soldiers dead; perhaps twice that many wounded) seemed to confirm the folly of military contests. Although it seems clear, in retrospect, that the devastations of the Great War fostered the growth of communist and fascist authoritarianism and planted the seeds of World War II, the war initially appeared to strengthen the hands of those who advocated new international mechanisms for the peaceful settlement of disputes. The idea of a League ofNations embodied the early twentieth-century internationalist faith that liberal capitalist democracies, benign imperial administrations, and international bodies might all promote a system that would civilize the rest of the world and spread universalized norms.32 US president Woodrow Wilson became the most prominent voice for building ii postwar peace through a kind of world federalism based upon international legal •[ 837 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG standards. His vision that collective security arrangements and "self-detciinin tcu w > of peoples would curb aggressive nationalism and ethnic grievances bxjint „1,^ ally influential. Wilsonian faiths, however, were fraught with contradiction Wjl son's country would never join the League of Nations, though that body \ lcjiLVt associated with his name, and his conception of self-determination turned uut t be excruciatingly limited. As president, Wilson had developed his ideas about internationali-m .is h-steered his foreign policy through a series of crises with Mexico and fonrr.jnttd the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914. Only leagues of cooperating, dei lunatic nations, he came to believe, could discipline the rapacious forces le: loose by involutions and wars. For the Western Hemisphere, he had proposed a Pan American Pact that would organize collective action among nations to solve wiorgdouip within the hemisphere (wrongdoing to which Wilson, of course, a»urr.jd the United States would never be party, although many Latin Americans lelt orhei-wise). The pact itself went nowhere, but after the European war hegnn i- ij>i+i Wilson drew closer to advisers who were generally influenced by Angell, Jurdan, and others who advocated international arrangements, arms reduction, and a repudiation of nationalism as the path to peace. Once in the war, Wilson proposed his Fourteen Points (1918), a plan for a postwar reconstruction of the interraional system along lines that he believed would eliminate the root causes of war." Around the world, reformers and internationalists of various stripe., saw in Wilson, and perhaps in the United States, a reason to believe that a new order actually could come from the sorrows of war. Two of the president's Points would have especially profound influence. One was "self-determination," a vague concept that Wilson advanced as an antidote to the instabilities raised by ethnic tensions in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire but one that colonial subjects around the world quickly embraced as a rallying cry for their own national aspirations. The second was "collective security," a concept to be embodied in a League of Nations. Conceiving of the new world-to-be in terms ol i -.i:ivldr.iii, self-determining states that would come together in a protofederacion, Vlr;lso:i s vision embodied the aspirations that had buoyed so many of the internationalist currents before the war. In some ways Wilson was an unlikely midwife to the vision :hat! ■ styled as a "new diplomacy" based upon open covenants, "peace witho.it vic- TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD NOT ROOM FOR BOTH :! The Covenant of the League of Nations struggling to unseat the Constitution of t; the United States. This political cartoon, published in the San Francisco Cbroni-■ de, supported President Woodrow Wilson's Republican opponents, who charged :: that the League of Nations would curtail the nation's sovereign powers. The US Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles because the tteaty established the t League. (© Bettmann/Corbis) tory,:'.self-determination, and collective security among democratic nations. An ilpof intellectual who had been president of Princeton University, Wilson had dispatched troops into Mexico, installed US military rule in Haiti, tight-eni-d .US military control in the Dominican Republic, and implanted a US administration into Nicaragua. America's first southern president since before the (...v;! War, he had brought racial segregation to his nation's capital and had appointed many southern Democratic segregationists as top diplomats around the world. •[ 859 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD Yet Wilson also had deep ties to international circles that advocated tor 1 bor rights, feminism, anti-imperialism, and even socialism. His bluepinit for conflict-free world of self-determining democracies and laws resonated within the agendas of many reformers throughout the world, including ahtKolonnl leaders in China, India, Egypt, Korea, and elsewhere. Many internationalises ,\r home and abroad, even if they decried Wilson s various compromises and rigidities, had been inspired by his belief in the concept of a league ■ )( self-determining states. Although Wilson met opposition at the 1919 Peace Conference at Versailles and then from his own Senate, which ultimately icrused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles because of the article creating the League, his League of Nations exemplified many of the hopes—and contradictions -,jf tlic era's internationalists.34 By 1918, as old autocratic empires (Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Gei 11-.in. and Ottoman) fell apart and a dozen new republics were proclaimed, liberal irttrm-tionalists such as President Wilson hoped that postwar cooperation among emerging democratic states might vindicate the horrible coses of war W-lvir'r idea that war could be an instrument for bringing stability and intci n icionalf understanding, however, was always delusion. From 1914 into the eai\ 1910s, much of the world witnessed epic-scale devastation: deaths from the ■world war, casualties associated with the Russian, Mexican, and Chinese revolutions, ravages from influenza and other epidemic diseases, and displacements of populations associated with wartime's rising nationalism. In Europe, the self-^i vied s'eat of civilization, perhaps over fifteen million people perished from these lu-iii-piiilU causes, and this death toll affected societies and cultures in profound w.ns, becoming both a symbol of instability and a further cause of it. New dictatorships, nourished by demographic dislocations and nc\* zoologies, quickly challenged any idea of an emerging liberal republican no im. The | Bolshevik revolutionary regime, which came to power in Russia in 19] , pio-vided inspiration and support for a transnational communist movemci 1 advo-d eating more power for working classes. It also promoted a doctrin; "f sc!f-J| determination that, unlike Wilson's, was merged directly with anti-imperialisn thereby appealing globally to nationalists seeking independence fron 1 1 powers. Liberal republicans in many countries, faced with postwar economic instability and threats to their power from communist movements, often moved ■[ 840 ]• ' t[ghtward. Partly in response to the growing strength of communist parties and rhe weaknesses of liberal parliaments, various forms of nationalist dictatorships 'and fascist regimes came to Italy, Spain, and Portugal in the 1920s and to Germany and Japan in the 19 jos. Corporative states with varied degrees of authoritarianism also emerged in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere. The League s structure of internationalism could hardly contain such political and economic polarization—much less the virulent nationalisms within which the many consolidating dictatorships thrived. The structures of the League were ill-suited to cope with what Eric Hobsbawm called the "age of extremes" and the clashing imperial aspirations that ultranationalism nourished. ""' Still, the League was a significant conduit for transnational connections in the interwar period. Headquartered in Geneva, it had thirty-two original member states, and thirteen additional states were invited to join. With a structure vaguely reminiscent of the IPU and inspired by plans from The Hague Peace Conferences, the League was the first international organization devoted to a broad agenda that included arbitration of disputes, the prevention of war, and die inrernational coordination of social and economic programs. It drew together the transnational connections that had been emerging among groups of professionals since the nineteenth century and brought them under a single international umbrella. The secretariat of the League in the early 1930s employed over seven hundred staff members from all over the world, although those from Europe were by far in the majority. The dense network of people working in League-sponsored economic, social, and cultural organizations in the interwar era probably constituted the Leagues most lasting impact. One scholar writes that the representations of the League at the time of its creation "conjured images of a globe crisscrossed by streams of electrical energy."35 Internationalist legal thinkers saw the League as the kernel that might grow into a global legal system. The Permanent Court of International Justice heard disputes between states in 1911-1940, and various League institutions worked on codifying international law, especially in the areas of communications, transportation, and arms control. The League also promoted restricting opium traffic (resulting in the Geneva Convention of 1931), protecting women from trafficking and children from exploitation, opposing the continuation of slavery, facilitating intellectual and cultural exchange, and resettling refugees, •[ 841 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG The League's Economic and Financial Organization (EFO) cv.ended *lv practice of standardization by collecting economic statistics on national i c\>nr mies and on the international economy as a whole. It widened its purview beyond data collection when leading nations and bankers urged active intervention to help stabilize postwar economies in crisis. Drawingupon the expmise of leading economists in Europe, the EFO began to advocate particular policies related to tariffs, trade, monetary systems, production, and poverty. It hosten Ehe World Economic Conferences in 192.7 and 1933. Although the EFO ,-lc.ulv i'.iiicd to prevent the world from slipping into depression during the 1930s its statistical? yearbooks and networks of economists provided a basis for the cret tnn if international economic agencies after World War II. The League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO), formed °n iyij -n response to postwar epidemics, also coordinated national policies to promote international norms. With one-third of its scientific work subsicued by the Rockefeller Foundation, the LNHO linked together public health exp , , mi nations and regions throughout the world to collect data and to standardizc-statistical and epidemiological practices, such as cataloging blood tyf^s. It encouraged the establishment of public health programs globally and reported regularly on health conditions throughout the world. League-promoo'd sanitation programs helped lower death rates.36 The International Labour Organization (ILO), established in the 1 :e icy of' Versailles partly in an effort to forestall the appeal of communism in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, became one of the League's most activist bodies. 'Ihc ILO built on a long but fairly ineffective tradition of international confeicncci convened by labor activists. In the 1870s leading labor reformers had begu.i t'-hold international gatherings, and an International Association for Lai ur Leg- :• islation (IALL) met in Paris in 1900 to informally coordinate national 1 jL-. and! expose countries with labor abuses. The resolutions of such internation il fo-1 rums, however, had little impact on national legislation. The ILO, hav mg r.iorcS formalized institutional backing, accelerated efforts to advance rights 1 ■■ :•' ers and labor unions. Its first annual conference in October 1919 adopted six conventions dealing with workplace safety, work hours, and .prorecron for women and children who worked in industry. Gradually, many Lemmies ratified the ILO s conventions, although the deepening depression of the I9J> of convergence and to amplify the voices of those who felt disenfranch In-marginalized within emerging international bodies. International conventions and rule-making institutions thus fo.ged im jutcinr global networks, but these often favored people already endowed with eroiKicnu. and political power. The contradictions of "internationalism" became mamk.L in the bloodletting of World War I, the rise of communist and fascist authoritarianism, the brutalities of and resistances against colonialism, and the horrific destructions of World War II. CĽ,ir»:>.h.id l||§g|||g mm mm I ill l 1 j. Social Networking and Entangled Attachments SOCIAL networking among people who might be distant from each other in geography, culture, class, age, or other attributes often seems a phenomenon of the computer age, but it clearly long predates the Internet revolution. In the age of electricity, the growth of communications—mass publishing, faster and less (.\pensive travel, telegraphy, telephone, and radio—created currents that allowed r|e t0 interact globally as never before. As has been seen, one vision of world liumony imagined a convergence of national states within rule-setting regimes ueh as the Hague Conventions and the League of Nations. A wider variety of \on-state transnational alliances and affiliations, however, also coalesced to both bolster and challenge this form of internationalism.43 Social networks assuming non-state forms organized themselves around :kss, religion, gender, race, function, ideas, and perceived moral frameworks. Ihey offered attachments that were transnational; that is, they pulsed above, below, and through the more formalized structures of national states, empires, and nternational institutions. Although today's concept of a "networked society" sometimes connotes a horizontal, nonhierarchical structure, my usage invokes die idea of social networks in a more flexible sense: they took hierarchical or horizontal shapes; they assumed forms with clear management structures or as loose issociations of entangled attachments. Social networking came in all kinds of natcerns. The relationships between transnational attachments and the allegiances formed around national or imperial loyalties are complex. Participants in transnational networks often proclaimed that they stood for universalistic goals articulated against the presumed particularism of national states and empires. Yet is this section elaborares, aspirations for universal betterment could also draw on an often unstated sense of ethno-national and imperial superiority. In both tk- international networks discussed in the preceding section, and the transnational: attachments discussed in this and following sections, the universal and •[ 848 ]• •[ 849 ]• EMILY S. ROSENBERG the particular most commonly intertwined, and each drew strength fr# i tensions and coproductivity. The historical periodization of globalization, put forth by A. Ci Ho )k and others, sees it quickening in the late nineteenth century and slowin' A 'rain the 19ZOS into the post-World War II period before resuming its'rpul pi-Such a trajectory well describes economic interconnections. When ■ uninjn the complex matrix of transnational social networks, however, it may be diffiail to discern such a metanarrative of accelerations and decelerations, Rather on might posit irregular patterns where some entangled attachments v, Wnj| others wane, some social networks become denser while others atrbpl' This section tries to capture the irregularity and diversity of currents r.rher than to characterize their overall flow. It seeks to develop notions of connection and entanglement—and of blockage and disruption. The networks and attachments that are traced below constituted no single field of transnational vuiun. some ran parallel, some intertwined together, some pulsed in diffeu.it detections, some seem simply incommensurable. In the terrain of the transnational ^fc^i I historical trajectory is not a singular but a plural thing. Language and Photography WBm The most fundamental building block of communication—language—hi came one medium that attracted transnational reformers. Ludwik Lazar Zamenhof, convinced that language divisions reinforced nationalist ideologies lIi.k led :o-global conflicts, attempted to create a new international languat-c called Esperanto. Growing up as part of a Yiddish-speaking Jewish majo-ir> In ,-. Polish town (part of the Russian Empire) in which other groups spoke Polish. Russian, and German, he was inspired to devise and publish in 1887 the fi :\st book i.f Esperanto grammar. The idea caught on, especially with middle-class people engaged in cross-border commerce and tourism. The language spread over ilir new fevr decades, at first primarily in Russia and Eastern Europe and then into ViVstern Europe, the Americas, China, and Japan. Esperanto's first world .-u i^iess, kid in 1905 in France, attracted 688 Esperanto speakers from twenty nationalities. The World Esperanto Association, founded in 1908 by a Swiss journal ;st. continued co hold yearly congresses. The language became so identified with intern uiinalisirt •r 8501- t TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD t it received considerable credibility among delegates to the League of Na-• although France blocked any official use of Esperanto on the claim that 1 -inch was already a universal language. As one historian writes, the Esperanto , ovement displayed not just "a commitment to an ideal language" but "a theory oi'the purpose of language."44 Esperanto rode a global wave of popularity during the 1910s, a time of deep lisillusionment with nationalism and war and of energetic networking on be-]-1 f of cosmopolitanism and peace. Esperanto, writes one scholar, "helped gen-•\.\zc an ideological framework of one-worldism."45 But the movement also di-" i in the 1910s, one wing becoming closely associated with socialist circles, i wings were generally distrusted by strong nationalists, and the movement tame under fire during the 1930s in Germany and Soviet Russia, precisely the amntries in which it had initially been the strongest. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Sulih both disparaged the language as associated with Jews and subversion. They worked to stamp it out. - Other new methods for enlarging communication proliferated during the late nineteenth century. Louis Braille, a young boy living in Paris who had lost his evesight, devised a system of raised dots that allowed reading by touch and thus expanded the reach of the written word to the blind. Variants of this system spread during the mid-nineteenth century, and in 1878 an international congress in Paris adopted a standard system, which was finally codified for the English-speaking world in 193Z. Such projects for humanistic language reform represented the hope that new kinds of codes might forge common meanings across all kinds of borders, facilitating understanding and peace. In this sense, photography also ranked as one of the new potentially transnational "languages" that emerged in the late nineteenth century. French photographer and balloonist Gaspard-Felix Tournachon, who adopted the name "Nader," publicly dramatized the potential of aerial photography when he flew over Paris in 1858. A few years later he launched his huge balloon Le Giant, which was unsuccessful but inspired the global-flight fantasies of Jules Verne. Seeing and photographing the world from on high or by traversing previously unseen territory became a preoccupation among many explor-<-■;-. and armchair adventure seekers who had growing access to mass-produced hooks and magazines. •[ 851 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG The desire to understand the world through photography sparked ava significant projects in the late nineteenth century. Scottish phot6guojv.,. ĽLtions, Thompson published one of the most famous and influential earh Lol Illustrations of China and Its People (1873), after a decade of traveling in tnc p " East. In it, he established some of the conventions of documentary phut-) > phy."6National Geographic magazine published its first photo in '1885, aril helor • World War I published many photo tours that brought images of the wt Id t(1 jc growing numbers of fans. The first photos of Lhasa in Tibet, the Noith lV]e w Machu Picchu, and some of the earliest color photos of gardens in Belgium, fo example, all appeared in National Geographic. France and Germany provided-the early leadership in photographic techniques, and international conferences such as the International Photographic Exhibition held in Dic-den n, 1900 drew photographers from many countries into technical and artistic communities. Generally these early photographers saw themselves as capturi Lg new kinds of information that would serve the transnational development of science, social science, and civilization. Albert Kahn, a French photographer, banker, and internationalist, perhaps best exemplified the idea that his images from autochrome photography- a portable color process—could draw the peoples of the world together in rutua! understanding. From 1909 until the onset of the Great Depression, when 'ie met financial ruin, Kahn sent photographers to more than fifty countries and collected some seventy-two thousand images, which he called "The Archives of the Planet." The archive boasted probably the earliest color photog aplis n: Egypt's pyramids and India's Taj Mahal. It showed daily life among Kurds, Vietnamese Brazilians, Mongolians, Europeans, and North Americans. The color pi.-tiircs were, and are, stunning but the assumptions behind them were perhaps even more arresting: Kahn hoped to deploy photography as a tool that, by repie-ent-ing human diversity for all to see, might promote greater familiarity and peace among the world's cultures.47 The semiotics of photographs, however, involved more complexity than simply broadening people's visions and promoting familiarity. KsJi r. tv aj h avt hoped that photography could be a neutral symbolic language that enhanced mutual recognition, but the meanings of photographic images ncccsvuiiv' emerge from the variable and unstable constructions of both produ 1 1 ■[ 85* ]• \ photograph from Albert Kahn's "Archives of the Planet," ca. 1910, showing Angkor Wat, the ;amd temple complex in Cambodia. Kahn's archives consisted of 4,000 stereoscopic plaques, ?i,ooo autochromes, and around 183,000 meters of film. The archives were intended to promote pWce by documenting the world's people. Five cameramen supervised by French geographer Jean Brunhes shot photographs in forty-eight countries on nearly every continent. (© Musee Albert Kahn—Department des Hauts-de-Seine, Leon Busy, photographer [A35851]) receiver. Photography's new representations of the world thus advanced no single agenda. Photographic technologies were developed and consumed most thoroughly, for example, within the hearts of empires, and they therefore often represented an imperial perspective. A multivolume set of 468 photographs, The People of India (1868-1875), published in London, accompanied the first census of India (187%) and land survey of India (begun in 1878). All represented efforts to categorize colonial inhabitants and make them legible to their rulers.46 The Ottoman Empire also became an early supporter of photography, and Sultan Abdiilhamid II used photography as one method of enhancing control over his territories.49 Around ;yo- in Russia, the photographic pioneer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii ■r 853 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG began to execute a photographic survey of the Russian Empire io be ,.],„ v. color slide projections. The project brought him to the attention of T-.i- Ki(.h l'" II, who then gave his project official sponsorship. From 1909 to n;u l'ru. Rafael writes that "images emerge at times from the archives that contain ceitain intractable elements, peculiar details, or distinct sensibilities that do no: easily fit •[ 854 ]• TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD nto the visual encyclopedia of colonial rule." An examination of imperial pho-^■rraphic archives of Samoa in the same period likewise finds uncertain views hat seem inconsistent with a stereotypically imperial gaze. Esther Gabara shows ww in the hands of Mexican and Brazilian modernists of the 1930s, photographic conventions became distorted and "errant."52 ' Kahn died during the Nazi occupation of France. By this time national states rid firmly embraced photography and its successor, motion picture film, in or-tcr to highlight difference and stoke ferocity and war. The propaganda machine honed by the Nazis revolved around the use of images and rested on the understanding that photography, while thoroughly constructed, could be easily taken "reality" and could motivate and manipulate. Nazi filmmakers excelled at •rafting images that could tap existing prejudices to augment hatreds, at shaping jicttires of enemies that the state could then justifiably destroy.53 And most jther nations involved in World War II joined in the project of merging film into war making. What John Dower has aptly called a "war without mercy" in the Pacific was grounded in a war of images. Photographers and filmmakers often borrowed and readapted techniques from each other along transnational Ktworks and then used them for national ends. The comparatively inexpensive technology of photography, let loose in a transnational world, both defied putative borders and also hardened nationalistic and imperialistic divisions. Although its images and symbolic languages produced currents that connected the globe, the meanings and effects that circulated in those currencs, and remain embedded in photographic archives, proved .-aridble and multivocal. Photography exemplifies the differentiated commonali-riciofthis period. Labor and Anticolonial Transnationalism As telegraphy, postal services, mass publication, and photography accelerated global transmissions, activists espousing diverse causes could find new audiences. Transnational social networks proliferated. Sometimes entangled within the processes of state building and imperial consolidation and sometimes not, c;k- outreach of transnational movements helped define many of the most significant global trends of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. •[ 855 ]• EMILY S. ROSENBERG Efforts to abolish slavery forged one of the most prominent of such n<. us British abolitionists had convened a World Convention in London in ,» From midcentury on, abolitionists from the Americas, the Caribbean 11 and elsewhere increasingly linked up to create a transnario-ul anusl*0^', movement. Action on the level of national states remained all-important, and r wnul« be misleading to suggest that national and imperial goals stood apart fiyn, . transnational antislavery cause. The many antislavery conventions and di. rc > during the latter half of the nineteenth century, after all, emerged f£U)n .„ specificity of national and local circumstances, such as grassroots resistance b ■ slaves, the Civil War in the United States, variable economic rlung;s f.noribl • to free labor, and the triumph of liberal revolutions in particular cour.ti t w tislavery objectives also became entangled in imperial justificat ons. By hjping to structure a benign "civilizing" mission for colonial powers, antislaverv campaigns could sometimes enhance discourses of national destiny and advance rhc universalistic rhetoric that dressed up assertions of imperial virtue, in :he Bc.lin Declaration of 1885 and the Brussels Act of 1890, for example, colonial powers pledged to suppress slave trading and work toward abolition even as the) were carving up parts of the world. Transnational organizing, however, proved critical to stigmatizing sla\(.holding and to the longer legacies that antislavery campaigns produced. Moreover, as antislavery networks collaborated across the globe to collect and sha-s data, other kinds of labor abuses came within their purview. Practices of conn n t labor, debt peonage, and trafficking in women and children, for cxamp.c often seemed analogous to, or at least on a continuum with, chattel slavery. The '.sdl-organized antislavery campaigns of the nineteenth century thus fostered collaboration among reformers on a range of issues and boosted the .w.hoiiit nt a twentieth-century movement concerned with human rights more generall)'1 As industrialization accelerated, attempts to improve working condit io.is fo: the burgeoning urban industrial labor forces also spawned an array of 11. nsnr.-tional efforts designed to combat what some called "wage slavery." Seekir g transnational solutions to economic exploitation, labor advocates embraced the idea that workers had common interests that might supersede national lovaltifs. Many viewed the national state itself as a creature of the ownership class I n this lilliilllii TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD vision, the goals of international peace and justice could not arise from cooperative bodies of national states until worker-led social democratic forms of governance had triumphed in every locality. Worker-based movements that tried to build transnational networks based upon class rather than nation, however, had goals that competed as much as they coalesced. Jean Jaures, leader of the French Socialist Party, emerged as one of the most influential leaders of the social democratic movement, which spread principally in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. In 1889 Jaures helped found the Second International, a body that famously declared May 1 as International Labor Day. Associated with the Paris Exhibition of that year, the gathering brought working-class organizations together around a vision that transcended states. Another meeting, coinciding with the 1900 Paris Exhibition, brought two thousand delegates from sixteen countries and created an International Socialist Bureau (headquartered in Brussels) to serve as an informational clearinghouse for geographically scattered workers' organizations. Between 1900 and 1914 Jaures became one of the most influential advocates of working-class solidarity in the face of industrialization and rising nationalism. An electrifying speaker, at the 1912, meeting he proclaimed, "We are all opposed to those ready to deliver the multitudes to the bronze clutches of the demon of war. It is up to us, workers and socialists of every country, to make war impossible." His "Second International" met regularly until World War I, and Jaures worked against the military draft and on behalf of general strikes in France and Germany that he hoped would force governments to negotiate with each other." Jaures was assassinated by a nationalist in 1914 just as the Great War was beginning, but his messages continued to resonate internationally in the interwar era. Peace (between owners and workers and between nations), he had argued, was unachievable under capitalism. A socialism forged by cooperating trade unions and workers' cooperatives, by contrast, could create both a supportive political process in individual countries and a grand moral transformation. Although his Second International disbanded during the Great War, supporters reconstituted it in 1913 as the Labor and Socialist International. The Second International and its successor sought evolution, country by country, toward a transnational democratic socialist state that would express working-class inter-cstvand gradually seize ownership of production from private hands. •[ 856 ]• ■[ 857 ]• EMILY S. ROSENBERG Attempts to build international labor solidarity, however, had competing advocates and agendas. The struggling International Labor Organization of the League of Nations, as already mentioned, tried to monitor labor reforms and empower labor unions within the existing order of national states. Socialist networks led by women such as the German Clara Zetkin spread globally from the 1890s on and generally concentrared on promoting sex-based legislation that would provide special workplace protections for women. International Women's Day, which began to be observed on March 8,1913, emerged from efforts of socialists who wanted to honor and give greater visibility to the contributions of working women. Anarchism and syndicalist doctrines also circulated globally. A number of factors may help explain the rapid spread of anarcho-syndicalist ideas at the turn of the century: the growth of inexpensive publication; the mass migration of Jews and Italians, two groups in which anarcho-syndicalist doctrines had become strong; the cross-border role of sailors, who spread the doctrines to port cities on many continents; and the influence of major syndicalist models, espe- * dally the CNT in Spain, the CGT in France, and the IWW in the United "- J States. Some historians also suggest that the proliferation of dangerous occupa- -- | tions such as mining and sailing encouraged "virile syndicalism"—an aggressively anticapitalist masculinity that emphasized male bonding around acts of physical strength and violent resistance to authority.56 Anarcho-syndicalism before World War I took on a local intensity especially in immigrant, urban areas of the United States and Latin America, and it also spread to East Asia through student and other exchanges. Campaigns against radicalism in many count-its after World War I significantly weakened anarchism as a transnational move- j ment, although the CNT in Spain grew stronger by successfully deploying gen- ' eral strikes to enlist support from much of the Spanish working class in the in-terwar period. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 advanced yet another radical transnationalist vision. In 1919, in the midst of civil war in Russia, the Bolsheviks called for a "Third International" to be held in Moscow. Guided principally. S by Vladimir Lenin, the group formed the Comintern, a central governing body \ that would command a worldwide communist revolution. The Comintern's creation formalized the split, grown wider during the war, between pro-Soviet TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD communist parties and those social democratic parties that had supported their nations' war efforts. A 1910 Congress of Peoples of the East, held at Baku, the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan, drew about two thousand delegates from workers' parties and anticolonial groups based in Turkey, Persia, Egypt, India, Afghanistan, Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Armenia, Georgia, Turkestan, India, China, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere. These delegates linked up to learn about the support for colonial self-determination sponsored by communist parties.57 Africa's first two communist parties were formed in South Africa and Egypt in the early 1920s. By the early 1920s communist parties existed in most countries and continents in the world. As Joseph Stalin began to emphasize "socialism in one state" in the mid-1920s, the Soviet Union's internationalist emphasis faded. Leon Trotsky had advocated building a transnational revolutionary movement, but his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1918 and subsequent assassination in Mexico dramatized Stalin's nationalist turn. By 1934 Stalin accepted that communist parties would have to form "popular fronts" with social democratic parties in order to combat the rise of fascism, and the Comintern was disbanded in 1943. Meanwhile, Trotsky's followers had created a Fourth International in 1938, but their transnational movement kept splintering.58 Although there were persistent tensions between broader transnational connections and narrower national or ethnolinguistic loyalties, most communist or socialist labor-based movements tried to find ways to accommodate both. Lenin, for example, tried to solve the national question by establishing a purportedly federated Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Many Marxists within the Austro-Hungarian Empire likewise imagined transforming the Habsburg monarchy into some kind of federation. Labor transnationalists, generally, spoke in universalistic terms but constructed their networks with a sensitivity to particular national loyalties. In colonial territories the revolutionary ideology of communism, its appeal enhanced by resentments over the false promises ofWilsonian self-determination, created a transnational context that facilitated the growth of networks of anti-imperial resistance. Especially after the Great War, diverse homegrown movements drew strength from their leaders' global networks to challenge Western hegemonies. The Oriental Branch of the Workers' Communist Party, for example, ■[ 858 ]• •f 8« 1- EMILY S. ROSENBERG operated both locally and across Asia. Trinidadian George Padmore's publication The Negro Worker (1918-1937) joined the advocacy of communism to anti-colonialism, and merchant seamen distributed its messages widely in Africa and elsewhere in the black diaspora. The careers of three leaders within India's nationalist movement exemplify how anti-imperial transnational networks fostered campaigns for national self-determination. Narendra Nath Bhattacharya, known as M. N. Roy, was a ttsn.s-national anti-imperial activist, a Bengali Indian revolutionary, and a political theorist. Roy had developed some of his revolutionary philosophy while in New York City, where he met his future American wife, Evelyn Trent. After traveling to the neutral nation of Mexico during World War I, Roy started what would become the Mexican Communist Party. Once the war ended, he accelerated his transnational activities, founding the Communist Party of India, serving with the Comintern for several years, and organizing to promote a revolutionary movement in China. With Trotsky's expulsion, Roy fell out of favor in Stalin's Moscow and left the Comintern and the Soviet Union. Once back in India during the 1930s, his continued commitment to transnational revolution landed him in prison, where, disillusioned by both Western democracy and communism, he began to work out his own manifesto for a future characterized by India's independence and a broad vision he called "New Humanism." His humanism, advanced as a universally applicable philosophy, emphasized scientific and critical approaches to knowledge mixed with an ethical grounding. Despite their substantial differences, Roy and Jawaharlal Nehru worked together to try to maneuver India toward independence. Nehru had also been closely involved in transnational anti-imperial movements. In 192.7 as a delegate from the Indian National Congress, he helped organize in Brussels an International Congress against Colonialism and Imperialism. Closely tied to Soviet goals, the Congress sought to connect labor movements with anticolonial leaders. Before World War II, Nehru established connections with liberation advocates in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and North Africa, many of whom already had established friendships with Mohandas K. Gandhi. It was Nehru who, in 1947, raised the flag of an independent India, espousing secularism and lib eral, parliamentary democracy. TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD Gandhi's technique of nonviolent resistance to colonial rule had also gained him a transnational following. While in South Africa before World War I, he had joined with women in the large population of Indian laborers to successfully demand that the government recognize Hindu, Muslim, and Parsi marriages, which had been declared invalid.59 Back in India, his famous Salt March campaigns of 1930-1931 brought wide attention to nonviolent resistance, and the currents from Gandhi's philosophy penetrated not only other anticolonial projects in Asia and Africa but also the often intertwined networks of Western peace activists. The War Resisters' International (WRI) and the Christian International Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) were only two of the many transnational organizations that helped popularize Gandhi's views among European and North American antidraft and pacifist groups before and after World War II.60 Gandhi and Nehru advocated the concept of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, or the world as one family. They envisioned India as a hub that could bind East Asia, South Asia, the Arab Middle East, and North Africa. The sufferings under colonialism would presumably forge bonds of sympathy that would radiate out to eventually include the world as a whole, nurturing a transnational consciousness as well as national self-determination. Roy, Nehru, and Gandhi illustrate how India's nationalism and eventual independence became nourished within transnational networks that sought global solidarity among anticolonial movements. As Sugata Bose has written, "anticolonialism as an ideology was both tethered by the idea of homeland while strengthened by extraterritorial affiliations."61 Like other articulations of early twentieth-century universalist ideologies—whether generated from Britain, France, Germany, the United States, or the Soviet Union—Indian leaders saw little contradiction between their own embrace of nationalism and the transnational webs they hoped to anchor and orchestrate. They proposed their own nationalist struggle as the opening wedge toward a larger global order that they claimed would emphasize justice and peace over inequality and war. Contacts among labor and anticolonial movements circulated in many directions. Irish revolutionaries built connections to labor movements in the United States; Sikh migrants in Canada kept in touch with anticolonial activists in India; nationalists from Southeast Asia established contacts with sympathizers TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD Mahacma Gandhi and Sarojini Naidu on rhe nonviolent "Salt March" of 1930. Gandhi and Naidu, along with eighty thousand other Indians, were arrested after this campaign, which protested the British tax on salt and British rule of India. Naidu was the first Indian woman to serve as president of the Indian National Congress. ("Die Illustrated London News Picture Library, London, UK/ The Bridgeman Art Library) from Africa and South Asia; Sen Katayama organized for anticolonial and communist causes in both Japan and the United States; the Paris-based Etoile Nord-Africaine connected Algerians and French supporters in agitating for independence of French North Africa; philosophical tracts and bomb-making manuals published in Paris or New York surfaced within resistance movements throughout the world. Just as national states organized international bodies and agreements, groups advocating workers' revolutions or chose aspiring to throw off colonial rule and establish their own states (or non-states, in the case of anarchist-influenced movements) also forged transnational networks.62 Diasporic Attachments The waves of immigration (both coerced and voluntary) that characterized this period mixed populations throughout the world and nurtured the emergence of transnational networks that followed the paths of the various diasporas. Though characterized by no single pattern and having no consistent relationship to national identities, diasporic attachments based on perceived ethnocultural ties provided important carriers of globalizing currents. Slavery had produced an African diaspora throughout the Atlantic and some of the Pacific world. As most countries formally abolished slavery over the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, indentured or contract laborers from the Indian subcontinent, China, and elsewhere augmented ex-slaves as cheap labor used especially in agriculture. The global diffusion of laborers from Africa and Asia, along with the histories of colonialism in most labor-exporting areas, created a milieu in which diasporic attachments often intertwined with labor solidarity and ancicolonialism. "Pan-Africanism" emerged as one of the most significant currents of diasporic transnationalism. The African-American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois powerfully articulated how Africans, even though geographically dispersed, could become part of an emergent black nationalism. In 1900 Du Bois addressed a Pan-African Congress to call for the integrity and independence of African states. This congress, convened in London by Trinidad-born barrister Henry Sylvester-Williams, would be the first in a series of congresses that brought together delegates from Europe, the West Indies, the United States, and Africa to EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD oppose colonialism and racism. Yet while building transnational solidarity within the African diaspora, Du Bois also advocated equality for people of African descent within the individual nations in which they resided. He advanced the idea that African-Americans had to live within a "double consciousness" an awareness of the self as distinct from the persona that dominant groups might construct. "The problem of the twentieth century," Du Bois declared in his famous 1900 speech to the congress, "is the problem of the color line." The First Universal Races Congress met in 1911 in London to build support for a global struggle against racism.63 The end of World War I brought new Pan-African initiatives. A Pan-African Congress of 1919 convened in Paris to coincide with the Versailles Peace Conference. Its delegates invoked Wilsonian self-determination and issued a proposal to turn Germany's former colonies in Africa into a new state, but the officials ar Versailles largely ignored the effort. A fifth Pan-African Congress, held in New York in 1927, was primarily financed by Addie W. Hunton and the Women s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), a sponsorship that underscored the overlapping goals of the Pan-African Congress and the WILPF; a transnational women's organization. Throughout the 19x0s Du Bois, Hunton, and others consistently championed self-determination in Africa as well as equality for African-descended citizens in their own countries. Although few delegates from Africa attended international conferences during the 1920s because coloni al administrations restricted their ttavel, groups throughout Africa formed to fighr white minority rule and used new networks of communication to link their efforts to sympathizers elsewhere in the world. Padmore's The Negro Worker, his work as head of the Comintern's International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (before he renounced the Communist Party over its policies toward colonialism), and his labor organizing throughout Africa and the Caribbean during the Great Depression of the 1930s facilitated the spread of Pan-Africanism.'54 Marcus Garvey espoused Pan-Africanism of a different kind. Born in Jamaica, where he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914, Garvey brought a charismatic message of racial pride to the United States and built a huge following after World War I. From 1919 to 1922, Garvey's Black Star shipping line visited ports throughout the world and attracted enthusiastic supporters. By using black seamen as agents, Garvey estab- ■ lished a global informational network that spawned branches of the UNIA in Africa, Australia, and the West Indies and throughout the Americas. At its height the UNIA had perhaps a thousand chapters in forty-three countries and territories. Like Du Bois and other Pan-Africanists, Garvey called for self-determination of African nations, but he rejected the assimilationist, antiracist message of Du Bois's "double consciousness." Embracing race essentialism and racial pride, Garvey preached that America was a white country and that black people needed to return to Africa and establish nations based within their own race. He tried to promote a settlement in Liberia but was jailed on mail fraud charges in 1923. In 1927 he was deported back to Jamaica, as his movement faded. The UNIA's global influence fell as quickly as it had risen, but Garvey s uncompromising message of black nationalism and pride continued to influence the Pan-African movement on several continents." The writings of Leopold Senghor, who would become the first president of Senegal, and Martinican poet Aime Cesaire helped forge a related transcontinental intellectual movement called nigritude. Meeting in Paris during the 1930s and linked to flourishing black arts and cultural movements in Haiti and in Harlem, black intellectuals from Africa and the Caribbean sought to build a common identity that rejected assimilation, turned negre into a positive word, and asserted opposition to French racism. These intellectuals did not seek political independence from France so much as creation of a more inclusive, transnational culture based on equal respect. Just as French colonialism contained both a universalizing discourse of Greater France and a particularizing discourse related to race, so nigritudes critique of French colonial modernity also developed a "two-fronted response." One front embraced French citizenship in the French empire and the other articulated a cultural nationalism in which mythic black-African culture and soul stood opposed to the presumed dehumanization of Western modernity.6" In his examination of what he called the "Black Atlantic," Paul Gilroy uses ships as a central metaphor. The displacement of Africans to other continents brought an accompanying need to hang on to memories of distant places and to see the Atlantic Ocean as a connecting highway rather than as a barrier. The circulation of people, ideas, and arts within this Black Atlantic, through people such as Du Bois, Padmore, Garvey, and Cesaire, Gilroy argues, formed a sense of •[ 864 ]• ■[ 865 ]• EMILY S. ROSENBERG '~M .'■:i^SHBi nationalism even under conditions of the fragmented consciousness prod need hv ; geographical and cultural displacement. People in the African diaspora, he si:g- gests, lived with instability and juxtaposition of identity long before the adveir. '■ of the tztmpostmodernity in the late twentieth century.67 % Pan-Africanism as a transnational nationalism, of course, flourished nor juH on the ocean currents but on the new currents of the electrical age. Du Boii's I writings and his newspaper, The Crisis, circulated widely; Padmore's The Ne^ro Worker and Garvey s newspaper The Negro World constituted parts of their : global networks. Other giant figures in the Pan-African movement also circu- ; lated their ideas and platforms within the new networks of travel and commvini- ;M cation: During the 1930s some of the major activists in the Pan-African 1110. ment— C. L. R. James, Claude McKay, and Paul Robeson, all of whom emlraied ■ socialism and its anticolonial agenda—were prolific writers and artists.68 Mo.: ■ over, many Africans, some of whom would later lead postcolonial governmci ■. ; participated in this transnational circulation. Kwame Nkrumah attenc: ■■' j school in the United States, spent time in London, and became the first prcM- I - :/ -.s:&i dent of Ghana. Julius Nyerere studied in Scotland before he headed the nei.. .■ j independent nation of Tanzania and helped found the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Diasporic allegiances that became influential in the late nineteenth and ea rly \ twentieth centuries emerged in diverse formulations, each with distinct regional . i "-'^M characteristics depending on the density of the diaspora and the power of L:e grouping with which it aligned. The Gadr movement, for example, took shape in > :':§ San Francisco among Sikhs who sought to mobilize migrant groups in supporr i of an anti-imperial, anti-British uprising in India. Irish nationalists mobilized their far-flung networks with a similar goal. Chinese tongs spread their influence Throughout immigrant communities on several continents. Pan-ethnic or pan-national movements, however, could prove ambiguous and '-even deceptive. Programs to promote "Pan-Americanism" and "Pan-Asianism," for example, claimed to construct broad regional identities, but they can also be seen as tools of expansionist national states. The respective attempts by the United j States (after the 1880s) and by Japan (especially in the 1930s) to create geographically proximate spheres of influence provide examples of highly nationalistic pro- ,f grams dressed in the garb of regional imaginaries. Both the Pan American Union ■[ 866 ]• TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD and the creation of Manchukuo expressed rich regional cultural circulations of ideas about moving toward modernity but came manifested politically as client state relations or as highly asymmetrical regional associations.69 Populations of Slavs, Ottoman Turks, Germans, and Arabs, to cite more examples, also asserted transborder identities. These movements, too, often arose from regional cultural circulations but became creatures of expansionist states and empires seeking to justify boundary claims, border transgressions, or attempts to drive away outsider populations. Regionally based transnational appeals, of course, waxed stronger when confronted by the claims of oppositional networks (for example, in liminal areas in the Balkans and the Caucuses) and when they served as useful weapons within the geopolitical rivalries of national states. The Jewish diaspora constituted another variant of transnational attachments. In 1900, 82. percent of Jews lived in Europe, the majority in Eastern Europe; by 1939 the number had shrunk to 57 percent, with the United States and, to a lesser extent, Palestine as newly important centers of Jewish life, Jews from this increasingly globalized diaspora, itself split into Ashkenazi and Sephardic branches, played important roles in many of the intellectual currents and social movements discussed in this chapter-—-internationalism, anarchism, socialism, pacifism, as well as in a variety of economic, artistic, and epistemic networks. Jewish transnationalism, often fueled in tandem with a global discourse of anti-Semitism, could combine feelings of loyalty to an ethnic identity, national attachments to particular countries, and a universalism that aspired to build tolerance for difference. Although linkages forged among often far-flung Jewish communities proved important to transnational networks of all kinds, there are few common threads among them. Jewish transnational linkages were both secular and religious; they strengthened both capital and labor; they both buttressed and undermined divisions marked by nationality, empire, gender, and racial identity. The modern nationalist movement called Zionism, however, was one transnational impetus that may be discussed in very loose analogy with Pan-Africanism, as it sought to imagine and advance a national identity within a diasporic community that held no singular or specific territory except in various constructions of memory. A movement of highly varied roots and diverse histories that began in the late nineteenth century, Zionist groups constituted an "international nationalism" that advocated the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. •r 8671- EMILY S. ROSENBERG They gradually grew stronger in response to pogroms in Russia; touhfdhlj,. { promises for a homeland that were made in the Balfour Declaration of im- j in the League of Nations' creation of a Palestinian mandate; to risi ■ Semitism in Europe during the interwar era; and finally to the Nazis' mass killii > of Jews in the Holocaust. As with other diasporic groups, the lor.irjn™ f-r a grounded homeland and the transnational organizing in pursuit of that we;' he-came bonding elements.70 Religious Transnationalism Major world religions had all built strong transnational affiliations i:: the a^e that preceded the consolidation of national states. In the nineteenth century, however state-building projects could rival and sometimes even tried to suppress such religious attachments. Moreover, the growing influence of scientific method, evolutionary thought, secularism, and Marxism seemed to challenge religious ways of knowing. In this context of increasingly secular state building and sc:enr.i-e modernity, religious connections nonetheless continued to refresh themselvcsand i-vcn flourish. In fact, under competition from secular trends and from each other, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoruba, and other groups all experienced revival and expansion. New modes of communication mid the accelerating global flows of people and ideas facilitated the new energy. C. A. Bayly has argued that this period saw the consolidation of religion as a universal category of identification, and that "many modern nationalisms were themselves heavily influenced by emerging religious solidarities."71 There were, however, always inherent tensions between religious claims to universalism and practices rooted in adaptation to local cultural traditions. The uniformities of religious doctrine came to be rendered in distinctive local ways—as differentiated commonalities. From one perspective, Christianity could seem on the decline in yji period. In the lace nineteenth century Friedrich Nietzsche, son of a Lutheran pasrer, articulated an influential disenchantment with Christianity, even as Karl Marx advanced a highly materialist view of the human condition. These and other philosophers challenged the basis of Christian belief from many directions in the generation before the eruption of the Great War. Then in 1914 an Onhodox- TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD ;nipjred killing of the archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian -prone and a devout Catholic, threw Europe into what became a devastating war 'hat pitted Christian rulers against each other—the German and Austrian em--■serors against the British king, the Russian tsar, and finally the US president— ■Uid prompted extravagant rhetoric on every side about doing battle in the name ,'f a Christian Lord. Just as the costs of war weakened Europe's states economically! tne figntm8 t0°k *ts t0^ on D°th the territories and the faiths of Christen-bm. The Russian Revolution of 1917 toppled the established Russian Orthodox ■Church. Persecuted Christian communities, especially of Armenians and others in the eastern frontier of the new Turkish republic, were scattered and killed as Ik old Ottoman Empire fell apart. Britain's hold on colonies became more precarious, and the Irish crisis pitted Catholics against Protestants. The dispirited generation that survived the devastations of the First World War emerged with allkinds of faiths shaken. After surveying the memorials to the dead from this struggle, Diarmaid MacCulloch writes, "The greatest casualty commemorated in ihis multitude of crosses and symbols of war is the union between Christianity and secular power: Christendom itself."72 Yet countervailing signs of Christianity's expansion also emerged, illustrat-: jng the contradictions of the age. From the middle of the nineteenth century appeared new visionaries, new excitements over End Times, a vibrant new Pentecostal movement in the United States, and—most importantly—an upsurge of Christian missionary fervor. Financed from private donations, Protestant missionary societies led efforts to "civilize" people around the world by saving their souls, spreading literacy (to facilitate Bible reading), and instructing people in .-. the virtues of monogamous marriage and disciplined labor. Christianity reached into every continent. The Salvation Army, for example, was founded in 1878 in England and grew into a worldwide network of schools, hospitals, and other institutions. Initially looked upon with suspicion by state authorities, it was later seen as a helpful tool . in controlling "dangerous" populations. The Salvation Army constructed both Britain's urban poor and the "heathens" and "savages" in Britain's empire as L-populations in need of the social salvation it offered. Becoming an imperial force :. tint discursively linked together both domestic and colonial social threats and remedies, the Army became active throughout the globe. It was called upon, for •[ 868 1- ■[ 869 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD example, to reeducate ex-convicts in places as far-flung as Japan, Australia, So-jth Africa, French Guiana, and elsewhere,73 Social-gospel Protestantism furthered the global evangelical movement. The American Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM), founded in 1886, famously promised "the evangelization of the world in this generat^n.'' The SVM movement, allied with the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), quickly spread to Great Britain and to other countries of Western Europe and developed chapters in Syria, Egypt, China, India, and across the globe.71 The late nineteenth-century famines, especially in India, China, and other mission fields, assisted evangelization, as the sensational coverage of these tragedies spurred missionary activity, boosted circulation for the new missionary magazines, and prompted heartrending appeals for donations to support Christian relief efforts everywhere. In the United States, the Christian Herald carried out the most dramatic campaign, using the relatively new medium of photographv to show graphic images of people in various stages of starvation.75 Such ; mages, while meant for philanthropic purposes, also worked to underscore the supcriorilv of Christian civilizations and to suggest the need for imperial interventions. Moreover, missionaries and other humanitarian activists often invoked ideals of a shared humanity in their appeals while remaining blind to the ways in which Western imperial policies had contributed to the very calamities that altered social and ecological patterns and thus disrupted food production and availability. By the time of the World Missionary Conference in 1910, Protestant Christianity had become a rapidly growing global network incorporating many church leaders in non-Western areas. As the faith expanded, its meanings and practices became ever more diverse. The African prophet William Wadé Harris, for example, defied colonial boundaries in 1913 to lead a transborder revival movement in West Africa that gathered perhaps one hundred thousand conversions. Harris, educated in a mission school in southeastern Liberia, spread an indigenous Christianity into areas not previously tilled by European missionaries. He urged his converts to abandon their nature spirits, which had failed to protect them from colonial conquest, and to embrace the Christian God, who could restore their sovereignty and bring access to needed knowledge and technology. Preaching accommodation with most Westerns ways but also upholding the custom of polygamy, Harris was responsible for the largest conversion to Christianity on rhe African continent. When Western missionaries later arrived in areas of West Africa, they were often astonished to find Harrist churches flourishing. Indeed, especially from the 1910s on, indigenous rulers and prophets throughout Africa carried out vigorous campaigns to found their own Christian churches independent of European interference.7* V The influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 promoted the transnational growth of i Christian divine-healing churches, The teachings of Faith Tabernacle Congrega- I ;i0n, which formed in 1918 in Philadelphia, found their way to Ghana, an area also I jopulated by many indigenous healing cults. Through pamphlets and correspon- I! dence, Faith Tabernacle's leaders promised to heal people of influenza at a time when medical authorities had neither the knowledge nor the supplies to adequately §F treat hard-hit populations. In Ghana, colonial authorities banned native healing > cults as "witchcraft" but allowed Christian healers. As word of successful cures f"' "sf circulated, Faith Tabernacle's evangelism spread to include Britain's Apostolic Church and stretched into Cote dTvoire and Togo to become forerunners of the iarge Pentecostal movement that would continue to spread even after Faith Tabernacle itself declined in the mid-i9ios.77 Pentecostalism, which had its modern roots in Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth century and emphasized healing, speaking in tongues, and a direct relationship with God, became one of the most dynamic global movements in Christianity in the twentieth century. J Catholics also stepped up their involvement in social issues by accelerating a global missionary effort. Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum (1893) placed Catholicism behind attempts to ameliorate industrialization's excesses. It championed fair wages and legal protections for workers. And in the 1910s, Pope Pius XI adopted worldwide outreach as a priority. He founded new mission centers around the globe, endorsed vigorous national churches under indigenous .eadership, and consecrated six Chinese bishops and a bishop in Japan and in Vietnam—the first non-Western bishops since the eighteenth century. In addi-"ion, Catholic missionaries constituted one of the largest groups of French men and women working abroad, although they often had conflicted relationships with imperial administrators of the determinedly secular Third Republic. French imperial policy in Indochina, Polynesia, and Madagascar, for example, emerged ;n the crucible of discordant religious and secular goals, and indigenous communities were sometimes able to work the dissension to their own advantage.78 •[ 870 ]• •[ 871 ]■ 1 .V [ 1 5r luirMII l(.G TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD "William Wade Harris (center) with singers and fellow missionary.________________1 in the coastal town oFAssinie in the French colony of Cote d'lvoire, Prophet Harris led a mass movement that spread Christianity throughout West Africa in the early twentiech century. (Archives cr Society des Missions Africains, Rome) The transnational religious networks in this period all intertwined with their members' other affiliations—national, imperial, racial, regional. For example, in many Christian mission fields, missionaries tended to keep to their own, with ethnic and national affiliations trumping ideals of Christian unity. Social separation from racially different "native" converts was pro forma almost everywhere, and missionaries also broke down into national groups. British missionaries in Asia and Africa often found American Christians too zealous, too egalitarian, and too uncultured—the same attitudes that marked an anti-American discourse outside of the mission field as well.7' As Christian missions tried to "uplift" indigenous people, they developed the kinds of ambiguous relationships to colonial states that so often marked "contact zones." The Salvation Army and other mission efforts based in Britain became an important arm of policy at home and abroad. The American YMCA similarly functioned during World War I as an arm of state military power. It ran the programs for the troops sent to France and conducted anti-Bolshevik espionage in the new Soviet Union. Missionaries abetted colonialism by schooling their 1 converts in their own social conventions related to monogamous marriage, hy- gienic rituals, work habits, and gender roles. Often working in volatile and inse- I cure areas, they frequently favored forceful colonial rule as a way to facilitate order, progress, and conversion.80 The instabilities and injustices of colonial rule, however, could also place religious conversion at odds with the economic and political structures of empire. In China, the US YMCA's goals to improve economic conditions led some missionaries to criticize colonial powers and the foreign merchants who seemed to exploit the very people they had pledged to serve. Moreover, missionaries developed expertise in native languages, and some cultivated a sympathy based in cultural understanding. As missions involved themselves in education, health, and the preservation of languages, the basis for a locally generated articulation of ethnic identities flourished—and sometimes bolstered anticolonial movements. If missionaries could not avoid being a part, sometimes even an appendage, of an imperial presence, some nevertheless sought to ameliorate, critique, and at times actively resist it. Moreover, the indigenous Christians who assumed positions of local leader-v ship brought even more complexity to the fraught intersections between transnational religion and colonialism. The ambiguous historical memory surrounding Anglican missionary Bernard Mizeki provides an example. Mizeki was born in present-day Mozambique, converted to Anglicanism in Cape Town, and was dispatched to Rhodesia as a "native catechist" in the 1890s. After being stabbed by opponents in 1896, his body reportedly miraculously vanished into air. The site of the Mizeki miracle in present-day Zimbabwe came to symbolize both a despised colonial collaboration and also a growing cultural nationalism fed by annual pilgrimages with special meaning for trans-African Anglicanism.81 Missionaries, in short, could both embody and also mediate the global inequalities of the imperial age. Korea exemplified another twist on the intersection of anticolonialism and ; Christianity. After Japan seized their country in 1910, Korean Christians fused 'f their faith with Korean national identity and developed it into a symbol of na-; tionalist resistance against the Japanese occupation. This association helped set the stage for the later robust growth of Christianity in Korea. •[ 873 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD As Christian revivalism spread missionaries around the world, assisted b-Western economic expansion, Islam experienced a parallel surge designed to push back and halt Christianity's spread. The growth of European spheres cn croaching into India, Southeast Asia, and Africa spurred Pan-Islamic networks, and the new forms of publication and communication reinforced bonds of attachment on all sides. Indeed, as Islam expanded in West Africa and, like other religions, adapted to local variations, some groups found special success by embracing the new technologies that colonialism helped introduce. Sheikh Ibrahim Niass, for example, used radio to spread his Tijani Sufi revivalism in the areas of Gambia and Senegal, and his network expanded to become one of the most important religious forces in West Africa. Roads that were improved to enhance imperial commerce also extended the reach of Muslim scholars. A Tijani dissident, Yacouba Sylla, inspired the rise of the Yacoubist movement, which beca.iic particularly powerful in Cote dTvoire.81 Transnational networks may have proved an especially congenial structure for the spread of Islam, or at least that has been an influential argument ad vanced since the 1970s in the scholarly work of Ira M. Lapidus. Lapidus and the others who have endorsed this view argue that the concept of a network provides a powerful "root metaphor" in a civilization that has struggled to sustain its identity under the onslaught of colonial political administrations. In this view, transnational interactions among Muslims became part of a network of practices animated by powerful symbols—the Quran and the mosque. These Islamic symbols became the focus for personal loyalty, ritual, and sacrifice in a sprawling territory controlled by mostly alien political jurisdictions.83 Pilgrimages helped reinforce such transnational ties of practice, and they created a common loyalty to specific and highly symbolic places. Pilgrimages, of course, may be found in ail transnational religious affiliations, as they help bring diverse localized practices and beliefs into a more unified sense of community and orthodoxy. But the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) proved especially important for the extensive Islamic networks that reached from western Africa, across the Middle East and South Asia, to Indonesia. The Hajj had provided, writes Sugata Bose, a "key integrative element in the economy, religion, and culture of the Indian Ocean in the precolonial era," but the introduction of steamships and railways further consolidated its importance to the Islamic world.84 The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the offering, by British and Dutch steamships, of regular Hajj trips helped forge Pan-Islamic links among Cairo, Mecca, and Indonesia, which was emerging as the most populous Islamic country. Ottoman Sultan Abdiilhamid II positioned himself as a defender of Islam against Christian encroachment and completed the strategically important Istanbul-to-Baghdad railway and the IstanbuI-to-Medina railway, which also made the Hajj somewhat easier. The sultan also dispatched emissaries to many distant lands to spread Islam. The rise of Egypt as a major crossroads within the Ottoman Empire, as a result of the Suez Canal, posed challenges for the sultan and for Pan-Islamic movements generally. The opening of the canal accelerated the movement of trade, people, and culture and drew many parts of the world together. It also facilitated the rising hegemony of European states in the Middle East and in Africa, which colonial powers began to partition in the 1880s. The mixture of Islamic and Christian influences under colonialism brought clashes but also borrowing and accommodation. Even as European encroachment and technologies changed caravanning patterns in northwest Africa, for example, Islamic law continued to structure and facilitate networks of trade and cultural exchange in that region.85 With the demise of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the British imperial authorities and the Saudi state gained greater territorial influence over Mecca and Medina, Islam's second holiest city. Still, Muslim networks proved adept at crossing seas and forging religious connections that state boundaries could hardly contain or control. Stronger colonial rule from the West often enhanced the oppositional appeal of Islamic practices. Islam was split along lines of doctrinal disputes, and different movements within Islam all had transnational reach. The largely Sunni-based Salafi movement, for example, called for a return to traditional Islam that would accommodate the kind of technological and scientific modernizations taking place in Europe. From the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth, writings by the main figures of the Salafiyya circulated especially among intellectual elites and influenced anticolonial and nationalist movements, particularly among Arab Muslims. Such Pan-Islamic appeals, closely linked to calls for Muslim societies to modernize in order to free themselves from European colonial rule, provided a basis for transnational connections as well as for militant anti-Western nationalism. At the same ■[ 874 ]• •[ 875 ]• EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD time, often propelled by rivalry with each other, Shi'i elites and the Naqshbandi Sufi orders also, in their own ways, promoted Islamic revicalization across and within national boundaries. All of these revitalization quests bore the imprint of both universalism and sectarianism. Although the symbolism of the Hajj played a major integrative and symboii.-role in Pan-Islamism, the numbers of actual participants remained comparatively small in this period. Before World War II, overseas pilgrims rarely surpassed 100,000. The peak year, 192.7, registered around 132,000, but the global economic depression brought sharp declines thereafter. Pilgrimages were made easier by new transportation, but European imperial regimes generally regarded them with suspicion. Worried that pilgrimages might spread politically subversive ideas along with infectious diseases, colonial regulations over the Hajj proliferated, and international sanitary regulations closed key ports. Calcutta (Kol-kata) was closed as a pilgrim port for thirty years, for example, after an outbreak of plague in 1896. Only in Dutch-ruled Indonesia did a colonial officer, Snouck Hurgronje, advocate facilitating well-run pilgrimages to Mecca. Hurgronje, a noted Dutch Orientalist, believed that a religious accommodation with Islam would facilitate Dutch rule and would reduce, not increase, political radicalism.8* Moreover, splits within Muslim communities during the Hajj always had the potential to rip away at Pan-Islamic solidarity. The Wahhabi ascendancy in Saudi Arabia sometimes sparked hostility from Shi'i and Sufi pilgrims.87 With the rapid spread of Christianity and Islam, reform movements also reshaped Hindu, Buddhist, and Confucian traditions. As in Islam, many reform leaders called for a return to traditions that emphasized elements consistent with adapting to modernity in order to more effectively challenge outside imperial powers. Perhaps partly to counter the appeal of Christianity and Islam, these faiths became more systematized in terms of doctrine, ritual, and organization. They even took on proselytizing attributes, and they also fused with national or protonational visions. The Young Men's Buddhist Association, for example, modeled itself on the YMCA and played a role in China, Burma, and elsewhere by promoting national strengthening against European influences. Swami Vivekananda well illustrates the intertwined spread of transnational religious impulses and nationalism, A disciple of the nineteenth-century mystic Ramakrishna, Vivekananda traveled India as a "wondering monk" and then proceeded on a world trip, visiting China, Japan, Canada, the United States, England, France, and Italy. Arriving in Chicago for the 1893 World Parliament of Religions, held in conjunction with the Columbian Exposition, Vivekananda managed to get himself accepted as a representative of India and received growing acclaim for his speeches. Presenting Hinduism as an international force that encompassed toleration for all religions, he also proclaimed the spiritual superiority of the East (especially India) over the materialism of the West. While in the West, he had reportedly remarked to a friend that he hoped to return home and "send an electric thrill" through "India's national veins."88 Indeed, he returned to India in 1897 to be hailed as a prophet of Indian nationalism. His enthusiastic reception in the West, where he sometimes came to symbolize India's worth to the rest of the world, established him as perhaps the most important representative of Indian culture. Swami Vivekananda remained a singular figure both in the transnational spread of Hindu teachings of Vedanta and yoga and also in the creation of a sense of Indian nationalism that informed Gandhi and others. Theosophy also stretched globally even as it promoted Indian nationalism in the 19 2.0s. Like Vivekananda's teachings, Theosophy probably spread in the West in the context of a particularly Orientalist vision of India. Annie Besant, a British socialist who campaigned for democratic self-rule in India and was elected president of the India National Congress in 1917, embraced Theosophy and headed the Theosophical Society. Theosophical views, which embraced a kind of mystical spiritualism, helped popularize ideas of human community and essential religious unities, even though they also accommodated prevailing views of racial hierarchy.83 Localized religious traditions could also spread globally within specific dias-poras. Wherever the African slave trade brought Africans, for example, religious practices came along, adapted, and even flourished. Specific groups of Africans, especially throughout the New World, tried to preserve and pass on beliefs and rituals. The religious culture ofYoruba, for example, thrived as Candomble'm Brazil and Santeria in Cuba.90 Within major religious affiliations, transnational conversations around proper gender roles seem at least superficially similar in this era. Some Christian and Islamic reformers (women and men), for example, propounded education for women on the maternalist grounds that women's moral education was essential •[ 877 ]• EMILY S. ROSENBERG for nurturing future male leaders. Encouraging motherhood and modern housekeeping within the moral framework of a religious tradition dovetailed with the goals of those who advocated nation building, literacy, sanitation programs, and other attributes of modernity. Religious transnationalism, in fact, provided a powerful (though certainly not the only) framework for the women's networks that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Worlds of Women As with other transnational movements and affiliations, women's networks v,n-ied widely in their goals and cannot be seen as taking shape independently from other movements. Gender-based women's networks were affiliated with groi.ps associated with labor, anticolonialism, socialism, racial solidarity, and religion, and with epistemic, artistic, and professional communities. Clearly, there was no single "women's movement" generated from any single place. Rather, there we s a robust current of diverse women's movements" flowing from multiple locations. With such variation, transnational identifications along lines of gender sometimes undercut and sometimes reinforced other demarcations of difference based on ethnicity, nationality, class, religion, and region." Many causes rallied relatively elite women who could marshal the resources to travel internationally. The more formalized transnational organizations of women were therefore heavily based in Europe, European settler colonies, and the United States. Most transnational networks, however, emerged simultaneously with local activist groups, each helping give shape to the other. Campaigns for suffrage, for a larger role in civic life, for control of prostitution and alcohol, for birth control, and for special protections for workers were a few of the strands within the larger current of women's connections. Local and national politics provided one context for the growth of the suffrage movement, but transnational organizing offered another essential ingredient. In the United States and Great Britain, declarations advocating women's civil and political rights (along with access to higher education and to professional service) had become influential—-and controversial—by the middle of die nineteenth century. The writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill had wide dissemination, first in the English-speaking world and then in transla- TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD rion, as did the Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848. Suffrage leaders in the United States, Britain, and France established in 1888 the International Council of Women, the first lasting transnational women's organization. Socialist groups formed the International Suffrage Alliance in 19 02.. Before World War I, Finland, New Zealand, Australia, and Norway granted voting rights to women (although aboriginal women were restricted in some Australian states). The important roles that women played during World War I in many countries provided additional impetus to suffrage. Denmark, Sweden, Canada, Soviet Russia, the Baltic states, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Netherlands, and the United States embraced women's suffrage during or just after the war. In Britain, women were granted a patliamentary vote, although fully equal suffrage did not come to Britain until 1928. Other countries, such as Burma, Turkey, and Ecuador, gave the franchise to women during the 1910s. As agitation for suffrage spread, victories seemed to beget more victories.92 Drawing inspiration and tactics from their globalized networks, movements for suffrage and other rights for women broadened their scope in the interwar era, expanding in Western Europe, in the old Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, in Egypt, Turkey, India, Japan, and Latin America. The First International Women's Day Celebration Conference, held in Canton in 1914, highlighted women's activism in China. One of the leading Egyptian feminists, Huda Shaarawi, famously returned from a women's conference in Rome in 192.3, stood on the railroad step, drew back her veil, and received applause from the crowd of women onlookers. As founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union and its president from 1913 until 1947, she championed greater independence for women as well as national independence for Egypt. US and Cuban feminists pressed the Pan American Union to establish an Inter American Commission of Women (Comision Interamericana de Mujeres) in 1918. Transnational peace activist Rosika Schwimmer fled postwar Hungary in 1920 for the United States, where although the Supreme Court barred her from becoming a citizen because of her highly visible involvement with the feminist peace movement, she continued her activism. In 1934 Turkey enfranchised women in national elections, a measure that radiated through Islamic networks.93 Transnational organizations carried some of this global activism among women, while books and ideas also helped sprout local initiatives that were independent of larger organizational •[ 87S ]• •[ 879 ]' EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD Huda Shaarawi (center) and the Egyptian delegation to the Ninth International Woman Suffrage Conference in Rome, 1913. Shaarawi was the force behind rhe Egyptian Feminist Union, the first explicitly feminist organization in Egypt. The Union merged feminism with advocacy on behalf of anticolonial nationalism and Islamic modernity. (C. C. Catt Collection, Bryn Mawr Collce Library, Special Collections) structures. Modest reformist approaches and bold transgressive acts both found encouragement within the formal and informal transnational circuits ..that women were forging. For many women who struggled to gain the right to vote, national sirf-age campaigns constituted less ends in themselves than means by which other soci.i! concerns might be addressed. Women in many countries led reformist causes associated specifically with women's issues. Josephine Butler led efforts to protect prostitutes in England and the British Empire, and Ghenia Avril de Sainie-Croix carried on Butler s work in France and within the League of Nations during the interwar era. Transnational efforts aimed at protecting women from" becoming the victims of male vice and sexual exploitation. ■[ 880 ]• Members of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) argued that greater political involvement by women could help protect the home by alleviating the brutalities arising from the evils of alcoholic drinks and prostitution. The WCTU, based in the United States, became one of the largest transnational women's movements, extending itself along currents of Christian connections and, mostly, within the zones of Anglo-American cultural influence. WCTU members believed that the United States was superior in its drinking habits to most of the rest of the world. Indeed, temperance crusades had successfully lowered alcoholic consumption in the United States. Moreover, the WCTU held that Christianity, efforts for peace, work against violence against laborers, and opposition to both prizefighting and animal cruelty would advance globally along with women's rights and temperance. Basing their arguments on biological essentialism, WCTU members advanced the view that women, as mothers, were natural homemakers and peacemakers, while men spread militarism and exploitative profit making. Women, in effect, were represented as the mothers of the human species and as custodians of international morality and well-being. Ian Tyrrell's global history of the WCTU traces the work of some of the thirty-eight global missionaries the WCTU dispatched to recruit women worldwide.'4 Empowerment of women as a means to combat militarism was a common theme among transnational women's groups. Calling for a halt to conflict in Europe, an international group of women met at The Hague in 1915 and established the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. This group quickly widened its mission to fight colonialism and racism as well as militarism, and it became one of the few interracial organizations of the interwar era—a time when views of strict racial hierarchies were still strong. Birth control became another cause of transnational advocacy. Drawing upon European women physicians who advocated use of the vaginal diaphragm, Margaret Sanger promoted birth control in the United States and gained both acclaim and notoriety worldwide. After she met Sanger in New York in 1919, for example, Baroness Ishimoto (later Kato) Shizue returned to japan and formed a birth control league. When Japanese authorities refused to grant Sanger a visa to visit, Sanger booked a ship to China, docked in Japan on the way, and received visitors in her stateroom. Under pressure, authorities finally permitted Sanger to •[ 881 ]• EMIT 1 - .in SI MliLRr, MargaretSangerandIshimoto([atefKac6)Shizue(sidebyside,cenKr)>andoth.r.i.1,i. u , n 1,,,t:, control in Japan, 1937. These two women worked in their respective countries and also rIuImIIv m elevate the status of women and to give women more power over planning cheir fami.n ICaro vAm lived to age 104, was one of the first women elected to the Japanese Diet after w.-imcr n.u.i sati (self-immolation), foot binding, and harem as evidence of the ba*. maidn.es» and injustice that colonial uplift might remedy. The harem especial \ betamj construed in much of the West as the very antithesis of respectable t onons ol family order and as a sign of a degenerate society that only imperial authority could stamp out. TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD At the same time, women in less powerful colonized territories often recog-)ized that they were constrained through both imperial and gender inequalities. In this sense, feminism (a term that appeared in various languages in Western Eu-,ope in the late nineteenth century) and anti-imperial causes could also go hand in rand. Moreover, women's advocates from colonies could call on women from the mctropole to support their causes and give them international visibility. In he iSSos and 1890s, for example, India's Pandita Ramabai appealed to networks in lin'dand and the United States to press her opposition to Hindu customs related ro child marriage and sati. She also converted to Christianity. Such women's and ■ christian networks helped her finance her Mukti Mission, established in 1889 for he education and training of poor women, especially widows. Still, Indian feminism did not arise out of a transnational network of women so much as it sprang rrom local grievances and traditions and then tapped into broader networks. And hesc could be fragile. Pandita Ramabai's feminism so disquieted some of her British missionary sponsors that they came to see her as heretical.96 Global travel consistently undermined the idea that Euro-American women activists were essential in bringing greater women's equality to the rest of the A'brld. When American Carrie Chapman Catt decided to "survey the status of vvomen" by a global trip around the world from 1911 to 1913, she found both the expected and the unexpected. In many places she saw the disempowerment and even isolation forced upon women and commented upon women's plight in clearly Orientalist terms. But she also traveled through places, such as Rangoon, Burma (now Myanmar), where matriarchal customs meant that women voted in local elections, held property, could choose and divorce their husbands, and controlled much of the retail trade. In some places in Southeast Asia, she witnessed the decline of women's power as the influence of Islam and Christianity spread. In the end, she wrote that her trip provided "an experience so upsetting to all our preconceived notions that it is difficult to estimate its influence upon us."'7 Women's networks entangled unpredictably within the uncertain currents of :ransnationalism. Transnational organizations to improve the status of women became somewhat less visible over time, especially in the West. Older women dominated these movements, and younger women seemed reluctant to join the formal associations that championed suffrage, pressed purity causes, and frequently advocated •[ 88i ]• •[ 883 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD a variety of religious or political agendas.'8 Younger, particularly urban, women found attractions within another, quite different, transnational current--consumerism. "Modern girls" popped up on every continent in the early twerit.-eth century. Like the organized transnational women's movements with whcli they occasionally overlapped, these "modern" women asserted an independent spirit and sought new freedoms. But they rejected the nineteenth century's worl. i of women, one that often assumed values found in homosocial bonds, gender es-sentialism, and domesticity. Instead many "modern girls" gravitated toward a jazzier version of femininity that looked toward heterosexual companionship, a sporty and androgynous look, and a revamped vision of family life. This chapters final section will examine "modern girls" and their involvement in an array of transnational "codes" spawned through consumerism. The bonds they developed were less those of affection based on gender than those woven through acts of purchase and self-presentation in an age of mass media. The variety of aspirations projected in global women's movements reflected differing ideas about proper or natural gender roles. Definitions of masculinity and femininity and of proper sexuality, of course, varied widely around the world. As global networks intruded upon localized habits, the production of perceived gender differences and of sexual behaviors could undergo change and challenge, not always in predictable ways. Discourses of masculinity generally infused imperial ideologies, as a rhetoric of benevolent paternalism mixed with the threat of military force. Many women's organizations, as we have seen, participated in this masculine projection of empire, endorsing an extreme version of domesticity counterpoised against a presumably rational and assertive manliness. On the other hand, the new global connectivities, even in imperial realms, also provided networks within which people on both sides of colonial divides could meet, question prevailing social values, and develop alternative affiliations. In transnational space, feminists and same-sex unions might find nourishment for their opposition to rigid gender or sexual norms. Cosmopolitanism could thus challenge the very discourses of masculinity that were embedded in imperial and other hierarchical relationships. Issues of gender expectations and realms of intimacy, as Ann Stoler has elaborated, lay not outside of imperial and global politics but often at their heart." In this increasingly networked world, aesthetic currents associated with music, literature, and art may have produced some of the most intangible, yet enduring, attachments. Realism, impressionism, cubism, art nouveau, surrealism, Dada-ism, and neoclassicism all drew together aesthetic movements that developed a global semiotics and, often, cosmopolitan circuits of collaborating artists and intellectuals. Paris seemed to generate an intellectual avant-garde. Its status as a transnational gathering place provided fertile soil for cross-cultural attachments based within globalized artistic communities of many kinds. It would be impossible, however, to map all of the transnational affiliations and intellectual currents that developed in this era.100 This section has tried to suggest examples rather than provide a comprehensive accounting, and to advance several central arguments. First, transnational affiliations almost invariably harbored tensions between universalistic and particularistic claims and goals. Second, realms of the transnational, the national, the imperial, and the local were not distinct; most people lived in them all at the same time. Global currents and the individuals involved in them shaped localized variations and vice versa; transmission lines ran in diverse directions, and the frictions among them often proved mutually constitutive. •[ 884 ]■ •[ 88s 1- 3. Exhibitionary Nodes AS popular representations of the world's geographic and human diversity spread within the increasingly dense transnational currents of the age, collecting and categorizing became a mania, as both science and enterrainment tried to tame, order, and make legible the world's vast differences. The tradition of collecting "curiosities" and of assembling specimens from around the world, of course, well predated the late nineteenth century. Collectors in this era, however, displayed a distinctive faith that the sum of their assemblages would produced system of universalized knowledge that would transcend geographical bound;. Most collectors and exhibitors saw the "facts" of their collections as building a unifying system. In Britain, writes Thomas Richards, "the administrative core of the Empire was built around knowledge-producing institutions like the British Museum, the Royal Geographical Society, the India Survey, and the universities," and collections of data promised to rationalize the empire, and the world, by ordering them into "categories of categories."101 Such enthusiastic faith in collec-: tions of facts and artifacts emerged from a confluence of romanticism, evolutionary ideas, bureaucratic methodologies, and the rapid shrinking of time and space. Who, however, collects what, and what is collected? Who establishes categories, and what gets categorized? The answers to such questions help map flows of power and constructions of hierarchy that once masqueraded as naturally ordained. The mania for collection both shaped and reflected the transnational currents and power dynamics of the age. The taxonomies created within collections ordered the world s presumed differences—in national capacities, in racial and sexual characteristics, and in animal and plant hierarchies. They were implicated in structuring imperialism and in asserting national and class advantage. Collecting, cataloging, and exhibiting can assert (or simulate) control. Yet the more these exhibitionary nodes linked into broad global networks, the less their meanings could be carefully channeled. The exhibiting and collecting of this age certainly TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD projected dominant hierarchies, but they also represented the messier attributes of "contact zones"—realms of transnational connection where what was taught and what was learned could be neither tightly disciplined nor unambiguous. World's Fairs World s fairs in our period perhaps best reflected the exhibitionary spirit of the age. They presumed to present tours of the world, but each was a tour confined to a constricted space, locality, and time. Fairs were shaped within the politics of individual large cities vying for attention, and they mostly represented the world as imagined by their sponsors, usually Westerners. They opened and then closed within several months. But despite their seemingly local and ephemeral nature, world's fairs constituted one of the most important nodes in the transnational currents of this period. Fairs became major cultural enterprises of global significance because their representations projected powerful imaginaries about the world, its diverse cultures, and its interconnectivity and divisions. They often left behind catalogs, collections, iconic buildings, networks of people, and memories that continued to structure perceptions of world "realities." A world's fair offered a simplified and comprehensible scale to both those who attended and those who learned indirectly about its exhibits. A series of world's fairs stretched over the century that followed the famous Great Exhibition in London in 1851, better known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition. The idea was simple: if masses of people could not traverse the actual world, then glimpses and bits of that world could be assembled and represented to them. To showcase whatever city and country served as host, each fair attempted to contrive a compelling attraction that could both educate and entertain.102 The dozens of small and large fairs—held mostly in the West and deeply implicated in the emerging colonialist order—conveyed multiple meanings and by no means advanced any unified view of the world. Yet their projected imaginaries about the state of the world's peoples and history illuminate two of this chapter's prominent themes. First, the fairs mixed images of national and cultural particularism with expressions of universalism. They provided structured representations of the new imperialism of the age—a time of nationalistic excesses and decidedly hierarchical visions—but cast these visions as a harmonious ■\ 886 1- ■r 887 1- EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD coming together of disparate parts. Universal peace was a prominent thcin2 most of the exhibitions, but so, of course, was nationalism. Secondly, discour,es of rationality often coexisted with, and even helped give definition to, a spccu-. ularity associated with the emergence of mass mediated culture. The fairs mi? t g| may imply a global/local dichotomy in which the global was the imperial enemy of the local. Other postcolonial scholars, however, have emphasized "co-production" between the transnational and local realms. They argue that even in a world of vastly unequal power and of racial and imperial hierarchies, good science depended on co-constructed circuits that could accommodate the experimentation, comparison, and collaboration that transnational connections facilitated.155 As participants in building circuits of expertise on radio waves, for example, the Bengali scientist J. C. Bose, the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, and the Serbian-American Nikola Tesla were all important to the late nineteenth-century transnational breakthroughs in research. This section builds on the framework of coproduction. If circuits of knowledge often projected imperial and hierarchical assumptions, localized interactions also altered both findings and implementations. Even as scientists tended to endorse the idea of a common transnational language and methodology, differentiated and coproduced expressions on the ground often reshaped their sense of commonalities. While keeping in mind asymmetries of power when analyzing epistemic currents, then, the discussion that follows emphasizes to the themes of coproduction and differentiated commonalities.156 Scientists, Surveyors, and Engineers In 1870 a proponent of the idea that the earth was flat bet five hundred pounds sterling that no one could scientifically prove the earth's curvature in a body of water. British naturalist and professional surveyor Alfred Russel Wallace rose to the challenge. He set up an experiment along six miles of the Bedford Level, in Norfolk, demonstrated a discrepancy in heights of objects at each end, and was judged the winner. The outcome, however, only further energized the flat-earth proponent, who denounced and sued Wallace for years into the future.157 Flat-earthers, who retained a transnational group of supporters, could not accept the world as a globe, despite the repetition of this "Bedford Level Experiment" in many other places on into the twentieth century. The theory of a round earth, of course, had predated Columbus's voyage, and one might have expected that the famous explorations of the seventeenth EMILY S. ROSENBERG and eighteenth centuries would have worn down beliefs about a flat earth. But scientific revisions of deeply rooted "truths" about the makeup of the world never come easily. The global spread of new scientific methods created backlash and uncertainty everywhere. What might be the implications for humans of a round earth? Or of the accumulating evidence confirming an evolutionary view of biology, anothet view with which Wallace was associated? Could science (with its view of how the earth and its creatures slowly evolved over far more than seven days) be reconciled with the Bible or the Quran or other spiritual systems? Despite the storms of controversy raised by such questions, prevalent even (or especially) in those areas in the forefront of scientific discovery, confidence about the reliability of scientific technique spread rapidly. Scientists (the word scientist was coined in the 1830s and widely used by the late nineteenth century) created webs of understandings and techniques that sought to corral the world s natural systems into arenas of specialized knowledge tamed for human use. Guided by emerging professional standards and goaded by naysayers, expertise became transnational. To comprehend the earth in scientific terms required extensive mapping and surveying with scientific techniques such as Wallace had employed. Although the mapping of trade routes had long been commonplace, the latter half of the nineteenth century brought precision mapping on a different scale than before. In this period, experts explored and surveyed the last remaining unmapped areas of the world in the name of science and usually of empire. New techniques of triangulation produced very large-scale field surveys, and such scientific surveys often included the accumulation of detailed data on the people, animals, plants, and natural features of a region. The scientific expeditions that surveyed and described the remaining "unknown" world produced heroic figures, especially in those national states and empires that might reap benefits. Britain's Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, for example, became one of the celebrated attempts of the early nineteenth century to create a vast archive of knowledge for imperial purposes. Then, between 1863 and 1885, Britain hired native Indians to measure and map the million-and-and half square miles of the trans-Himalayan region. Code-named "pundits," these mappers took the disguise of pilgrims and risked their lives and health to record accurate measurements of the territory, which technically bc- mm 1 TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD longed to China. On his first surveying trip, Nain Singh walked twelve hundred miles recording his measured steps by using specially constructed rosary beads; he subsequently won international fame and awards from the Royal Geographical Society. Pundit Sarat Chandra Das wrote two books and inspired the character of Hurree Chunder Mookerjee in Kim, Rudyard Kipling's famous novel about the Great Game in Central Asia. The pundit known as Kinthup (or K.P.) returned to India after four years of harrowing danger, during which he and his colleagues mapped the course of the Brahmaputra from its source into India. Although their activities had remained secret during the mapping, these and other pundits soon became highly acclaimed because their technical contributions had significantly enhanced survey techniques and their endurance epitomized imperial greatness. European expeditions into sub-Saharan Africa also took advantage of local expertise. In trying to settle a dispute over the origin of the Nile, for example, Richard Francis Burton relied upon Arab informants while his rival John Hanning Speke relied on Ugandans. Their competition erupted into high drama when Speke shot himself in advance of a public showdown with Burton. Henry Morton Stanley's attempt to settle this controversy would explode into one of the most sensational stories of the late nineteenth century.lss Land surveys and scientific commissions proliferated in the late nineteenth century, as the ambitions of national states intertwined with the discourses of expertise that sought to make the whole world legible. Only governments could afford the expense that extensive triangulations entailed, and only national states had the compelling interest in developing systematic and uniform statistical information. Both Russia and the United States, for example, commissioned scientific surveys to map and consolidate knowledge about their inland empires. John Wesley Powell, who would later serve as director of rhe US Geological Survey, famously explored the Colorado River and Grand Canyon in the 18 60s. Various US biological surveys, which preceded the creation of the Fish and Wildlife Service Bureau in 1939, were likewise guided by scientific agendas. Russian surveyors gathered information on Siberia, as well as bordering lands in Central Asia and Tibet. Napoleon III created the Scientific Commission of Mexico to "lift up this unknown world and deliver it from chaos." This commission (1864-1867), which coincided with the ill-fated French attempt to establish •Í 92-4 1- •í 92s 1- EMILY S. ROSENBERG OWE TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD an empire in Mexico under Maximilian, floundered in its extravagant ambitions but did issue a lavish sixteen-volume report along with important reference works on the botany and zoology of Mexico. Mapping the most inaccessible parts of the world became "global sport in both Norway and Sweden," as com peting explorers ventured north of Siberia across the Northeast Passage, north of Canada across the Northwest Passage, into Central Asia, and also entered the-race to the South Pole.159 Colonial administration heightened the need for surveys of land and people, and each colonial power adopted some form of expert commission to collect and evaluate information on acquired territories.160 The United States carried out extensive data collection in the Philippines after 1898. In these reports, the array of landscapes and peoples that characterized the various territories of the archipelago came to buttress the views that ranked peoples of the world into a racial hierarchy according to skin color, physical features, type of agricultural practice, and gender norms. The modernizing elites in Manila also had a stake in such surveys, as they worked to assert their own capacities for scientific administration and for larger degrees of self-governance. Even though surveys were legitimating tools of colonial states, they often attracted help from subjects who were engaged in their own nation-building and career-enhancing projects.161 International agreements such as the many boundary-drawing treaties of this period—for example, the Anglo-Afghan Treaty of 1875, the Canadian-US agreements, and the post-World War I territorial settlements made at Versailles—also depended on more accurate, common maps. The idea that the entire world could be "known" provided a strong pillar not only of the age's confidence in measurement but also of the conviction that the world, through science, might converge into a unified, if hierarchically ordered, whole. Mapping projects provide clear examples of how nationalism, imperialism, and transnationalism often stood not in opposition but as codependents. As empty spaces on world maps became filled and calibrated, the history of humankind through archeology likewise became a field for global, rather than simply local, knowledge. More precisely, local knowledge interacted with and helped to shape emerging transnational disciplinary practices. German archeol-ogists were especially important in this late nineteenth-century development. Alexander Conze became the first to include photography in reports of archaeo- : i IIS m 'is'k'- Ifllllp MĚĚĚ logical excavation; Carl Humann, an important developer of scientific techniques of excavation, worked throughout the Ottoman Empire and cooperated with archeologist Osman Hamdi Bey, founder of the Istanbul Archeology Museum. Teobert Maler, born of German parents, came to Mexico with an Austrian army supporting Maximilian, stayed to become a citizen of Mexico, conducted a survey of Palenque for Harvard's Peabody Museum, and devoted his life to archeological study of the Mayan civilization. Heinrich Schliemann, who had traveled to California and made a fortune in banking during the Gold Rush, conducted significant but also highly sensationalized digs to uncover the sites of Homer s Troy. In the decades before World War I, Germans developed a keen interest in the Bible as a historical text and, consequently, in Middle Eastern archeology.162 Worldly scientists illuminated natural and human history, but their activities also often led to the plundering of local sites, the alienation of artifacts, geopolitical positioning, and even hucksterism in the name of science. The careers of these German explorer-scientists suggest the globality of this new age of investigation, as well as the uneven pace of identifying professionalized disciplinary practices. Such examples tend to confirm that surveying and archeological missions often bent scientific knowledge toward the purpose of Westerners. Naming is one way of claiming; controlling representation (in geographic space as well as in historical time) is the most profound form of power. Still, the new cultures of professionalism were not simply one-way impositions. Building transnational circuits of knowledge rested on local expertise and on various degrees of copro-duction. Moreover, globe-trotting professionals might become ever more cosmopolitan as they cultivated their abilities to thrive in unfamiliar terrain or to succeed as cultural mediators. Engineering, often considered to be applied science, became one of the most hallowed professions in this instrumentalist age. Sandford Fleming, a Canadian born in Scotland who was a member of over seventy international societies, a surveyor and mapmaker, a champion of the Prime Meridian reform movement, and a facilitator of the transoceanic cable line across the Pacific, saw his profession of engineering as a neutral peacemaker in the social turbulence of the industrial era. In 1876 he wrote that engineers were not usually "gifted with many words" but that they did battle against "nature in her wild state" in order to ■[ 9^-7 ]• EMILY S. ROSENBERG "smooth the path on which others are to tread." "It is their privilege to stand between these two great forces, capital and labour, and by acting justly at all times between employer and the employed, they may hope to command the respect of those above them equally with those under them."163 Moreover, the amazing technical feats associated with construction of the Suez Canal in the 1860s and the Panama Canal in the early twentieth century became emblematic of the claim that engineering could draw the world geographically closer together. Civil engineers working on projects such as canals, roads, and bridges were among the most active professionals to form transnational networks that were both personal and professional. Although this ideal of the politically neutral engineer skilled in universally useful techniques circulated widely, many of the huge turn-of-the-century projects employed laboring people in ways that could scarcely "command respect" from all. The building of the Panama Canal, for example, orchestrated one of the largest, most global labor mobilizations in modern history. With jobs and compensation scales arranged according to race and nationality (West Indians received the most perilous assignments for the lowest pay), the tens of thousands of imported workers from every continent paid a huge, generally overlooked price in life and limb, even as engineers reveled in accolades. Other colonial construction projects assembled similarly global workforces, not to serve the uplifting goals so often proclaimed in professional circles but to drive down costs in the increasingly globalized labor market.164 As engineers did battle against "wild nature" and sometimes against cadres of laborers, their efforts were almost always justified within an entangled rationale linking service to the world with service to empire and nation. The case of India provides an example. Under the rule of both the East India Company (EIC) and then the British crown, India became a laboratory for experiments in the application of scientific and technical expertise. The construction of canals, irrigation works (for agriculture), and railroads was central to the British conception of imperial development, yet this transportation infrastructure necessitated large numbers of civil engineers who could develop methods suitable to local conditions. Before the EIC relinquished its rule of India to the crown in 1858, it had established engineering colleges at Mumbai (Bombay), Roorkee, Calcutta, Roona, and Madras. The heavy emphasis on state-directed engineer- TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD ing projects accelerated in the latter half of the nineteenth century (an emphasis that ironically emerged simultaneously with Britain's highly visible public promotion of laissez-faire theories). The Famine Commission of 1880 especially pressed for a range of applied specialists, operating on the village level, and suggested that their success would be a test of imperial benevolence. After more end-of-the-century famines, the new viceroy, George Curzon, proclaimed that the advancement of practical science would be his highest priority, and he created a Board of Scientific Advice that lasted until 1924. The model of state-sponsored engineering schools and ambitious projects, pioneered in India, came to be replicated in Britain itself and elsewhere in the empire. Indian graduates became part of a broad transnational network of experts from everywhere on the globe who shared ideas about technical training and infrastructure development.165 Britain, the United States, France, and Germany each adopted somewhat different models for the training, credentialing, and employment of engineers. More important than such differences, however, was the proliferation throughout Europe and colonial areas of technical schools, each with specializations relevant to the respective extractive and industrial strengths of each area. National and imperial rivalry thus fueled the transnational spread and exchange of technical practices. Building canals and railway beds, regulating river flow, and draining wetlands for agriculture all fit the export-oriented goals of colonial powers and often fit within the modernizing visions of elites outside of Europe as well. By the early 1880s, for example, most irrigation engineers in Egypt were Egyptians schooled in the techniques of the Ecole Polytechnique in France, and the surplus of Egyptian-trained experts served throughout the region for decades.166 China's technical education likewise arose within the context of both transnational networks of expertise and nation-building imperatives. The Chinese "self-strengthening" movement, launched after the second Opium War, emphasized military technology, engineering, and basic science. The Fuzhou Naval Yard, one of the most important industrial sites in late-Qing China, hired foreigners to teach many of the technical courses related to ship building. Similarly, the expansion of its Jiangnan Arsenal, which focused on training related to technology and machinery, by 1891 produced forty-seven kinds of machinery under the supervision of foreign technicians and successfully produced rapid-firing machine guns for China's coastal defense. New schools, encouraged by the •[ 9*8 ]■ •f 929 1- EMILY S. ROSENBERG Chinese governmenc, embraced Western science and emphasized engineering, even as increasingly more Chinese students also studied abroad. Although China's defense industries faltered in the face of the country's declining resources and defeat in wars, they exemplify how important access to transnational networks of experts became in helping to determine which countries flourished and * : which floundered in the late nineteenth century. In the late 19x0s and early -il'if j., 1930s the Nationalist government in China worked with German experts to clv to shift industrial infrastructure away from treaty pons to presumably less vut nerable interior locations, but this program also stalled as war approached.1""7 ;: Japanese scientists worked very successfully to join transnational scientific circles. Self-confidently embracing attributes of modernity, the state promoted :iar-ticipation in technical and professional conferences, issued the extensive reports of the Iwakura mission, and sponsored student study outside of Japan. Japan's scientists made special contributions to the science of seismology, among other fields.'63 Japan's modernizers and scientists did not regard such transnational participation as Westernization, because they sought to import Western practices not as a cohcr-ent entity but as piecemeal adaptations. The newspaper Nihon, published on the day the new Japanese constitution was announced in 1889, stated, "We esteem Western science, economics and industry. These, however, ought not be adopted simply because they are Western; they ought to be adopted only if they can contribute to Japan's welfare."115* The overlap between transnational circuits and statc-building projects could hardly be better expressed. Engineering projects often focused on controlling water resources. Hydroelectric dams proliferated in the late nineteenth century, especially in the United States, Scandinavia, and the Alps, as a result of improvements in turbines and transmission lines. An era of large-scale dam building began in earnest with the construction in 1931 of Hoover Dam, which was completed in the United States in 1936 and thought to be the largest man-made structure in the world and a marvel of modern engineering. Other monster-size dams followed: Shasta Dam in California and Grand Coulee Dam in Washington. Meanwhile, American engineers were helping lead the construction of the Dneprostroi Dam in Ukraine, Soviet Union, in the late 1910s and early 1930s. General Electric Company manufactured the dam's first huge power generators. At the time of its construction, the Dneprostroi Dam claimed to be the largest in Europe. France TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD completed the Kembs Dam in 1931 on the Rhine River, which had been a site for hydroelectric power since the late nineteenth century and would become thoroughly regulated by a dam-and-lock system after World War II. Uses of the Rhine (but unfortunately not its protection, until more recently) lay in the hands of engineers of the Rhine Commission, which, dating back to 1815, was the oldest multi-state commission in Europe. In China, engineers for the Nationalist government, inspired by foreign models, as early as the 1910s began plans for a huge dam at Three Gorges on the Yangzi River (a plan ultimately carried out after 1989).170 Created under President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) most fully reflected the vision of top-down planning for the kind of huge projects that technocrats everywhere began to associate with modernization and progress. The TVA married the promise of engineering a system of dams to regulate an entire river system with the hope of engineering human health and prosperity on a broad regional scale. Dams could bring both flood control for agricultural development and inexpensive electrical power for accelerated industrialization. Farmers and workers, region and nation would all supposedly benefit. The TVA model became globally influential, and in the next few decades millions of people would tour its system. TVA's head, David Lilien-thal, popularized the idea that dams would bring progress to any country whose wild rivers were "waiting to be controlled by men." His writings were translated into many languages.171 Although most of the large dam-building projects in the developing world, influenced by the TVA model, came after World War II and often with financing from the World Bank, American, Soviet, Nazi, and other dam-building undertakings during the 1930s confirm the importance of a trans-nationally influential developmentalist project not necessarily tied to particular forms of national states. From the late nineteenth century on, for example, German engineers had been reshaping the Rhine, and under the Third Reich they drained marshlands to the east while also advancing ideas about reshaping both the landscape and its people. Each state, of course, manifested the commonality of water-related developmentalism in somewhat different figurations. Despite the disruptions associated with the First World War and the waning prestige of the German academic institutions that had often taken a lead in pro-fessionalization, the interwar era became the heyday of transnational professional associations, especially in the natural sciences. Under the auspices of the •[ 93° ]• ■r 1. EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD International Research Council, formed in Brussels in 1919, international unions were formed for astronomy, biology, chemistry, geophysics, and physics in 1919, and for geography, radio science, mechanics, soil sciences, and microbiology in the 1920s. In 1931 the Research Council regrouped as the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), headquartered in Paris, and continued to foster it:, networks. The Comintern also sponsored its own transnational professional circuits, the most important of which advocated the complementary scientific nature of the biological and physical sciences. Walking the line between robust universalistic scientific communities and the hierarchies of empire seldom came easily outside of Europe. Most Indian scientists, for example, had experienced second-class status in British scientific and administrative circles. In 1876 Mahendra Lai Sircar consequently had helped launch the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), a group independent from colonial authority that eventually affiliated with the physics and chemistry department at Calcutta University. The group ultimately produced scientists who received global recognition, such as the 1930 Nobel Prize winner C. V. Raman, the first Asian scientist so honored. P. C. Ray, one of the great chemists of the turn of the century, who had been heavily influenced by developments in Germany, in-■;: sisted in 1918 that "the Hindus had a very large hand in the cultivation of the experimental sciences" and wrote his monumental A History of Hindu Chemistry (1901-1909) to carefully document the scientific heritage of his nation, which remained under colonial rule.'72 Prominent Indian scientists, such as Ray's student Meghnad Saha, went on to advocate national advancement through the use of science for industrial promotion. Even when seeing science as wedded to particular national goals, however, Indian scientists such as Saha asserted the belief that science, as a transnational endeavor, should stand above particularity and draw the world together. Saha wrote that "rivalry amongst nations should give way to cooperative construction and the politician should hand over his functions to an international board of trained scientific industrialists, economists and eugenicists who would think in terms of the whole world."175 Muslim and Hindu scientists sometimes formed distinct groups with different goals, but Rabindra Narayan Ghosh, who wrote on the use of scientific method, felt that cultural unity could be found in technological achievement. Without repudiating religious backgrounds, he taught, people could find common ground in scientific rationality. The scientific and technical endeavors of this period were thus not necessarily Western impositions foisted on the unwilling. Although unequal and frequently in service of empire, professional circuits could generate sparks of transformative innovation from diverse locations. Ashis Nandy has suggested, for example, that the creative brilliance of Indian mathematician Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan, who persistently resisted the kinds of proofs demanded by Cambridge professors and instead invoked Hindu deities as the agents for his mathematical breakthroughs, may have stemmed from the rich cultural cross-fertilization in his own life.174 Epistemic currents, in short, became stronger as their architects became larger in number and more varied in background. Agricultural and Forestry Sciences The devastating waves of famine from the 1870s through the turn of the century, particularly in India and China, elicited calls for greater agricultural expertise. These "late Victorian holocausts," to use Mike Davis's term, seem linked to ways in which colonialist policies were changing both the global and the local economic orders. Still, governmental elites and agricultural experts from America and Europe generally promoted the idea that Western science and engineering were the solution, not the problem. Blind to ways in which interaction with the West could often devastate the complex social and economic networks that supported native production and land tenure systems, agronomists allied with engineers to build circuits of knowledge that promised to boost yields, control floods and erosion, and eliminate pests. George Curzon, for example, inaugurated a large number of experimental farms and agricultural colleges in India; a contingent of missionary-soil scientists from the United States went to work in China; Western hydrologists advised how to drain marshland and convert deltas in India and Southeast Asia into farms for rice export. As agricultural experts helped plantation agriculture spread throughout the world, more and more people became enmeshed in labor and commodity markets.175 Although Western agricultural experts in the early twentieth century generally worked to enhance the profits earned by export commodities, global networks that introduced new methods could also facilitate an optimal mix of new and old practices. In the Kigezi district of southwestern Uganda, unlike in much •f 932 1- -[ 933 ]• EMILY S. ROSENBERG of the colonial world, local farmers rejected colonial land policies and cash cropping yet adapted new soil conservation practices that they layered onto precold: nial customs. Their careful and limited interface with networks of agrarian expertise enabled them to produce farm surpluses even as population grew.176 As with agricultural science, the rise of a science of forestry accompanied the growth of colonial power. In many parts of the world, forests were common property, or at least different groups of people had access to different uses of the forest. However, as traditional ways broke down under the globalization of markets, forestry experts increasingly made a case for systematic, top-down interven tion to curb the rapid clearing of land and the avarice for extractive products. The claim that experts backed by the power of states would make wiser use of resources than would local people bolstered arguments for standardizing arir even commercializing forestry practices. Interventions in forestry, like those in agriculture, had various effects. Some changed the land in dramatic and irreversible ways by developing methods of intensive use that contributed to deforestation globally. Forestry science could easily work against local groups who lived in or depended upon mixed forests. US timber experts, for example, devised methods of systematic logging in the colony of the Philippines. In German East Africa, one study concludes, "scientific forestry" was neither rational nor efficient but simply served the needs of colonial extractive industries. Colonial forestry experts in Southeast Asia became both advocates and facilitators for the huge rubber plantations that came to dominate land use there. Throughout the colonial world, European demands to make space for plantations of sugar, rubber, pineapples, and other commodities took down mixed forests and the lives of people who depended upon them.177 In other cases, transnational experience helped forestry experts grasp the important interrelationships between forests, healthy environments, and culture. The early nineteenth-century German biogeographer Alexander von Humboldt profoundly influenced nineteenth-century visions of the tropics. Born in Prussia but living for extensive periods in the Americas and Paris, this influential transnational figure had addressed the deleterious consequences of cutting trees from mountainsides. Of even more significance for forestry was the work of George Perkins Marsh, the American scientist and US ambassador to Italy from 1861 to 1882.. Marsh's influential books Man andNature (1864) and The Earth as TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD Modified by Human Action (1874} examined the global interrelationships among foresrs, wildlife, watersheds, and healthy communities. His work influenced the German-born Australian acclimatizer Ferdinand von Müller, who championed horticultural connections between California and Australia and helped develop exchanges of seeds and plants, including the Australian eucalyptus varieties that became so widespread in California.178 Professionalized forestry services often emerged as transnational coproduc-tions. British colonial officials made tropical forests in India a training ground, and Indian foresters subsequently helped shape forest services in New Zealand, Ceylon, Kenya, Nigeria, and elsewhere. Gifford Pinchot, the founder of the US Forest Service who had previously studied at the French forestry school in Nancy, developed the conservation doctrine of "wise use" that became widely influential in Canada, Australia, and South Africa. The forest services of the major colonial powers watched each other closely and exchanged practices. The science of forestry thus branched in several directions—toward greater exploitation, toward enhanced sensirivity to ecological interactions, and toward coproduction of practices among colonial and local experts. As in the case of other professionalized circuits, transnational interactions became critical in shaping policies, practices, and debates that historians have too often studied only within the framework of national or imperial hisrories. Science in the Social Sphere In rhe nineteenth century, close observation, careful documentation, and creative experimentation rapidly changed ideas about the natural world. Alfred Russel Wallace traveled through what is now Malaysia and Indonesia in the late 1850s and early 1860s, collected 1x5,000 specimens, and carefully observed the differences in their characteristics. He formulated ideas about natural selection and evolutionary theory that his friend, Charles Darwin, was also developing from his famed five-year voyage (1831—1836} on HMS Beagle."9 This revolution in the way scientists thought about the natural world, together with convictions about the efficacy of applying scientific techniques, began to influence what came to be called the "social" realm. In the late nineteenth century, rhe influence of what has been called "social Darwinism" mixed with philosophies such as ■Í 934 I" ■[ 935 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD August Comte's "positivism" to influence a larger milieu that forecast evolutionary social improvement through the application of professional expertise. Daniel T. Rodgers's Atlantic Crossings details how the development of industrial capitalism in Europe and North America prompted a transatlantic exchange designed to address common social problems. Intellectuals and practitioners of newly emerging professions such as political economy, sociology, and education addressed questions of public sanitation, vice, labor codes, currenq, poverty, housing, disability, and old age. They also debated the role that centra 1 governments should play in redressing social ills. Could transnational groups of experts create a "social science"? Such exchange, of course, did not mean agreement on specific matters, no:-did it encompass only Western Europe and the United States. The many transnational conversations that developed over how to tackle social problems certainly did not move toward programmatic cohesion. German social insurance plans introduced in the 1880s, for example, provided an influential model that stood in sharp contrast to experiments with worker's cooperatives or to the more private, corporate-dominated welfare systems developed in the United States. The Soviet government in the interwar period advanced very different socialist models that attracted leaders of Marxist parties to Moscow for study and exchange. But even if particular models varied, the transnational epistemic disciplines now calling themselves "social sciences" did foster some common sets of referents and generally shared the conviction that the whole world, in effect, could become a giant laboratory for experiments in social improvement.180 This cross-fertilization of social science networks reached far beyond the Atlantic community, as modernizes in the Ottoman Empire, Japan, China, and Latin America also participated. The Meiji government in Japan after 1870 and rhe Turkish government of Mustafa Kemal in the interwar era, for example, carefully studied and adapted an array of international models that addressed social problems. Moreover, discussions of social policy often traveled within imperial networks affected by local conditions and also by what Ann Stoler has called the "politics of comparison" among empires. Leaders of the new Soviet Union in the interwar era proclaimed their ability to re-engineer a new social order and even to create a New Man. International conferences, world s fairs, travel, studem exchange, and mass publishing created circuits that brought leaders together from around the world. In the spirit of science, independent fact-gathering organizations burgeoned, especially in the United States. Before World War I, new institutions such as the Russell Sage Foundation, the Brookings Institution, the National Industrial Conference Board, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Twentieth Century Fund sought to propel an intellectual revolution based upon the practical application of expertise.181 The League of Nations enshrined the fact-gathering mentality in its various agencies, especially those dealing with labor and health. Although there was a growing chorus of dissenters who warned against the hubris and inherently antidemocratic tendency of the enshrinement of technocratic expertise, apostles of the new age paid as little heed to the naysay-ers as did natural scientists to flat-earthers. Social scientists were especially involved with educational experimentation, and "industrial education" provided one of the important new transnational models during the early twentieth century. Programs of industrial education fit well with the emerging colonial order. The Hampton Institute and the Tuskegee Institute, for example, pioneered industrial schools in the southern United States, in the US colony of the Philippines, in Haiti under US military occupation, in the protectorate of Cuba, and as part of US missionary efforts in Africa. Between 1901 and 1909 German authorities attempted to implant Tuskegee structures in Togo in order to boost cotton production for export. In the early 1920s, well-publicized commissions financed by the Phelps-Stokes Fund encouraged developing industrial education in Africa. The recommendations from these commissions found strong backing in the British colonial office and from John Dube, the president of the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Congress) and James Aggrey of the Gold Coast, who lionized Booker T. Washington's program of educational and economic development. Afro-Cubans also generally welcomed a close connection with Tuskegee because it brought broader awareness of Pan-African ties and allowed them to adapt Tuskegee's models to suit their own aspirations for upward mobility. The links between educational strategies directed toward American Indians, African-Americans, and colonial areas suggest the complex transnational intersections •[ 937 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD among progressive-era faiths in social science expertise and Christian social -gospel ideas. They also suggest how practices that transnational professional currents carried around the globe might express both Western colonialism and also the anticolonial goals of empowerment that challenged it.182 Racial Science As encounters with racially different people multiplied in this shrinking age, it i -hardly surprising that ideas about race figured prominently in all social science discussions. Examined transnationally, no broad brush can paint a characterization of the knowledge systems about race that prevailed from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. For brevity, however, one might tease out four dominant threads: a missionary discourse, a physical anthropology discourse, discourse of culture, and a discourse exalting race mixture and local empowerment (given various labels, such as indigenismo). All four circulated transnationally; they also often blurred and emerged in shadings. All could be found both as justifications for empire and as elements of anti-imperial arguments. But these four competing, and sometimes overlapping, views of the role of race helped construct the language and the understandings of social science and of world history that have long shaped discussions of the past and the present. The missionary-inspired imperial discourse, especially prevalent in the mid-nineteenth century, held out hope that racial others could be saved and transformed; that all characteristics of their culture could be purged and replaced by enforcing a universalized morality and discipline. William Holden, a British missionary among the Xhosa in Kaffraria, wrote that by breaking the power or chiefs and placing the Xhosa in educational and labor camps, British overseers could guide "the black races... to the highest state in the civil and ecclesiastica. world." The American founder of the Carlisle Indian boarding school, Captain Richard H. Pratt, put it more succinctly: "Kill the Indian, and save the Man." The violence suggested in such views (and demonstrated in colonial warfare) dripped with sentimentality about the essential equality of humankind. People could be coerced, in effect, into joining the Christian "brotherhood of man.1'183 The "science" of race that emerged in physical anthropology toward the turn of the century did not so much replace such views as layer another set of coercive justifications beside them. If races were, in effect, different competing species, as many social Darwinists argued, then the progress of humanity depended upon the more robust and powerful race taking firm control over others and, in time, dominating the genetic pool. The "race-suicide" theories, which seem to have ; sparked particular panic among Anglo-American elites, propelled pro-natalist policies directed at the "better" races and policies of destruction or sterilization or draconian control directed at the "lesser." As Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed, "With much of the competition between the races reducing itself to the warfare of the cradle, no race has any chance to win a great place unless it consists of good breeders as well as of good fighters."'84 Late nineteenth-century scientists (especially biologists and anthropologists) and medical doctors who wrote in terms of "racial type" usually presented racial mixing as degeneration within the human species. They also tended to represent successful nations and states as being ideally coterminous with racial composition. Such notions emerged especially strongly in settler colonies such as the United States, Australia, South Africa, and parts of South America. In these locations, becoming a "white" country seemed so pressing precisely because it was so problematic. Success in creating a white citizenship seemed to forecast national destiny in a "survival-of-the-fittest" world. j As Warwick Anderson and others have pointed out, however, the white body was not a stable signifier, and its biological definitions proved flexible according to location. Whiteness was frequently discussed as a matter of blood and heredity, but it was less a category of origins than a cultural category that connoted health, responsibility, and efficiency. Although white was an imprecise tetm, it nevertheless proved a useful marker in designating progress, along with a particular conception of masculinity, against its "nonwhite" opposite. To "whiten" a population also involved marginalizing, and often feminizing, nonwhite groups that were deemed to be "inefficient" or "degenerate." Racial science, empire, and global commerce all marched hand in hand to create a doctrine of "whiteness" and a racial justification critical to acquiring cheap labor.185 In Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere in Latin America, schemes to "whiten" the population through immigration became a major goal of national state building. As Juan Bautista Alberdi, the famous mid-nineteenth-century Argentine political theorist, put it in 1851, "gobernar es poblar" (to govern is to ■[ 938 ]■ •[ 939 ]" EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD populate). As the science of race became increasingly elaborated later in the century, Alberdi's dictum seemed ever more urgent. The director of the Museu Na-cional do Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the century joined other influential merrl-bers of the governing elite in proposing that Brazil convert its population from black to white.186 In Latin America, various incentive programs to attract immigrants from Europe, as well as proposals to "whiten" through modernization and efficiency, drew from and reinforced a discourse of racial hierarchy. As some late nineteenth-century reformers sought to improve their nations by whitening, many others pursued an associated program. What if professional interventions, with assistance from state power, could strengthen the body politic by improving and standardizing individual white bodies? Regeneration not just of the national body but of its individual members might mean that strong white bodies would no longer be confined to temperate climates but could master the tropics and inherit the earth. As social Darwinists regarded the ultimate triumph of white races throughout the globe as both assured by survival of the fittest and at risk if fitness were not maintained, eugenics became a transnational conversation propelled by organized networks and institutes. Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, is regarded as one of the founders of eugenics—the idea that, because of the hcrita-bility of physical and intellectual characteristics, humans could be improved by scientific breeding. Eugenic ideas, important to the construction of states and empires, traveled rapidly within elite circles who wished to "better" their popula ■ tions by preventing interracial unions and by barring the reproduction of those whose supposedly inheritable conditions (such as epilepsy, "feeble-mindedness,"! even alcoholism) rendered them undesirable. An international literature, circulating especially in the West, sounded alarms about a decline in fertility among European peoples, especially after the huge losses in population associated with World War I, and about the need to "strengthen" populations. This concern reflected anxieties about race and about how the growing participation of white women in public areas and workplaces outside the home might adversely affeci reproductive rates. Eugenics, however, was a big tent, and its supporters by no means all saw the world alike. One branch of eugenics (stronger in the United States, Britain, and Germany) assumed that biology and reproduction controlled destiny. Two Calk fornians, Eugene Gosney and Paul Popenoe established the Human Betterment Foundation in 192.8 and published Sterilization for Human Betterment (19x9). Their book and other publications, which advocated eugenics through sterilization, circulated throughout the world and proved especially influential in Germany. California and Sweden became leaders in eugenic sterilization programs— many involuntary.'37 British settler populations in Kenya in the 1930s also adapted eugenic ideas and created a vigorous movement. Although widely supported by the medical profession in Kenya, the push for racially based eugenicist policies in Kenya failed after the British colonial office refused to back it. In the Third Reich, official promotion of public hygiene, racial doctrines, and doctors' interests in medical experimentation mixed together to create a system designed to cleanse the fatherland through increasingly horrifying practices of eugenic medicine. German legislation passed shortly after Adolf Hitler seized power led to sterilization of two to four hundred thousand people. The Nazi state financed a eugenics institute, employed Hereditary Health Courts to decide on sterilization, traced the genealogies of "criminal types," and set up a racially based welfare state that targeted Jews and others who were deemed unfit for life under National Socialism. The horrific medical experiments at Auschwitz and the mass killings of Jews and other "undesirables" emerged from these ideas about "bettering" humanity through elimination of "unfit" breeders. Historians have tried to explain how such extreme exterminationist practices emerged in Germany. Some have argued that German anthropology in the nineteenth century embraced a tolerant, humanistic, and internationalist agenda, while Anglo-American and French variants saw races ranked within an evolutionary hierarchy. In the early twentieth century, however, Anglo-American cultural anthropologists began to leave behind the physical measurement of "racial type" and accentuate the pluralism of cultural traditions. Indeed, the German-born Franz Boas and his cultural anthropology students at Columbia University saw themselves as continuing the older humanistic Germanic tradition. Germans, however, moved in the other direction—toward a more nationalistic view that became absorbed with biologically based theories of race and wirh "scientific" ways to measure racial distinctions.188 Studies have emphasized several factors behind this turn. Even in the nineteenth century the Prussian state had imagined a long-term colonial project in ■[ 941 ]• EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD Eastern Europe, and the image of inferiors in the East came to figure com n 10: in culture. Empire building in East Africa, especially the brutal war agains: ihe Herero people from 1904 to 1908, further contributed to a racialized vision of the nation (just as similar colonial wars fueled racial ideologies in other imperial states as well). World War I, however, proved especially critical in the develop- - > -t ment of racial ideology in Germany, for a number of reasons. First, anthropologists in Germany gained access to POW camps during the war and worked on the classification of POWs to develop a "science" that ranked humans hierarchically according to racial attributes. In addition, the great fear of typhus trigr^i ed -disinfection campaigns that identified socially marginalized groups such as lew> j and Eastern Europeans as vectors of disease. Campaigns for health took on an i exterminationist rhetoric, as the desire to eliminate dangerous germs and pests, displaced onto their presumed hosts, justified eugenic purification. Moreover, racial discourses everywhere intersected with representations of masculinity, and post-World War I Germany developed a particularly romantic image of ' white soldierly masculinity. Embodied in the heroic figure of General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, the commander of Germany's African soldiers in the successful East African campaign, the image of the white German soldier in strong command of obedient black troops contrasted sharply with the image of "disorderly" African troops that Allied armies had used against Germany, particularly in the Ruhr Valley. Representations of the "white hero," and of black Africans as either dutifully subordinate or frighteningly threatening, fed interwar intersections among discourses of masculinity, race, and nation. Although Hitler embraced less gentlemanly masculinity than that represented by the popular general, N-.v/.i culture also emphasized a strong identification between restoration of "Aryan' masculinity and national strengthening. Finally, of course, in the economic environment of the 1930s Hitler was able to play upon an acute sense of national grievance against both the Versailles settlement and the economic order, a grievance blamed on all kinds of outsiders, but particularly Jews.189 As eugenic thinking careened to extremes in Germany, other groups of pro-natalist eugenics professionals (stronger in Romance-language and Far Eastern areas) emphasized the need for ameliorative social conditions and decried coer cive and grimly deterministic assumptions. The rifts between rival groups "I eugenicists, different varieties of which were all connected to transnational networks, surfaced in international eugenics conferences in the interwar era. There was ongoing debate over whether racial and national regeneration should focus primarily on improving the genetic pool or on improving the surrounding environment. Different professions and people in dissimilar circumstances, of course, had different stakes in the answer.190 As "scientific" racism and eugenics built different constituencies, the meaning and significance of race was meeting important transnational challenges. In 1911 the Universal Races Congress, held in London, assembled fifty people from Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas to promote interracial harmony. Speakers at the conference endorsed both human universality and racial difference; they both reinforced and also denounced the idea that history was fundamentally a story of "races." This gathering had no specific outcome and was multivocal on the race question, but it did provide intellectual space for plurality and for dissenting voices of various kinds.191 Moreover, dominant voices within the profession of anthropology, which had once promoted the idea that humans could be arranged into clearly defined hierarchical categories, began to doubt that race defined any foundational set of characteristics. Franz Boas, as has been mentioned, moved away from the precepts of physical anthropology, with its stress on the biological grounding of racial difference. Arguing that difference was rooted in culture, not in characteristics such as skin color or skull size, Boaz and other cultural anthropologists redirected part of the discipline of anthropology away from its racialist orientation. Boass many influential students working in the interwar period and after included Alfred L. Kroeber, Margaret Mead, African-American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio, and Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre. In an article in the American Anthropologist in 1915, Kroeber advanced a list of professional principles that included "the absolute equality and identity of all human races and strains as carriers of civilization."192 As this culturalist view broke from the grim determinism of race essential-ism, programs for "whitening" populations as a mark of social improvement lost scientific justification. But emphasizing cultural difference could still support policies of imperial coercion in order to promote the cultural transformation of the less powerful. Boas's pathbreaking book The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) represented primitive cultures as less complex and more intuitive than civilized ■[ 941 j- ■[ 943 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD ones, and the word primitive in popular usage came to be the antonym of modern, underscoring otherness and representing a gaping chasm of difference. A vogue of things "primitive" swept the West, influencing transnational artistic and cultural styles. Josephine Baker, costumed in a skirt of artificial bananas, enchanted Parisians with her seminude danse sauvage; Art Deco styles (often adorned with a line representation of Baker s facial features) became a worldwide sensation after Paris's Exposition des Arts Decoratifs popularized ethnic artistic forms. Antimodernists from various parts of the globe visited Mabel Dodge Luhan's dwelling in New Mexico, where they embraced the native and Mexican heritages and advanced the view that indigenous people lived lives superior to those in the modern industrial order. The appeal of primitivism rested partly on the idea that it represented a disappearing way of life. In most professional social science circles, "primitive" remained a condition that was headed for extinction in a shrinking and modernizing world. Other social scientists inverted the paradigm of racial difference that remained so powerful within professional communities in the white West. While still presenting social science as a topic very substantially concerned with race, intellectuals such as Jose Vasconcelos Calderon in Mexico and Gilberto Freyre in Brazil articulated the idea that racial blending enhanced, rather than degenerated, a population. Vasconcelos, one of the most important intellectuals associated with the Mexican Revolution and Mexico's first minister of education, promoted Mexican nationalism around the idea that his country's racial mixture had produced a superior "cosmic race." Freyre, likewise, argued against the idea that Europeans had made the major contributions to Brazilian society. Instead, he saw Brazil's future as coming out of the mixing of Portuguese, Africans, and Indians. He pronounced that Brazil's "racial democracy" was perfectly consistent with evolutionary progress.193 Pride in racial mixture implied a new respect for local indigenous cultures and a rupture with ideas of racialized social Darwinism. A movement called in-digenismo profoundly affected transnational discussions about race throughout the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere. Spread globally especially through the visual arts in the dramatic interwar murals of Mexican painters such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, indigenismo dignified the historic contributions of indigenous and mixed-raced people and foregrounded them in narra- A detail from Diego Rivera's The Tarascan Civilization, 1941. This mural, which decorates the Pala-cio Nacional in Mexico City, honors the work, artistry, and learning of pre-Hispanic Mexico. Rivera and the other great muralists of Mexico endorsed racial equality and helped to build Mexican nationalism around pride in its indigenous past. (Palacio Nacional, Mexico City, Mexico/Giraudon/ The Bridgcman Art Library) lives of national and civilizational progress. This kind of antiracism often found support in and traveled through transnational communist networks, which viewed racism as a barrier to working-class solidarity. Challenges to the hierarchical, biological view of race thus came from diverse sources. Cultural anthropology challenged its scientific claims. Some intellectuals embraced indigenous influences as part of a rejection of industrial modernism. Communist parties often built class solidarity around programs to advance racial equality and anticolonialism. The transnational currents concerned with the role of race in social science thus ran in no single direction, but each drew enhanced energy from the messy, crisscrossing nature of their networks. EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD Municipalization of the World Networked professionals devoted to improvement in the social realm turned-attention especially to the late nineteenth century's burgeoning cities. The preýn ■ lence of cities, of course, varied widely. In 1900 nearly 40 percent of Western Europeans lived in cities or towns of over five thousand people. Although much of Africa had no settlements at all of this size, recent research has nevertheless emphasized the long-ignored importance of Africa's urban history. Some cities {especially in Europe and America) arose as major productive centers; others (such as Shanghai, Calcutta, or Buenos Aires) became significant points of distribution. A few cities, such as Chicago, boasted both industrial and commercial might. Urban elites, in any case, drew their wealth and status from a globalizing economy, and cities themselves became symbols of new transnational economic interrelationships. Industrialization and commerce, wherever in the world they appeared, spurred the quickening pace of urban life and linked cities together. These new "global cities" offered a cosmopolitanism accentuated by diverse streams of immigrants who came through in transit or who swelled their neighborhoods as resident laborers, traders, and entrepreneurs. Most cities exhibited similar patterns. Urban living conditions accentuated divisions between rich and poor and between majority and minority ethnic groups. Inadequate water supplies and sanitary systems raised the specter of disease, which could easily slip from poor and crowded areas to threaten the nes'tli of the powerful. Upper and middle classes, no matter the region or nationality, tried to confine criminality and vice to separate zones, even as some profited from and might themselves frequent these areas. Such divisions became even more apparent in the outposts of empire, where merchants and administrators from the metropole carved out privileged sectors in which they could separate themselves and try to replicate familiar landscapes and customs. In cities, women very often made claims on public space and found both new freedoms and new perils. Consumer goods, advertising, amusement parks, sports clubs, bars, coffee shops, and movie theaters rearranged the ways people lived together. Labor radicals, anticolonial activists, bohemians, and dissenters of all kinds could find gathering places and exchange ideas, as could those transnational elites whu : occupied the often classical-style banks and mercantile houses. From whatever:: •[ 946 ]■ vantage point, cosmopolitan urban life with its mix of ethnicities seemed to embody both the promises and the dangers of the age. Cities often became not just polycultural spaces but also environmentally polluted. Smokestack industrialization, particularly in urban areas close to belts of mining and smelting, belched particles that darkened skies, poisoned waters, and sickened populations. Industrial areas concentrated around certain cities in England, Belgium, Germany, Pennsylvania and Ohio in the United States, Russian Ukraine, and Osaka in Japan, and to a lesser extent in South Africa, India, South America, and Australia.1'4 Such conditions prompted appeals—crafted within transnational conversations—to reorganize space, create sanitary systems, and curb industrial smoke and effluents. Berlin and New York boasted that they led the way in electric lights, which flooded the windows of stores and made dark streets less treacherous. But electrification by no means came just to the largest cities. In the early 1870s, ten thousand gas lamps had illuminated Denver, Colorado, for example, and these were easily converted to electricity; boosters dubbed Denver America's "City of Light," without irony, and claimed that no city in the United States had better public and private lighting systems (although Buffalo, New York, and others also claimed this status).195 Municipal lighting became an emblem of progress, of public safety, of enlightenment. Names such as the "Great White Way" and the "White City" resonated within the racial coding of the day. The transformation of localized electrical systems of the turn of the century into the large regional "power pools" of the 1920s, together with the multinational stretch of utilities companies (especially American), served national advantage and also defied national boundaries in favor of transnational connectivity. Analogizing electricity to modernity, T. P. Hughes writes that "modern electric systems have the heterogeneity of form and function that make possible the encompassing complexity [of modern life]." Energy consumption soared.19* It is hardly surprisingly that cities converged in some of their basic structures. Networks of communications and transportation, after all, emulated each other, and the many world's fairs served as nodes to showcase new international practices. In addition, expertise in urban planning, like that in most other professions, took on a transnational character, and planners embraced the idea that there could be a universalistic "municipal science." Demand for urban electrical •[ 947 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD networks and for the new lighthouses called forth cadres of experts, technicians. ! ■ and capitalists who operated around the world to construct the circuits that sup- I ' ported the new age of electricity.157 Other groups of experts, traveling both ! -■ within imperial administrative networks and outside of them, specialized in j "J port and terminal building, street design, sanitation, food inspection, and social services. Indeed, recent scholars have worked "to make urban history one of the ; = avenues to historicize globalization."1'3 The so-called global city, they point out, j * is not just a phenomenon of today but began to take shape in the late nineteenth century. Even in the world's least urban continent, Africa, cities played a more impor- ! tant role than their number and population might suggest. The shocks of coloni- - > zation changed the patterns and institutions of urban life throughout Africa. I ; Cities had long functioned as crossroads, mostly trading posts on inland or .| J .-"6" $ coastal waterways. "With colonization, however, specific port cities, mostly those "* ; linked to Western commercial networks, flourished, and these municipalities, - I unlike earlier ones, layered white metropolitan models upon already varied and ■ j culturally mixed cities. In South Africa's industrial zone of Durban, for example, ' j formal planning began in the early twentieth century and meant replacing "slums"—the products of informal development—with formalized zones that \ restricted access from "disorderly" Indian and African residential areas. Modern : ; port facilities, Western architecture, including Christian churches, racially sepa- '- < rated zoning, regulated and "purified" housing, and uneven installations of sanitary services changed the look and operation of many African cities.19' The commercial, imperial, and professional networks that often linked the governance of cities throughout the globe sought to develop a scientific and uni-versalistic approach to urban problems. Germany's zoning laws prompted emulation in many countries; Britain's Garden City Association and America's City \ ; Beautiful movement influenced ideas about how urban space might be planned -*Qf to promote spiritual and physical health among urban dwellers. Urban planning \ ; laws in French-administered Morocco influenced France's own planning effo: :s after World War I. The Union Internationale des Villes, which first met in 1913, : emerged from networks of European socialists and internationalists who wished to form a body composed of individual cities. Led by Belgian socialist Emile Vinck, after World War I the Union became a more formalized international association, the International Union of Local Authorities, which expanded its membership into the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Looking more closely at what Pierre-Yves Saunier called the first wave of "municipalization of the world," it seems clear that there were dense transatlantic and transpacific conversations over urban design and administration. Libraries of municipal planning in Melbourne, Australia, show that city officials there drew ideas not just from British treatises but from sources written in the United States, Mumbai, Dunedin, Toronto, and elsewhere. Daniel Burnham, the famed American architect who formed what became the world's largest architectural firm, oversaw the creation of the "White City" in Chicago, implemented projects in Manila and Baguio City, and saw his 1909 "Plan of Chicago" come to have international influence. Elites in Buenos Aires reconstructed their rapidly growing city in the late nineteenth century and styled it "The Paris of South America." In Meiji Japan in the 1880s, Tokyo also devised a plan modeled on Paris (which was not implemented); German experts helped draft the administrative structure of several Japanese cities, towns, and villages; the progressive mayor of Osaka, Seki Hajime, tried to eclectically adapt urban reforms from many countries; and the mayor of Tokyo invited famed urban expert and historian Charles Beard to advise on rebuilding after the devastating earthquake of 192.3 (his recommendations had little effect). The industrial-modernist "internationalist" styles of Le Corbus-ier in France and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in Germany projected a simplification of form and a rejection of ornamentation. The machine aesthetic of this design movement would influence the look of cities throughout the globe. Even while asserting unique features arising from their own heritages, then, city experts worldwide valued being part of transnational circuits that linked professionals specializing in municipal governance and design.200 As with other transnational movements, the "global" and the "local" in cities proved to be mutually constitutive, rather than oppositional, realms. What Michael Smith has called "transnational urbanism" foregrounds cities, with their groups of migrants, refugees, activists, entrepreneurs, and institutions, as localized sites within which transnational realms are created and enacted.201 Combinations of borrowed forms, of local practices, and of diverse transnational networks •[ 948 ]■ •[ 949 ]• EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD influenced city life everywhere, even as they played out differently in each particular location. Exemplifying the theme prevalent throughout this chapter, munici pal transnationalism found expression through differentiated commonalities. Healing Bodies Could people really thrive in transnational cities and their hinterlands? The spread of disease made port cities particularly vulnerable and challenged the circulation of goods and people on which they depended. In the last half of the nineteenth century several pandemics swept the globe. Anxieties related to health and the spread of disease mounted.202 The connective currents of travel and commerce could, quite suddenly, pose the gravest threats to human well-being. Cholera seemed to follow paths of infection from India, often carried by pilgrims going on Hajj to and from Mecca. Yellow fever outbreaks accelerated with sea travel and reached global proportions in the late 1870s, when they simultaneously claimed thousands of lives in Madrid, Havana, Memphis, and other cities. Bubonic plague carried by ship-borne fleas and rats spread alarmingly, with almost every port city in the world experiencing outbreaks in the two decades before World War I. The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, called the "Spanish flu" but probably originating in Kansas, may have killed fifty million people worldwide. The virulence and rapidity of such pandemics left scientists scrambling for preventions and cures. Commerce, colonialism, and civilization itself seemed to rest upon halting the global circulation of disease. Pandemics called forth responses from teams of transnational health experts. These professionals increasingly accepted the germ theory of disease and exchanged specimens and theories. Research institutions such as the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, the Lister Institute in London, and the Kitasato Institute in Japan worked on vaccines and antitoxins. By 1930, transnational efforts from a variety of labs had produced vaccines against typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, smallpox, plague, diphtheria, and tetanus. New public health bureaucracies in many countries carried out vaccination programs and swapped knowledge about how remediation might best work at a grassroots level. Sometimes vaccination programs in colonies had low priority. British policies in ll m mam A line of people waiting to receive vaccinations in Cote d'lvoire in the 1910s. Epidemic disease, which knew no geographic borders, spurred transnational scientific and medical efforts. Imperial governments, especially concerned with the health of their emissaries and of colonial labor forces, frequently ordered massive vaccination efforts. (Centre Historique des Archives Nationales, Paris, France/Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman Art Library) Gambia in the first three decades of the twentieth century, for example, included no vaccination efforts even as large expenditures were made on commercial roads and canals and for courts and clubs where European merchants might relax. In many places, however, states and colonial administrators tried to institute programs of compulsory vaccination from the late nineteenth century on, although antivaccination movements formed almost everywhere to contest such exercises of power. Indeed, early vaccination procedures did involve a significant health hazard. Opposition to them at least had the salutary affect of prompting technical improvements, which made vaccinations ever safer and less painful.203 A string of international "sanitary conferences" during the late nineteenth century brought together delegates from Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, •[ 950 ]• •[ 95! ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG China, Japan, and the Americas. In 1907 the Office International d'Hygieiie Publique was established as a permanent body for global coordination of health policies. Such transnational initiatives helped regularize quarantine procedures, especially applying to port cities. They also promoted sanitary projects to improve '. I sewage and water systems in disease-prone areas. After World War I, the League of Nations Health Organization assumed some monitoring and coordinating functions. Remedies for epidemic disease also often emerged through processes of co- :~ production b etween transnational science and local experts, even if medical encounters were uneven. During the US military occupation of Cuba after 1S9S and in Panama during the building of the canal, for example, US scientists built ■ ■ on the mosquito theory of Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay to successfully combat '-!: :;f '■ yellow fever and other diseases. The successful mosquito eradication measures influenced those who sought to fight disease elsewhere in the world, even as they --" "k, helped justify US imperialism as necessary to contain disease. The differences in the meanings of health and disease between China and the West also worked in various ways. Practitioners of traditional medicine in China adapted Western theory to develop their own versions of modern (but non-Western) medicine. Transnational discourses on health that circulated in China layered imperial influences from the West and from Japan alongside the desire t-.f Chinese elites to shed the country's weaknesses by adopting concepts of hygiene that might improve the nation's fitness. Ruth Rogaski has analyzed the embrace by ,■■ elites in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin of goods and practices that would advance "hygienic modernity" (weisheng) to improve cleanliness and hence bodily I vigor. Moreover, China both borrowed from and competed with the West. Entrepreneurs in Chinese medicine, for example, waged successful marketing campaigns against Western medical companies to attract buyers in Southeast Asia. And medical knowledge and practice did not simply flow from the West to the East and South. George Soulie de Morant, who served in the French diplomatic corps in China during the first two decades of the twentieth century, became so impressed with the success of Chinese acupuncture during a cholera epidemic th.-t he wrote major works on the technique and, during the 1930s, developed a signifi- 5 cant following in France that would expand in the post-World War II period. As in China, instances of "medical pluralism," in which patients exhibited consider- TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD able eclecticism in choosing healing practices from an array of local and imported systems, emerged in many areas of the world, even though health-care provision was often inequitably distributed.2"4 The civilizing potential of medicine emerged as a central discourse of imperial justification from the mid-nineteenth century. Epidemic disease hindered imperial stability and infrastructure development, and colonial officials gave it high priority. Colonial rivalries added further urgency. Plant experts in all the imperial powers, for example, competed with each other to smuggle and adapt the Peruvian cinchona in order to produce sufficient quantities of the quinine needed to protect against malaria. Medical practice, however, could also easily prove to be a site of imperial failure or of resistance to colonial authority. During the early years of French rule in Algeria, for example, imparting modern medical knowledge and administration provided a strong justification for colonialism, both morally and pragmatically. As France began to construct health-care institutions in Algeria, however, the costs and difficulties of building a comprehensive medical system began to eclipse the early optimism. Even if doctors and other personnel operating in the city of Algiers could imagine they were building a structure that would transform the colony's health, their reach into rural areas was spotty and encountered resistance. By the turn of the century, ideologies of racial inferiority had blended into the intractable problems of cost, poor administration, and jurisdictional battles among French colonists, Algerians, and the French army. Plans to train Algerians as doctors and to spread French-style medical care throughout the countryside were largely abandoned, and Algerian medical personnel, who had once supported the French effort, gradually withdrew from the networks of colonial medicine. Complaining about deep injustices in the system, the vision they had once shared with French doctors degenerated into disillusionment and resentment. At the same time, the French effort to spread health gradually devolved into an effort to segregate off the "sickness" in the body of the colony so that it could not escape through the port to contaminate or threaten healthy French cities. Not only did French medical interventions have insignificant or negative effects on the health of Algerians overall, but the French administration labeled Algeria itself as a sick state.205 Similarly, during the 192.0s, British officials increasingly blamed Sudan's "moral and economic backwardness" on the practice of genital cutting. Spurred •[ 953 ]" EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD by a Western-based transnational movement to abolish the practice, they launched an all-out campaign to introduce "scientific" medicine and especially to change midwifery practices. By the late 1920s a "circumcision crisis" in Kenya and associated debates in the British Parliament led to even stronger directives to end practices that harmed the health of women and children throughout the empire.The interactions among colonial policy, British nurse-midwives sent to reform what were seen as detrimental Arabic cultural practices, local advocates on both sides of the issue, rising nationalism, and differing religious orientations created a complex milieu over several decades, during which genital cutting may have became more, rather than less, culturally entrenched.206 Disease thus provided a central cultural trope of this interconnected age, although it framed a variety of meanings. Within transnational circuits, met.i phors of disease often became part of a moral discourse that marked tropica! bodies as backward and hazardous and justified exogenous interventions, including colonialism. "Tropical medicine," which became a subspecialty of medical knowledge, segmented off the "tropics" as an area of danger and disease, even though the geographic boundaries were anything but clear.107 At the same time; the sweeps of epidemic disease and famine could also threaten the Western claims of superiority that justified imperial and racial power. Within some communities swept up under colonialism, metaphors of disease could mark outsider-carriers and justify resistance to contact with imperial officials or transnational health workers. Moreover, anticolonial nationalists sometimes embraced public health programs as a way of strengthening local communities and institutions in order to counter colonial or neocolonial power. Ideas about who carried disease and who could stop it thus became parts of larger discussions. The powers: of healers, like all other circuits of expertise, involved global circulations and contestations of meaning.208 Numerous transnational organizations in this period tackled problems related to global health. For example, the Friends (Quakers), the Catholic Chu rch's Caritas Internationalis, and other religious-based groups led major efforts. Save the Children International concentrated on relief work to help children suffering from war and disaster. Two transnational organizations, the Red Cross and Crescent and the Rockefeller Foundation, deserve special attention because of the influential and long-lasting transnational networks they forged. •[ 954 ]• The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) began as the inspiration of Swiss businessman Henri Dunant, who witnessed the bloody battle of Solferino in 1859 in northern Italy and became determined to alleviate the suffering of war. The organization adapted the design of the Swiss flag, taking as its emblem a red cross on a white background, and began to spread its services into war-torn areas. In 1877 the ICRC reluctantly agreed that the Ottoman Empire could use a crescent instead of a cross. In 1901 Dunant was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize. A private institution headquartered in Geneva, the Red Cross and Crescent played a major role as a neutral intermediary during World War I, when it provided medical assistance and advocated improved treatment of prisoners. Through a federated structure, the Red Cross expanded internationally, gradually sprouting local chapters throughout the world.209 Clara Barton, who had inspired a volunteer service to soldiers during America's Civil War, helped start an American Red Cross (ARC) chapter in 1887. The ARC served military personnel during America's War of 1898 and became a semiofficial agency in 1905 when it received a charter and subsidies from Congress. Active during World War I and during the inter war era, the ARC expanded its mission beyond wartime emergencies to coordinate international disaster relief and, unlike the ICRC, tried to tackle broader issues related to sanitation reform and prevention of epidemic disease. After the great Japanese earthquake of 1923, President Calvin Coolidge asked that all American donations of food and medicine be channeled through the ARC. Despite some tensions over core mission, the International Red Cross and Crescent and the American Red Cross together provided a strong and ever-expanding global infrastructure for advocacy related to humanitarian and health concerns.210 Philanthropic foundations, based on the fortunes of some of American industrial barons, also became heavily involved in global health issues. Oil baron John D, Rockefeller launched a Sanitary Commission in 1909 to combat hookworm in the southern United States. He then expanded the idea by incorporating his new Rockefeller Foundation with the goal of promoting well-being throughout the world. The foundation's International Health Board (IHB), which operated for thirty-eight years after 1913, carried its anti-hookworm campaign to one billion people in fifty-two countries. It also gradually broadened its concerns to include malaria and twenty-two other diseases or health conditions. ■Í 955 1- EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD A special yellow-fever commission, formed in 1915, led work on the eradication of mosquitoes and successfully developed a vaccine. The work of the foundation frequently emerged from coproductive local relationships. After World War I, the foundation established a European office in Paris and courted European partners for its programs to advance basic science. The foundation built institutes of public health in some two dozen cities to train health-care workers and conduct research. It helped establish women's colleges in China, India, and Japan. In China, where the foundation developed a special interest, its China Medical Board became an independent institution in 192}; and supported the Peking Union Medical College. Using this China model, the foundation formed partnerships through grants to large medical education arid research institutions in Beirut, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, and other locations. Cadres of locally trained health workers joined the IHB's transnational network. In 1935 the Rockefeller Foundation launched a grassroots initiative to take health care and community development into rural villages in China by relying on midwives and other paramedics to bring basic care to peasants. It also supported the development of local outreach programs for rural health-care delivery at the grassroots level. In many countries, alliances among the Rockefeller Foundation, local public health reformers, and national state-building elites shaped the programs. In Costa Rica and Brazil, for example, research on and treatment of hookworm disease and yellow fever preceded the foundation s involvement, and Rockefeller grants provided the money for local public health activists who were advocating a more vigorous role for their national governments. Many governments feared the economic consequences of epidemic disease and welcomed efforts to keep ports open and commerce flowing. Foundation money also helped local officials pay for public health educators and professionals focused on hygiene and mosquito eradication.211 In the British colony of Ceylon the IHB developed a demonstration project for the eradication of hookworm. Plantation owners first resisted the costly health requirements the IHB tried to enforce, but the IHB then switched course; Broadening its focus to a range of infectious diseases, it promoted educational campaigns operating on the village level, provided training for local herbal doctors, and encouraged provincial governments to create sanitary departments. From the mid-i9zos, the IHB teamed up with a new generation of local leaders who advocated a grassroots approach that stressed preventive measures such as vaccinations and maternity services. This switch from curative to preventative medicine dramatically lowered mortality rates. Any assessment of the role of scientific health professionals and philanthropic foundations depends upon specific context and can hardly be captured in a single interpretive narrative. Professional transnational medicine was, in one sense, allied with capitalist globalization; it disrupted settled ways in the name of modernization. As such, medical professionals might be seen as agents of Western medicine working on behalf of the West's imperial aims. They might also be viewed, however, as participants with local elites in a global circulation of knowledge that both coproduced possible remedies and furthered anticolonial nationalist agendas by extending the power and reach of local officials. Health programs on behalf of grassroots groups and women's empowerment proved to be important, if controversial and sometimes counterproductive, forces in many areas. Like other networks of expertise in this period, health professionals served imperialism, nationalism, local aspirations, and transnational ideals variously and often simultaneously. The currents of their expertise often asserted hierarchies of race and culture, but local impacts varied widely, as recipients of funds sometimes ignored, changed, or adapted methods to their own purposes. The nineteenth century exhibited a faith that the transnational and neutral character of science and expertise would foster universal frameworks and propel the progressive convergence of "civilization." Over time this faith came under challenge from various directions. To many, World War I underscored the bankruptcy of the Western fascination with technological change. Chinese reformer and scholar Liang Qichao, who visited the shell-shocked European capitals just after the war, pronounced that the "peaceful" traditions of Eastern civilizations would flourish in the ruins of war-breeding Western techno-materialism. Intellectuals as diverse as Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammad Iqbal, and Liang Shu-ming developed parallel critiques of Western materialism and called for revivals within their own religious and cultural traditions.212 Paris hosted a "lost generation" of artists and intellectuals who also hoped to pronounce the death of the •[ 957 ]• EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD West's mechanical approaches to life and the natural world. These dissenters built a transnational aesthetic out of shattering conventions and revolting against formalisms of all kinds. American educator Mary Parker Follert warned that transnational networks of professional elites would breed narrowness. She wrote in The New State (1918), "The man who knows the 'best' society of Petrograd, Paris, London, and New York, and that only, is a narrow man because the ideals and standards of the 'best' society in London, Paris, and New York are the same. He knows life across but not down—-it is a horizontal civilization instead of a vertical one, with all the lack of depth and height of everything horizontal. This man has always been among the same kind of people, his life has not been enlarged and enriched by the friction of ideas and ideals which comes from the meeting of people of different opportunities and different tastes and different standards;" A flat world, she suggested, would be a provincial one.H3 Bruno Rizzi'sLa bureaucratization du monde, published in Paris in 1939, and James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution, published in New York in 1941, exemplified yet another line of critique. These two works articulated the view that the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the New Deal all manifested a new bureaucratic mentality that had arisen over the past half century. Throughout the world, these two ex-Trotskyists suggested, new groups of people who claimed specialized expertise had come to exert power through governments, empires, and corporate structures. They were neither owners of production nor people of great wealth. They were managers, and they claimed ultimate authority, through the power of specialized knowledge and technical expertise, to know what was best for the public in whose name they presumed to operate. Although Rizzi and Burnham were primarily concerned with how this new class of experts had emerged within national states, their critiques of "bureaucratized" and "managerial" systems also addressed the networks of scientists, technicians, and professionals that had coalesced transnationally since the late nineteenth century.114 All such critiques, however, tended to exaggerate the unities within scientific and technical networks. A close look at transnational circulations suggests that circuits of expertise did not simply devise their theories and "facts" from on high and transplant them into various localities throughout the world. Rather, transnational circuit builders interacted with each other from many different geographic and social positions, and in their encounters, specific context interacted with and altered supposedly universalized laws and propositions. Science, technology, and health were neither neutral in the powers they embodied nor consistently one-sided. In a variety of configurations, they were coproduced through encounters, often unequal, between the local and the global. Expertise could both serve and also alter imperial designs; it could work in favor of nationalistic visions but also as a check against them. If the euphoria associated with late nineteenth-century one-worldism, transnational bonding, and supposedly apolitical networks of science and engineering deflated after the Great War, the crisscrossed transnational networks that had been forged remained in place and even flourished. These "soft" networks constructed within scientific, engineering, and healing communities spanned the globe as surely as did the "hard" ones of cables, telephony, railroads, and ocean liners. The meanings carried in their currents remained complex and often contradictory, but the global reach and importance of transnational epistemic communities continued to grow, generating both broad commonalities and localized variations. •[ 958 ]• ■[ 959 ]■ $, Spectacular Flows THE world was shrinking, and ever more people made their way around it—foi adventure, education, and even publicity. Li Gui claimed to be the first Chinese official to travel around the world and wrote an account of his 1876 trip, describing for Chinese readers parts of the world he visited: their social customs, industrial organization, and material culture. In the early 1880s King Kalakaua of Hawai'i, determined to investigate immigration and how other rulers governed, became the first ruling monarch to journey around the world and meet with other heads of state. On November 14,1889, American journalist Elizabeth Co chrane Seaman ("Nellie Bly"), sponsored by Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and inspired by Jules Verne's 1873 book Le tour du monde en quatre-vingtsjours (Around the World in Eighty Days), left New York on a z4,899-mile trip to set a record in speed for circling the globe. Seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds later, she arrived back in New York, having traveled through England, France, the Suez Canal, Ceylon, Hong Kong, and Japan. She captured loads of publicity and her coveted world record, which would be broken only a few months later by another American. Pursuing what was now a surefire market for globe-circling adventures and broke because of a bad investment. Mark Twain published an account of his roundabout through the British Empire called Following the Equator (1897). Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet, undertook a global oceanic voyage in 1916, going from India to Burma to Japan to North America, and in 1924-1915 traveled from Latin America across the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. These were only a few of the many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century globe-trotters whose adventures provided a sense of the vast, yet also small, new world of interconnected currents. In such a world, adventure awaited and encounters with difference expanded imaginations. The new transnational networks, deeply imbedded in commerce and its culture of desire stimulation, altered ideas about the fixity of identity and seemed to offer possibilities of self-fashioning. Borders of all kinds, geographic, TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD racial, and gendered, seemed more permeable and less permanent. Media technology fostered new entertainments that challenged traditions and gave rise to global networks of celebrity and consumerism. Older histories of this era, organized around a linear teleology, emphasized the spread of the "West with its supposedly rational culture of science and reason leading toward an evolutionary future called progress. Recent work in anthropology and history, however, has challenged the narrative structures that framed this view. First, transnational networks, rather than clear geographic centers, map the changes often marked as modernity. Second, scholars as diverse as the historian C- A. Bayly, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, and the interdisciplinary Modern Girl collective all see the emerging and networked modern world as characterized by the simultaneous (and related) creation of both uniformity and difference. Bayly's work, for example, "traces the rise of global uniformities" while emphasizing how "connections could also heighten the sense of difference, and even antagonism, between people." Appadurai calls this homogenizing and differentiating process "modernity at large." The Modern Girl project, which analyzed the nearly simultaneous emergence of "modern girls" in every part of the world in the early twentieth century, illustrates what I call differentiated commonalities as it describes the emergence of local variations within uniform global trends.215 Third, scholars note that modernity did not represent the triumph of the rational as much as the conjuncture of the rational with a new media-driven spectacularity. The examination of adventurers, celebrities, travel, and consumerism illustrates the networked world of differentiated commonalities and exemplifies how sensationalism—driven by a search for audience and by peoples' yearnings for self-fashioning—merged with the rationalism needed to produce market calculation and machine-driven mass culture. Adventure By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the greatest cartographic and cataloging enterprises of the age of exploration were coming to an end. The mapping of the globe, even its remote regions, was mostly complete. But a few blank spaces remained, and the era thus featured some of the most celebrated feats of •[ 960 ]■ 961 ]- EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD exploration. The thirst for scientific discovery had once driven geographies exploration. As the scientific justification for new discoveries diminished, h< wc\ er the emerging popular media lavished increased attention on the "conqu.-srs'' of the few still-uncharted places. With the rise of mass-circulation media, adventurers who once emp] tasked the scientific aspects of their deeds became tempted to join forces with sensation-seeking newspapers to enhance their own fame and profit. Still claiming status as instructors about science and the natural world, many converted therrise.vcs into globe-trotting showmen and showwomen. The turn of the century rema i i icd a time of daring feats of endurance, as adventurers challenged themselves to reach the remaining unexplored terrain of arctic and high-mountain regions, but it was also a time of sensation seekers and even charlatans, for whom the reductive yearning to become a celebrity often overrode good judgment and truthful representation. "As the world got smaller, travelers' tales grew taller," writes Felipe Fernandez-Armesto.216 The age of industrialization vastly improved the ability of explorers to survive in extreme environments, and increasingly more people became tempted to try. Adventurers had growing access to specialty clothing for tropical and arctic climates, to orienting devices, and to antimalarial remedies. Steam engines, ironclad ships, railroads, and telegraphic communications eased and sped travel to more places. Various kinds of industrial power, now more than sheer physical endurance, made the world smaller and more accessible. Still, the hardships of exploration remained real enough to pack the pages of adventure stories. As surveyor-explorer Kenneth Mason writes about the hardships in the still-remote places, "there were no roads and fewer tracks; there were no maps; the people were suspicious____[Mountaineers] had no mountain equipment, no ice-axes: crampons, pitons, no nylon ropes, wind-proof clothing or indestructible tents, They learnt about frostbite and snow-blindness the hard and painful way. They carried no oxygen and no Pervitine tablets."217 Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weavers history of Himalayan mountaineering points out one of the central paradoxes of the expeditionary culture that emerged. "It was bound up with visions of imperial destiny that assumed the rule of white Europeans over darker-skinned Asians and drew many of its conventions from the hierarchical order of the English public school and the British Army. At the same time, it harbored individual climbers who were often misfits in their own societies, romantic rebels who found a spiritual purpose and freedom in the mountains." It fostered "colonial arrogance" but also a mix of individualism and "responsibility to others."218 The media-framed tales of adventure from this period drew from these paradoxes to create iconic sagas of moral, racial, and physical supremacy wrapped within notions of the brotherhood of hardship. The age of extreme expeditionary culture and the golden age of popular newspapers and journals were a marriage made in heaven. Whereas nineteenth-century explorers usually worked for governments eager to publicize scientific discoveries and to press colonial territorial claims, the new breed often sought stories that could be sold. Well-publicized adventures found their way into theaters, music halls, exhibitions, "yellow journalism" in America, the "penny press" in Britain, and mass-circulation magazines such as National Geographic. Almost everywhere in the world the numbers of newspapers and theaters soared. Newspapers printed in China alone, for example, quadrupled from two hundred to eight hundred between 1905 and 1910. The adventure genre would become a staple of photojournalism and of the new film industry. In almost any year of this era, some spectacle-ridden adventure dominated the news everywhere that mass publications reached. Stories with audience appeal circulated feverishly within the emerging information and entertainment networks that connected empires and spanned the globe.219 Henry Norton Stanley's expedition best exemplified the union between mass entertainment and adventure. Stanley excelled at grafting imagined "facts" into stories of exploration, even obscuring his own birth as John Rowland in North Wales to claim that he hailed from New Orleans. Sent to Africa in 1869 by James Gordon Bennett Jr., publisher of the New York Herald, Stanley was to find and interview Dr. David Livingstone, the British Congregationalist missionary to Africa, explorer, and antislavery activist. Livingstone, whose motto "Christianity, Commerce, and Civilization" was subsequently inscribed into his monument at the base of Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, had disappeared into the interior of Africa in his obsessive search for the source of the Nile River. Stanley's search for the famous man, chronicled by the newspaper, became a sensation. In November 1871 Stanley landed on the shore of Lake Tanganyika and reportedly met the ailing Livingstone with the soon-to-be-famous words, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" •[ 96z ]• •[ 963 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD Scanley's exclusive stories to the Herald, and the adventures sensational ending (capped by the doctor's death from malaria a year and a half later), boosted the newspaper's circulation and profits. Stanley became what the twentieth century would call a "celebrity," an emerging cultural phenomenon that sprang from the popular media's new sensational style and global interconnectivity. The Royal Geographic Society, which had sent its own expedition to try to locate Livingstone, derided Stanley's lack of scientific credentials, but London newspapers emulated the Heralds profit-making formula. In 1874 the Daily Telegraph of London teamed up with the Herald to sponsor another African expedition led by Stanley and to publish his exciting accounts. The Daily Telegraph helped spread within the English press the fad of covering sensationalized, often brutal, adventures. The huge popularity of Stanley's writings and the many personae he projected in them also shaped the conventions of adventure writing. The Livingstone-Stanley story became, and remains, one of the most mythologized and familiar tales in the world, and Stanley's fame illustrates the emergence of globally circulated stories that interconnected mission, adventure, colonial violence, and celebrity.220 The writings of both the religious Livingstone and the sensationalist Stanley became influential in shaping the views of Africa presented within the global webs of popular publications. A study by Clare Pettitt raises questions about what Livingstone's (and Britain's) relationship with his African servants, Jacob Wainwright, Susi, Chuma, and Wekotani, might further illuminate. She points out that the servants exist in a historical void. They pop up here and there in photographs and scattered accounts but leave no significant trace of how their own perspectives or voices or narratives might have framed the famed Livingstone and his encounters in Africa. The "native" servants are the silent participants in an association in which only one side left the kind of accounts out of which "realities" and then histories are usually made. This era of communications, her study shows, is often not about communication at all but about the projections emanating from those who, through publication, gained Access to a future audience. Transnational currents, once again, both bridged but also accentuated differences in power.221 National Geographic, of course, became one of the most popular purveyors of adventure and one of the most influential venues through which Americans and •[ 964 ]■ ■ 111 111 111 ■ mm mm 11111 IBi ■ iiii > iii 11IB Blil Hi others learned to picture and understand the world. In 1903, for example, the magazine featured the explorations of Fanny Bullock Workman, a record-setting woman explorer, and her husband, William Hunter Workman.222 Their many adventure books, such as Ice-Bound Heights ofthe Mustagh, helped to popularize accounts of mountain climbing in this age when men-women duos were still unusual enough to attract special attention.223 Striving for rewards and recognition within the new world of mass publishing came also with hazards. Otto von Ehlers, for example, wrote travelogues that became best-sellers in Germany and beyond. Spurred by success, von Ehlers tried in 1895 to cross New Guinea's central mountain range, coast to coast, but mis-gauged the time it might take to transverse the 150 miles. The party of forty-three ran out of food, lost their compasses, and suffered from sores made by leeches and from the red maggots that settled in them. After seven weeks, a few remaining native guides shot the Germans in an effort to secure at least their own survival. The adventure had little scientific or even imperial rationale. It showed, however, that a desire to recount a daring exploit to the vast audience that seemed eager to read tales of travail could be deadly.224 Similarly, Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone around the World (1900) told the exciting tale of Slocum's three-year, forty-six-thousand-mile journey, at age fifty. The first person to make such a trip alone, Slocum enjoyed great popularity from his book. Trying to achieve another celebrity-style feat a decade later, he disappeared at sea. In the early twentieth century, expeditions to the North and South Poles captured the most frenzied press coverage and popular attention. In 1909 the Americans Frederick A. Cook and Robert E. Peary both claimed to have reached the North Pole (probably neither did), and two rival newspapers, the New York Herald and the New York Times, magnified the controversy to build sales through sensational stories and charges against the other. After Cook cabled that he had reached the pole, the New York Herald splashed the news on its entire front page with the headline "Fighting Famine and Ice, the Courageous Explorer Reaches the Great Goal." Several days later when Peary also cabled success, his sponsor, the New York Times, reported that "the world accepts his word without a shadow of hesitation" and quoted Peary as saying that Cook was a fraud who "has simply handed the public a gold brick." With this and other stories, according to historian Beau Riffenburgh, the Herald's publisher, James •[ 965 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG Gordon Bennett Jr., "established the role of the press in the creation of the modern image of the unknown," emphasizing not facts but exhilarating stories of rivalry, hardship, and perhaps tragedy. The global spread of newspapers and news networks was an essential component in creating the formulas of spectacularity that dominated visions of adventure by the early twentieth century.225 The interest in the North Pole controversy culminated in another "race to the pole," this time to Antarctica. Sixteen different expeditions from nine countries headed toward the Antarctic to gain the distinction of being first, but only two ultimately became contenders. Media again played up the stories of the hardships and rivalry. News came in 1912 that Norwegian Roald Amundsen's group had reached the Pole. Then came the gripping story of Robert Falcon Scott, Britain's most famous explorer, whose expedition had struggled to the Pole only to find that Amundsen had attained the goal several weeks earlier. On their arduous return across the glaciers, Scott and others then died from starvation and cold. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a member of Scott's expedition, wrote one of the most vivid accounts of the travails in The Worst Journey in the World (1922). The greatest fame from the race to the Pole, however, came to the experienced Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, who had once been part of Scott's team before the two had a falling out. Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which embarked early in 1914 aiming to be the first to travel across Antarctica from sea to sea, suffered an almost incredible ordeal when the crew became stranded in the ice and Shackleton endured deadly conditions to rescue them. Shackleton's tale, which he published as South (1919)» was bone-chilling adventure, and Shackleton became a legend for his remarkable endurance, dedication to his team, and truly sensational story. Amundsen, whose fame also spread, went on to explore the Northwest Passage and the North Pole region, where his plane disappeared in 1928 as he was attempting to rescue a former associate. After the race to the poles, individuals and nations turned toward the Himalayas as the only "unconquered" place left that held significant challenge. Some called the Himalayan heights the "third pole." In the 1910s the English mountaineer George Mallory joined expeditions that claimed the goal of surveying and subduing hitherto unmapped territory in the Himalayas, Mallory, however, claimed no utilitarian purpose. Displaying his late-Victorian concern with character, he insisted that he climbed only because the mountains were there and TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD posed a personal challenge. He thus exemplified mountaineering as being about self-discipline and self-improvement, values that were widely celebrated in this imperial age, Mallory was no sensation hunter, but his famous climbs of 1921-1924 were nonetheless sensational, and he lost his life attempting to be the first to reach Mount Everest's summit. In the dispirited post-World War I atmosphere, Mallory and other mountaineers captured world attention with their messages stressing the importance of personal fortitude. Throughout the inter-war era, expeditions from all over the world made the conquest of Everest a determined goal (not achieved until 1953).226 Adventurers pushed not only into remaining uncharted territories but into the skies above. In July 1909, French airman Louis Bleriot crossed the English Channel in an airplane in thirty-six and a half minutes, and much of Europe celebrated the achievement. The well-known Viennese author and pacifist Stefan Zweig saw flight as a positive sign. The feat, he wrote, prompted people to consider "how useless are frontiers when any plane can fly over them with ease, how provincial and artificial are customs-duties, guards and border patrols." Air flight, exclaimed Zweig, promoted "the spirit of these times which visibly seeks unity and world brotherhood!"227 Some hoped that the very possibility of aerial bombings would deter war, and there were suggestions that the Hague Peace Conference of 1915 (which was not held) should take up the subject. Although World War I confirmed that air flight could facilitate not just interconnection but killing, the popular fascination with flight nevertheless provided a new arena for adventure headlines. Charles Lindbergh became the greatest celebrity of the late 1920s when his 1927 solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic from Long Island to Paris drew huge crowds and global media attention. Lindbergh's good looks and his feat's celebration of individualism made him a media sensation and contributed to a decade in which adventure flying remained constantly in the news and on the movie screens. The first flight over the South Pole in 1929 brought fresh excitement to this new-style "race to the Pole." And other flying records of all kinds remained to be repeatedly set and then broken. Amelia Earhart, the decorated aviatrix who went missing during her attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 1937, added mystery and tragedy to airborne adventures. All the enormous publicity associated with these early years of flight, of course, drew from the fascination that had captured Zweig and so many others: humans ■f 966 1- ■[ 967 ]■ TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD The New York Daily News celebrating the completion of aviator Charles Lindbergh's historic nonstop flight from New York ro Paris, May zz, 1927. Crowds amassed in Times Square to hear the news of his landingin Paris, and journalists made "Lucky Lindy" into one of the besc-known people on the planet. Lindbergh came to symbolize the new globalizing age of flight. {NY Daily News via Getty Images) could now glide across geographic borders as though they did not exist; they could reach distant lands in hours rather than weeks. The shrinking of time and space had accelerated very dramatically.228 Back on land, or under its surface, the lure of "lost cities" beckoned to other kinds of adventurers and sensation hunters. Ruins of past civilizations from the Mycenaean to the Mayan to the Anasazi spurred searches for more, and it often was not easy to distinguish the line between scientist-archeologists and headline-hunting hucksters. In the 1870s, German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated many sites that he claimed showed the historical authenticity of Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid. Although garnering great publicity, his finds were and still remain controversial because of the suspicion that he may have planted some of the more spectacular items he then uncovered. The American Hiram Bingham came upon the ruins of Machu Picchu in 1911, and he then excavated, photographed, and publicized them to the world as though he had been the first to "discover" them (which he probably was not). The Incan artifacts he encountered were crated off to Yale University.225 American Roy Chapman Andrews typified the showman-scientist. Andrews, a naturalist with the American Museum of Natural History, launched his famous Central Asiatic Expedition into the Gobi Desert in the early 1910s in hopes of finding evidence of earliest human evolution. Exemplifying the America of his era, he sought extensive publicity by traveling in caravans of automobiles through one of the world's most inhospitable terrains. His 1925 expedition required 115 camels and a huge support staff to carry the needed gas, oil, tires, and repair equipment for his six motor vehicles. Finding no significant ancient human remains, he did uncover troves of dinosaur fossils and eggs, many of which he dispatched to New York. His flamboyance and appropriation of fossils raised disputes over ownership with the Chinese government and produced enough complications to end his expeditions. But Andrews published book after book recounting his exploits, and some claim that he became a model for the Indiana Jones movies that thrilled a later generation.230 The famed American animal collector Frank Buck likewise displayed the flair of a vaudeville agent (which he had been) while promoting his adventures. In the interwar era, his "bring em back alive" books, movies, and radio shows dazzled fans worldwide with tales of his encounters with jungle animals and of •[ 969 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD his travails in transporting them to "civilization." An entire genre of Buck-inspired products—King Kong and its many offshoots being the most influential—plotted stories in which rare animals, native "boys," and intrepid Euro-Americans played out predictable scripts in the "jungles" of the world. The drama of such stories came not from a kill or even from a capture but from the physical and financial dangers of trying to keep the beasts alive through the process of transporting them. Frank Buck also promoted his exploits at the New York World's Fair of 1939, where his Jungleland exhibition advertised a display of thirty thousand animals and birds—vastly more than the number featured in even the largest zoo of the era.231 As adventurers on, above, and below the earth generated amazing stories about daring the unknown, they fed consumer appetites for even more sensational tales and pictures of distant lands. Avowedly fictional presentations of the discovery and exploration of unmapped or lost worlds boomed, as this new age of connectivity spurred imaginations to go beyond even the often exaggerated exploits of real-life adventurers. French author Jules Verne's tales of adventures under the sea, in the air, and on uncharted islands reached audiences from their first book publications during the 1870s on into the age of mass movies. Japanese writer Oshikawa Shunro, influenced by Verne, was not translated outside of Japan, but he popularized the adventure genre in Japan just after the turn of the century. German novelist Karl May's tales set in the American West, Asia, and the Middle East sold hundreds of millions of copies in thirty-three languages. In Lost Horizon {1933), British author James Hilton wrote of a fictional "Shangri-La" in the forbidding Himalayas. American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs claimed that Stanley's In Darkest Africa was by his side as he wrote his extravagantly popular Tarzan fantasies, the first of which came out in 1911. Like Verne's tales, Burroughs s many Tarzan books found audiences worldwide and provided staple formulas for the new medium of movies. Meanwhile, a growing global circulation of pulp magazines and their local adaptations, which sprang up on every continent, featured adventure stories and derring-do of all kinds. Adventures engage readers through drama. There must be physical exploits, of course, but the popularity of the adventure genre arises from the constructed narrative form. Looking at the structure of adventure stories—the hope, the hazard, and then the triumph or tragedy—reveals less about the world than 970 about audience expectations. In short, the transnational encounters embedded in adventure accounts seemed to be about the world but often achieved popularity because their dramatic centers and resolutions reinforced familiar verities: the importance of nation, of empire, of manly character. They often seemed to validate notions both of shared humanity and of exceptional races, and they generally obscured the contradictions between the two. Shows and Entertainments Adventure stories provided the structures for most popular amusements during this period. This was the heyday of extravagant live shows that traveled the globe while purporting to represent it. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so many larger-than-life showmen and showwomen presented the "world" to so many audiences that it is hard to grasp the scale and significance of these spectacles with which people in almost every land became familiar. Even as the disciplinary circuits of sober scientists and engineers spread around the world, these transnational networks based on fantasy and spectacle also burgeoned. Both, in a sense, depended upon each other's achievements. Looking through the biographical and descriptive material on the great shows of the period, one is quickly struck by the superlative language. Each show is often proclaimed as the most spectacular of its day and as the model for others. It becomes clear that no spatial or chronological ranking makes sense. The art of the spectacle did not "begin" in a particular place or at a single time and then spread in some predictable way. Rather, the currents of entertainment radiated transnationally and often with a kind of simultaneity. Newspapers, migration, travel, and then film created communities of entertainers that spanned the globe, borrowed from each other, and profited from weaving ever more extravagant representations. The major entertainers of the era, discussed below, appear in no order of chronology or importance. As a group, they suggest the pervasiveness of spectacle to this age of rational categorization and also provide background against which to understand the most important transnational entertainment that emerged from the age—the motion picture. Circuses had become one of the central diversions of the nineteenth century, and just before and after the turn of the century many great circus families ■[ 971 ]• EMILY S. ROSENBERG attained international fame: George Sanger and Frank Bostock in Britain, Carl Hagenbeck in Germany, the Gautier family in France, Albert Salamonsky in Moscow, Herman Renz in the Netherlands.232 The brilliant American promoter Phineas Taylor Barnum used many of the same formulas as these great circuses of Europe. Barnum, however, added scale and also perfected the art of enabling his huge circus entourage to travel widely and rapidly. With Hagenbeck as his designated foreign agent for animal procurement, Barnum found that portrayals of the "world" and its "exotic" creatures provided a circus's most powerful draw, and he took these appeals to their limits and beyond. Barnum's "Great Ethnological Congress of Curious People from All Parts of the World" featured "uncivilized" specimens that he claimed would instruct his viewers about the world. He acquired nine aborigines in Queensland, for example, and they toured with his circus during the 1880s (along with the huge pachyderm, Jumbo). His "Congress" included bearded ladies, armless men, e. Chinese giant, a Burmese dwarf, and a family of Sioux Indians.233 During the 1870s and 1880s the most prominent showmen in America engaged in a rivalry over elephant displays—first over which could display the greatest numbers, then the greatest in size, then the whitest. In her history of the circus in the United States, Janet Davis speculates about the power of such exotic attractions: "The modern child first glimpsed the exotic Other through circuses and toys, a formative encounter that helped make colonial hierarchies part of the natural' world of child's play." This world both blurred and reinforced the lines of gender, race, and class—and especially the lines between animal and human. Well-performing Indian elephants became representatives of India, and "wild" elephants became emblems of Africa. Genuinely white elephants became the most coveted creatures. Empire building was one of Barnum's standard themes. In his hands, the 1904 Durbar of Delhi became a lavish and popular pageant. His advertisement:, described the Durbar with the exaggerated codes of Orientalism: "native soldiers riding upon lofty, swaying camels and preceded by the mystic priests of Buddha, leading the sacred zebus and the sacrificial cattle; there is a prince of Siam with his retinue of warriors and shapely oriental dancing girls... while the Potentates of the Indian kingdoms pay their tribute to the Imperial power."234 TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD The presentations of "abnormality" and difference that lay at the heart of Barnum's spectacles could have many meanings. They could project American middle-class values as normative, but they could also provide tempting glimpses into very different alternative worlds. Being carried off by circus people, after all, could function either as a fearsome cautionary tale or as a tantalizing possibility. Whatever the exact impact on the sensibilities of individual viewers, however, circus spectacles helped to standardize entertainment formulas. Even as they projected diversity, spontaneity, and surprise, their success rested upon the precision needed for replication of acts and railroad mobility. As circuses traveled from place to place, they spread attention-grabbing sensations and raised expectations for encountering the unusual. They drew viewers away from their own local frameworks and introduced the techniques of regional, national, and even international mass culture. Regional circuses flourished within this international milieu of circus techniques and performers. In China and Japan, countries whose acrobatic techniques had influenced European circuses in the nineteenth century, troupes of acrobats performed locally and sometimes as traveling parts of European or American circuses. In South Africa after World War I, Boswell Brothers Circus and Menagerie traveled by ox-wagon and train throughout the countryside. The Great Royal Circus of India, dating from 1909, and the Great Bombay Circus, operating primarily in Punjab, attracted regional audiences during the 192,0s and 1930s. Argentines and Brazilians in the early twentieth century developed circo-teatro shows, which combined traveling circus-style acts with musical, melodramatic, and magic-show performances. In all their variety, interconnection, and mutual borrowing, circuses came to be paradigmatic representatives of globalizing networks. There were many turn-of-the-century extravaganzas that were related both to circuses and to world's fairs. Carl Hagenbeck, the impresario of the animal trade and developer of the much-copied Hamburg Tierpark, for example, merged together the concepts behind zoos, circuses, and exhibitions to establish a global entertainment empire. Although Hagenbeck presented his shows as part of a scientific impulse to document zoological diversity and to "authentically" represent other lands, he enthusiastically embraced the spectacle of the entertainment EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD world. His Tierpark incorporated a dinosaur area with gigantic sculptures. Its ethnographic arena once featured a Wild West show, including forty-two Sioi.x Indians from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota that attracted more than a million viewers. Like Barnum's, his traveling circuses circled the globe, presenting the animals, people, and displays that had gained such a following at the Tierpark. Imre Kiralfy, born in Austria-Hungary, became similarly famous for his extravagant productions. In the United States, Kiralfy and his brothers produced, among other things, a long-runningversion ofjules Verne1s Around the World hi So Days, which featured large female chorus lines and unusual special effects. For the Chicago Columbian Exhibition, Kiralfy staged "America," an extravaganza that grossed almost one million dollars in its seven months. After moving to London, he then built a smaller replica of Chicago's "White City" at Earl's Court and opened an "Empire of India" exhibit in 1895. The height of his career featured a huge Great White City at Shepherd's Bush in London, which hosted yearly exhibitions and the Olympic Games of 1908.235 Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West traveled the world on a scale that was probably unmatched. Like the dime novels and highly mobile circuses from which Cody borrowed ideas and techniques, his Wild West shows generated enormous popularity by reinforcing the familiar formula that linked imperial destiny to the evolutionary progress of civilization. Even his show's musical background, offering such songs as "The Passing of the Red Man," advanced the message. In Cody's pageants the cowboy-hero of the American frontier became a mythic creature of unsurpassed virtue and skill who always vanquished his opponents. He was nature's nobleman: civilized and gentlemanly, yet an enemy of both savagery and of overrefinement. His drama of the triumph of civilization over barbarism seemed to have worldwide appeal. The Wild West's popularity stemmed also from its skillful promoters and managers. Publicity stunts, larger-than-life images, and simplistic stereotypes all expanded the arts that were being perfected in the nascent advertising industry. Moreover, the mechanized precision of worldwide tours itself became part of the spectacle. Featuring sometimes as many as one thousand people, with all the ■< horses and equipment needed to accompany them, the past represented in the Wild West inevitably met the future of Taylorized efficiency. Specially equipped trains, adapting models from rhe traveling circus, facilitated the logistics of quickly transporting and setting up the shows in destination after destination. The military campaigns so often celebrated in the dramas became surpassed in the shows own militarized speed and maneuverability. In 1893 the name of the troupe became "Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World." The change signaled a transnational focus, and the show built a huge global fan base that included kings as well as commoners. Accommodating different audiences and the headlines of the day, Cody's scripts proved flexible in assigning heroes and villains. The Indians who played Cody's defeated nemesis could cue their hair to become Chinese Boxers overwhelmed by the forces of progress; celebratory reenactments of America military victory in the War of 1898 could vanquish assorted Spanish, Filipino, or Cuban foes; Russians could be flattered by epic renditions of their sweep to civilize the steppe. The romance of "The West" helped lure some Germans into dreaming of a frontier of their own in Eastern Europe. At the turn of the twentieth century, Buffalo Bill Cody might have been the most famous American in the world, and his entertainment formula shaped the production of mass culture across the media spectrum, including the new possibilities offered by film.236 Motion pictures truly revolutionized the transnational possibilities for show business. Developed more or less concurrently from various kinds of precursors in France, Germany, and the United States, motion picture films meant that images and stories could be projected relatively inexpensively all around the world almost simultaneously. In France the Lumiere family created its first projections in 1895, and by 1899 Lumiere films were being shown in Istanbul, Damascus, Jerusalem, Cairo, Mumbai, Mexico, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Australia, Shanghai, Peking, Tokyo, and Yokohama.237 Initially films concentrated on documenting and reporting notable events; the technology itself highlighted the spectacle of the object filmed. Most of the earliest films, only a few minutes in length, drew their appeal from collapsing both distance and class status. Popular topics showed images of celebrations that most audiences could never personally have witnessed: Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (1896), The Capture of Rome, September 20, 1870 (1905), The Coronation of Edward VII (lyoz), The Durbar at Delhi (1912), Carnival Scenes at Nice and Cannes (1909). Before World War I, productions from France and Italy predominated in world markets, but few people •[ 974 ]■ [ 975 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG thought in terms of national film industries. Production sprouted everywhere hi the era of silent film. Distribution channels included a range of venues, from the lavish theaters that opened in every major city to the mobile screens that traveled via carts through even very remote areas of the world. After World War I, films from America increasingly dominated global production and distribution. In older scholarship, the formulas and techniques that characterized Hollywood films were often cast as "American" and their global spread deemed "Americanization." Hollywood, however, was always a global place that had emerged within early cinema's transnational network. If Hollywood was innovative and popular in diverse localities throughout the globe, it was because filmmakers with transnational backgrounds and connections made it so. American films emerged less from the traditions of elite art (as films had in Europe) than from immigrant filmmakers who sought to develop entertain mem for a diverse, multiethnic audience. Such films, especially in the silent era when language proved no barrier, perfectly suited a world market. Hollywood's global appeal, of course, brought special advantages to investors and manufacturers in the United States. During the interwar era American companies directly owned more than half of the leading movie houses in the world, and American industries manufactured most of the film and production equipment. In 1915, American-produced films constituted approximately 95 percent o: the total shown in Britain and Canada, 70 percent of those in France, and 80 percent of those in South America.238 Japan developed a substantial film industry that retained a predominant market share in its own country, but Japanese films did not significantly figure in international distribution networks. During tin* 1930s especially, many national cinemas declined sharply under competition from Hollywood, depression-era conditions, and the coming of "talkies," which made it difficult for films in small-market languages to flourish. Still, even when US companies dominated the international movie trade, the transnational currents in film culture remained strong. Some directors developed differentiated commonalities in their moviemaking, as transnational filmmaking came to display what film scholar Miriam Hanson called "vernacular modernism." The film industry boomed in India, for example, where new technologies and styles emerged from coproductive links between local innovations and the globalizing networks of production and distribution. Some thirteen TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD hundred silent films were produced in India from 1912. to 1931. Even after "talkies" came in, the Indian industry flourished. Director Pramathesh Barua, for example, contributed his distinctive touch after study in Paris and London. His movies, wildly popular in India in the 1930s, grafted the narrative traditions, the melodrama, and the visuality of transnational film culture during India's colonial era onto some of India's own precolonial cultural forms. The popular orientation of Barua's films has brought him mixed reviews from later film critics, but he well exemplified filmmaking styles and themes that, as with many popular directors, skillfully mixed the global with the local. In interwar Shanghai, director Sun Yu also sought Chinese forms of modernity that drew from global currents. In Latin America, Argentine and Brazilian filmmakers imported equipment from France in the late nineteenth century; before World War I, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile had developed a brisk exchange in the production and distribution of films. After the war, even in the face of relentless competition from Hollywood, Argentina produced several dozen movies a year, many featuring tango dancing. Likewise, the pre-Wbrld War II Mexican film industry became one of the strongest in the world, influenced by, and also standing apart from, nearby Hollywood.239 Hollywood itself became even more internationalized as directors, producers, and film technicians from many countries migrated there when threatened by the rise of fascism in Europe. Although barriers remained high against anyone not from the United States or Europe, "American" movie products of the late 1930s nonetheless emanated from one of the most cosmopolitan settings in the world. Casablanca (1942.) provides an example: director Michael Curtiz had been born in Budapest, producer Hal Wallis in Chicago, musical creator Max Steiner in Vienna, screenplay writers Julius and Philip Epstein and cinematogra-pher Arthur Edeson in New York City, editor Owen Marks in England, art director Carl Jules Weyl in Stuttgart. The cast featured Humphrey Bogart (New York City), Ingrid Bergman (Stockholm), Paul Henreid (Trieste), Claude Rains (London), Conrad Veidt (Potsdam), Sydney Greenstreet (Kent, England), Peter Lorre (Rozsahegy, Hungary), Madeleine Lebeau (Antony, Seine, France), Dooley Wilson (Tyler, Texas). The film's internationalism in production matched its message. The global influence of Hollywood's motion pictures joined the spread of mass-produced magazines to set new styles of celebrity-dominated journalism. American physical culturalist and magazine impresario Bernarr Macfadden set •[ 976 ]• ■[ 977 ]• EMILY S. ROSENBERG A portrait of Dolores del Rio, transnational film stat. Born Maria de los Dolores Asiinsoio y Lopez Negrete in Du-rango, Mexico, del Rio became a popular part of Hollywood's international social scene and a superstar in the industry's global movie empire during the 1910s and rj30S. Refusing to take patt in films that she felt disparaged Mexico or Mexicans, and facing pressure for her leftist politics, she returned to Mexico in the :940s ro star in major Spanish-language films. (Library of Congress) the cone. Macfadden's publishing empire, which like Hollywood in the early twentieth century developed strong appeal within Americas upwardly mobile immigrant communities, included popular titles such as Physical Culture, True Story, and True Romances. The largest publisher in the United States for several decades, Macfadden developed a huge global distribution network in the first TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD half of the twentieth century. His publications popularized a "look" of modernity that included a reliance on celebrities and confessional formats along wich projections of strong bodies, eroticism, and self-fashioning.240 The new film and celebrity magazines helped promote global film stars. During the silent era, stars such as Clara Bow (the "it" girl) and Lillian Gish in the United States, and Ruan Lingyu and Hu Die in China helped construct and explore a variety of roles for women. Film culture spread transnationally a feminine look that often combined heavy use of cosmetics and flashy clothing styles, evoking consumerism, with an aura of independence and sexuality. In the same era, Rudolph Valentino, the Italian-American heartthrob, parlayed his ambiguous national and ethnic identification as a "Latin lover" into a sex appeal that brought him global stardom. After the advent of "talkies" in the 1930s and 1940s, many of the most popular film celebrities continued to be figures who embodied transnational appeal in diverse and often personally destructive ways—Anna May "Wong, Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hay worth, Carmen Miranda. Very often, the cultural otherness depicted in European, American, and Asian cinema provided ways of suggesting new gender norms and even alternative modernities. The currents of transnational cinema, like popular culture generally, offered a complex interplay of emulation and differentiation .2'11 The medium of film, its celebrants claimed, brought the world together by depicting unfamiliar places. It projected images of New York apartments to people in Patagonia, constructed Chinese rural life for filmgoers in Paris, represented Chicago gangsters to fans in Africa. Especially in Hollywood's world, global diversity could sometimes be mastered quickly and easily. Fox's Movietone News, begun in 1919, took viewers "Around the World in Fifteen Minutes in Picture and Sound." Paramount News, begun in 1917, adopted a similar cosmopolitanism-but-be-quick-about-it appeal. These glimpses of the world, of course, were highly selective and structured in formulaic and misleading ways. Many of the popular documentary films of the first three decades of the twentieth century, for example, claimed an ethnographic authority similar to that supposedly represented in world's fairs and museums. Safari films produced by Nordisk, the first Scandinavian film company, purchased bears and lions from Carl Hagenbeck to stage safaris. Everything about these films was faked, except for the animals, which were shot and killed •[ 978 ]• ■\ 070. 1- EMILY S. ROSENBERG in front of the camera. For safari and hunt films, body count (of animals) seemed a key factor in popularity. Hagenbeck himself turned toward film. He constructed his own Kino in the Tierpark, shot many films, and killed some of his most troublesome animals after staged hunts. He also allowed other filmmaker j to use the dramatic backdrops of his park. Even during and just after World War I, seven different production companies shot films at the Tierpark, which became an all-purpose "foreign" background that could be outfitted to stand in for any exotic terrain in the world.242 Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North: A Story of Life and Love in the Actual Arctic (1922) is considered the first feature-length documentary film. Flaherty's cameras followed, and sometimes staged, the story of an Inuit man and his family in the Canadian arctic and highlighted their traditional methods of hunting, fishing, and igloo building.2'13 A box office success, Nanook encouraged other adventurers to try to capture the lives of premodern peoples for the movie screen. Like Nanook, the supposedly ethnographic documentaries of the age, however, often exaggerated their presentations by incorporating the formulas that audiences already expected from mass attractions. The primary purpose of most documentary films, of course, was entertainment, and their formulas borrowed from those pioneered in world's fair midways, zoos, vaudeville, amusement parks, circuses, and adventure novels. Osa and Martin Johnson provide an example. They began their careers in vaudeville and then turned to nature photography and film. With their one million feet of film (their photographs formed one of the initial collections of the Museum of Natural History in New York), eighteen books, and over one hundred articles, they epitomized the way in which various new mass media intertwined to represent the world and to entertain audiences, who seemed to crave spectacles of unfamiliar cultures in a shrinking world. "This was the Africa as no civilized man had seen it," boomed the narrator of their film Simba (1928), produced under the auspices of the Museum of Natural History. Congorilla (1932), a voice declared, demonstrated "the age-old story of man emerging from savagery." Osa Johnson, in poses echoed in so many of the photos taken in this age of imperial power, frequently posed with her rifle over the animal kills. In Simba she contributed the crucial shot that saved the party from an elephant stampede, killed a charging rhinoceros, brought down a lion that was the object of a village hunt, and then joined the "natives" in celebrating the kill ■■111 ■Si TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD (PL Osa Johnson demonstrating the use of cosmetics to a group of Masai in a carefully posed photograph, 1913. Johnson, alongside her husband Martin, were American vaudeviilians, explorers, photographers, and filmmakers who produced influential but highly staged images of Africa. Always on a tight budget, the Johnsons pioneered product-placement advertising in their photographs by depicting odd scenes in whicli they "introduced" Africans to globally marketed products such as Coca-Cola, Shell Oil, Eveready batteries, Bisquick biscuit mix, Fab detergent, and Colgate toothpaste, along with various brands of cosmetics. (© Bettmann/Corbis) by baking an apple pie. An accomplished shooter of both guns and film, Osa domesticated exotic places and displayed the prowess of white women over both animals and the native males who also participated in the hunts. If Osa and Martin's photos and films fostered greater familiarity with the world, they did so by also reinforcing the highly conttived conventions of racial and cultural hierarchy that permeated the adventure shows of the age.244 By purporting to show ethnographic "realities," documentaries constructed cultural differences that could supply humor and even melodrama. One common corned ic device involved highlighting the superior knowledge of whites while ■r 080 1- •1 081 1- EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD mocking the inadequacies of "natives." Frank Buck, one of the preeminent procurers of exotic animals for zoos and shows, for example, scored a box office hit in 1931 with his feature-length documentary Bring 'Em Back Alive, a film that became the cultural reference for the 1933 hit King Kong. One scene features a large hunting party of natives who fearfully flee when they hear a jungle noise. The audience is then treated to a shot of the accompanying white explorer, who unflap-pably pulls back bushes to reveal a small and harmless honey bear. In such films, the dominant subject was the white hunter-adventurer, the setting included exotic animals and peoples, and the drama came from the testing and ultimately the mastery displayed by the protagonist, an obvious symbol of Western civilization. The world according to Hollywood's feature films also took shape within such conventions. Although the preponderance of Hollywood plots presented images of the United States, those images could become more defined when played off against a "foreign" setting. Producers found that they could easily create rather undifferentiated "foreign" locations by adding a repertoire of various exotic fixings to the same studio lot. As Hagenbeck had discovered when his Tierpark became the standard place to shoot German movies set in foreign locations, one did not need to travel around the world to make movies. Rather, a standard set of "exotic" motifs would do. Film historian Ruth Vesey points out that although Hollywood dressed residents of foreign locations in different costumes, they were generally accorded similar picturesque qualities and set against similar backgrounds. As American-produced films sought export markets, directors had to be sensitive about giving offense to any particular national group. Vesey writes that "since the foreigners' national origins were deliberately obscured, the population of Hollywood's universe came to be broadly comprised of Americans' and others.' "245 Film viewers consequently could "travel" without the cultural, physical, or monetary discomfort of actually doing so. The world they experienced through film, however, was a carefully constructed and formulaic product that had evolved out of the mass amusements popularized in the nineteenth century. Mass Tourism The adventures represented in novels, the sensationalist press, and film brought visions of a shrinking world to mass audiences throughout the world. They perhaps stimulated wanderlust in many, and they schooled those tempted to stray from their familiar surroundings in the conventions of how to perceive whatever appeared strange. Buoyed by ever cheaper and faster transportation systems, mass travel began its rapid rise, at least for Europeans and Americans. In 1911 the London Times reported that one million Britons were visiting the continent yearly. A century before, the number had been fewer than ten thousand.246 In 1880 about 50,000 US tourists per year traveled to Europe; thirty years later the number had mushroomed to zscooo.247 Historians of US tourism have emphasized the huge growth in traveling to Europe and to the "Holy Land," but at the turn of the century six steamship lines also served US travelers to Asia.248 It was within the context of this boom in mass tourism, of course, that the world's fairs flourished as an around-the-world travel destination located closer to home. Mass travel promoted new industries that constructed their own transnational networks. Operators such as the British firm Thomas Cook, which put together some of its first tours for the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, developed the global connections and specialty tours that could ease the hardships of individual travel. Cook and the Berlin-based company Stangen operated almost all over the world. Guidebooks by Baedeker in Germany, John Murray in England, and Michelin in France advised travelers on what was "important" to see in various locations worldwide. Michelin introduced the practice of according stars to favorite eateries and inns. In Germany the Nazi regime also encouraged a carefully controlled tourism designed to offer working people something other than a message of discipline and sacrifice. The "Community Strength Through Joy" agency, created in 1933, sought to build support for the regime and weaken the appeal of the Left by developing a limited but affordable menu of consumer activities and tours. By 1938 Strength Through Joy constituted the largest travel agency in Germany, with buses and twelve cruise ships. It had sent fifty-four million Germans not just on outings to well-known domestic historical and hiking sites but also on excursions to Norway, Greece, Italy, Madeira, and elsewhere.24' Inexpensive and easily portable Kodak cameras became signatures of the traveler. The American company Kodak democratized the medium of photography, heavily promoted travel for the middle class, and cleverly used its advertisements to instruct users in how to take engaging and enviable photos. Armed with information on tours, guides, and cameras, armies of new tourists set out .f oS?. 1. •Í 983 1- EMILY S. ROSENBERG on adventures and then brought their experiences and photos back home to church basements, living rooms, and community gatherings. Women proved critical to the growth of the mass travel industry. In the United States, for example, dozens of American women, often sponsored by newspapers and magazines, wrote about their travels around the globe. The demand for such accounts in women's magazines seemed almost endless. The Ladies Home Journal, especially, fed the fascination for romps through the world in its many features of foreign travel and, for young girls, its around-the-world series of paper dolls that wore different national costumes. Moreover, women's travel clubs sprouted in towns all across the United States, providing armchair adventure for those who might not go themselves. For thirty years an American entrepreneur, John Stoddard, successfully marketed his "Travel Series" of lectures and travel accounts to such clubs. As members gathered to discuss different countries and cultures, the women's club culture strengthened the idea that travel was desirable, educational, and generally accessible to the broad middle class. Acts of travel, it seemed, could come from acts of study and imagination as surely as from boarding a ship or rail car."0 Film did the most to promote and simulate mass travel. In the new genre of the "travelogue," the Americans Burton Holmes and James A. Fitzpatrick were the kings. Holmes had begun on the lecture circuit, where he coined the word travelogue to describe his performances. Like Stoddard, he sold impressive numbers of volumes that interspersed his lectures with photographs. After World War I, however, Holmes took to the screen. Working for Paramount Pictures, he featured titles such as Burton Holmes'Head Hunters (1919) and Torrid Tampico (1911). Fitzpatrick's Traveltalks and other documentaries, which commonly played before feature films in movie palaces worldwide from the mid-i92.os through the mid-19 5°s. perfected the formula for the travel film genre. Fitzpatrick specialized in introducing his audience, who were presumed to live harried "modern" lives, to the presumed simple pleasures and uncomplicated customs of distant lands. In choosing his world locations, he was keenly aware of fantasies and fascinations with the "primitive." Social evolutionary thought had, of course, placed the primitive at the low end of a progressive continuum, but Fitzpatrick's formulations exalted ideas about how a rural life and closeness to nature could counterbalance the enervating influences of urban civilization. Many of his ■Bp I Eli TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD travelogues ended with the somber "and now we must say a fond farewell" (to some idyllic lifestyle) and return to the thankless pressures of "our" advanced ways. For many moviegoers, Fitzpatrick became the "Voice of the Globe."251 Mass travel seemed to promise enlightenment by reaching out to other lands and peoples, but the tours and travel literature often structured experiences designed to confirm Euro-American advancement set against backwardness elsewhere. Not surprisingly, Strength Through Joy's tours began each morning with swastika-draped ceremonies, emphasized racial exclusion, and contrasted the orderliness and cleanliness of German cruise ships with some of the disorderly, poverty-ridden, and darker-skinned ports of call. Travel could establish new bonds among people, but it could just as easily confirm beliefs in racial hierarchy and fuel ethnonationalism. Consumer Codes and Advertising The sensational display of adventure, the advent of motion pictures, and the growing appetite for mass travel were all parts of a new ethos of mass consumerism. Spreading within transnational networks, this emerging world of consumerism was not just about buying necessary goods. Rather, "mass consumerism" may be defined as a mass-production and mass-marketing system that imagines an abundance of goods within a culture that emphasizes purchasing, desire, glamour, and flexible, consumption-driven identities. Consumerism, in this usage, is as much a cultural as an economic system. It operates to establish "codes" by which particular mass-marketed items signal specific kinds of associations. The United States, with its large domestic market and adroit advertising industry, emerged as perhaps the most significant global driver of mass consumerism and its codes. The specificities of local cultures, however, also helped co-produce variants of mass consumerism within the expanding transnational networks of commodities, producers, sellers, buyers, and advertisers. Such transnational flows were inevitably complex and often contradictory. C. A. Bayly has emphasized that colonial rule, by creating networks that introduced Western modes of speech, dress, and sociability, proved critical to the spread of consumerist codes and "modernity." So were global networks of media, which circulated publications, movies, and advertisements. It would be beyond 984 .r qRí i. EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD the scope of almost any work to trace out all of the various codes projected within transnational circuits of consumption, much less to speculate on how they might have, over time, shaped the identities of people, regions, nations, empires, classes, genders, sexualities, and ethnicities. As changes in demography, communication, and trade mixed people together as never before and augmented the availability of goods, how would it be possible to represent all of the ways in which consumers might signal affiliations and identifications? Yet the significance of the mass consumer networks that emerged in this era may not be ignored just because their meanings are necessarily elusive and variable. The consumerist-driven mixing of cultural attributes within transnational space can be described by many terms. Assimilation connotes the loss of one culture along with the embrace of another. Hybridity connotes the selective adaptation of different cultural elements into some new combination. I prefer to borrow, from linguistics, the term code-switching, which seems best to capture what most often occurred in the culture of transnational mass-consumer images.251 Just as people with fluency in multiple languages may go back and forth, strategically invoking words from different languages at particular times, so consumer code-switching may also connote the going back and forth, strategically producing an assemblage, at any given time, of different cultural and political significations. Consumer goods coded all kinds of projections and allegiances. Consider, for example, the "modern girls" in Shanghai in the 1910s who assembled their "look" from a qipao, high-heeled shoes, and bobbed hair. Or the rebels who fled New York for New Mexico in the 1920s and projected their antimodernist views by mixing western ranch styles with emblems of Mexican indigenous culture. Or the elite Mexican "chica moderna" who mixed European style with folkloric attire and accessories mimicked from indigenous cultures and from Europe's "exotic" representations of them. Or the zigs and zags of men's fashions. Before World War I, many urban men of affairs throughout the world embraced the simplicity and uniformity of Western-style clothes. Rejecting the complex, colorful, and often luxurious robes and coats characteristic of many indigenous styles, the simple top hat and black coat came to signal power and sobriety. Yet, especially after World War I, men in colonies often became more self-conscious about signaling pro- or anticolonial political affiliations by the degree to which they adopted Western business attire and housing styles, and many sought to retain traditional customs in clothing and dwelling. Moreover, political currents, generally controlled by men, often channeled women's fashions in significant ways. Meiji reformers in Japan mandated Western dress in the 1870s, but a nationalist revival later brought the kimono for women back into greater prominence. Soviet authorities scorned the capitalistic overtones of the women's fashion industry, favoring simple garments that facilitated work and were not provocative, but many women dreamed of having access to greater choice and style. Fashion was just one arena in which consumerist identities could be assembled and advanced.253 The more open particular societies were to global currents, the more consumer code-switching became a cultural style associated with modernity. Code producers, such as those involved in movies, advertising, governmental fashion policies, or movements of various kinds, helped contour the environment in which different cultural codes might be accepted or rejected. Individuals, however, also played an active role in selecting, mixing, and making meanings from the available codes. Consumerism offered the raw material for a constructed (and reconstructible) projection of self and society that drew upon transnational networks of goods and symbols. As such, it could seem both alluring and subversive. The power of capital, of course, clearly shaped consumer culture. Commercial advertising, an increasingly transnational set of practices and businesses, became perhaps the most important global purveyor of consumer codes (along with films). From the late nineteenth centuty, expanding along with trade, advertising sought to foster values and lifestyle aspirations that would boost people's desires to purchase specific products. Advertising agencies became important cultural brokers, working to adapt messages across boundaries and to create what historian Daniel Boorstin called "consumption communities" that transcended geographic space.254 Although in the twentieth century a substantial critical commentary portrayed advertising-driven mass consumption as a homogenizing influence (and often as an agent of "Americanization" or of "cultural imperialism"), more-contemporary cultural analysis has stressed the interplay between global and local and the possibilities for the often creative juxtapositions that became a mark of modernist pastiche. Advertising strategies have generally responded to pressures for both standardization (the "packaging" of buyers to sell to marketers) and diversification (the flexibility needed to appeal to •f 086 1- EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD diverse buyers). As with other transnational phenomena, they exemplify differentiated commonalities, even as they also may embody asymmetries in power. American advertiser J, Walter Thompson became a leader in forging transn .-tional networks devoted to selling. Founded in 1864 in New York, JWT openec its first branch in 1899 in London and expanded rapidly into dozens of other coun tries. The American model of advertising departed from the older European approaches that emphasized artistic styles associated with nineteenth-centuiy posters. Centering the appeal of their ads on whatever was likely to make customers respond, US advertisers pioneered techniques developed within the emerging field of psychology. They employed surveys and other types of "scientific" methods to gauge and constantly improve the effectiveness of their persuasive strategies. Partly through advertising—and partly through screen images—constellations of signifying codes became recognizable throughout much of the world. JWT designed ads, used worldwide, for American auto manufacturers that featured sporty, young, unescorted women and appealed to a car's beauty as much as to its performance. It also held the accounts for many cosmetics and soap companies. Especially in the interwar era, such advertising messages constructed and spread a look of modernity that, when often mixed with localized images, aimed to stimulate desire for products, especially among women.255 Among urban youth throughout the world in the 1910s, consumerist modernity often seemed to come dressed with cropped hair, cigarette adornments, and fascination with jazz music, movies, cars, and dancing. These codes beckoned toward cultural reorientations, especially changing relations between men and women. They suggested approval of heterosocial relationships, that is, close friendships between men and women who were not related. They signaled the ideal of couple-formation based on individual desire and companionate marriage. In some cases, they hinted at greater acceptance for same-sex attractions. Within patriarchal systems in which male control of female sexuality was paramount, such "modern" styles could represent a threat of social breakdown or a promise of new freedoms, depending on one's perspective. In the early twentieth century, images of "modern girls" had emerged simultaneously throughout the world as flappers, vamps, garconnes, moga, modengxiaojie, kallege ladki, schoolgirls, znáneueFrauen. Everywhere, these were "young women with the wherewithal and desire to define themselves in excess of conventional Global operations and distribution centers for the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, ijtiS. The distribution and sales of rubber tires, which accompanied the rapid spread of motorized vehicles, exemplifies the global, but uneven, spread of the automobile/consumer revolution. By the mid-1910s, US-based Goodyear was the largest rubber company in the world. female roles and as transgressive of national, imperial, and racial boundaries." Modern girls seemed especially drawn to automobiles, which signaled independence and mobility. The 1910s became a heyday for women motorists.256 Moreover, advertisers encouraged the love affair between women and autos. In the United States and in markets around the world, ad campaigns for the American autos that dominated global sales portrayed women as athletic, unsupervised, and fashionable. They showed women driving often simply for recreation. In different languages, they proclaimed the message that "Every Day More and More Women Drive Cars."257 As consumer advertising and modern-girl imagery emerged globally, contests over cultural values flared. Cultural wars over the products and entertainments associated with mass consumerism became especially contentious in the 1920s and the depression decade of the 1930s. In countries as diverse as Germany, Mexico, France, Nicaragua, Italy, China, and Japan, custodians of elite culture and groups espousing "traditional" values (especially related to gender) most loudly invoked themes of nationalism and anticonsumerism (or their own consumer-nationalism) •ľ 088 1- •[ 080 ]■ EMILY S. ROSENBERG " TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD against the proliferation of foreign consumer goods and images they regarded degraded and feminized. The Nazi regime in Germany denounced jazz music, which it depicted as an alien and degenerate art form produced by African-Americans and Jews, and tried to develop a mass culture supposedly rooted in völkisch traditions. Popular "swing clubs," however, kept jazz alive, even during the outright bans of the World War II era.258 On the contentious grounds of mass commercial culture, any particular assemblage of consumer codes could send especially evocative—and provocative—signals. China, particularly the trading crossroads of urban Shanghai, provides a specific example of the growth of transnational mass consumerism and advertising and of how consumer codes travel. Consumer products, promoted in advertising and film images, washed into urban China during the 1910s and 1930s as American, European, and Japanese entrepreneurs sought to capitalize on the potential of the fabled "China market." At the same time, the ethos of the May Fourth era in China (1917-1911) encouraged both nationalism and an influx of Western writings, as the movement drew from a cosmopolitan spirit that sought to adapt foreign models to national goals.259 Especially in the treaty ports and particularly in the International Settlement in Shanghai (where approximately thirty thousand foreigners lived among more than eight hundred thousand Chinese), the rapid growth of modern mass media and electrification provided the transnational infrastructure for advertising and consumer awareness. Estimates suggest that by the mid-19 30s, nearly two thousand magazines reached ovet thirty million people in the whole of China; there were seventy-eight broadcast radio stations, and outdoor billboards were increasingly common. In Shanghai specifically, thirty-six newspapers had a combined daily circulation of nearly nine hundred thousand, and there may have been as many as thirty advertising agencies, foreign and local. Eight Hollywood studios established distribution offices in Shanghai, and by 1927 the city boasted 150 domestically owned film production companies. Dozens of gigantic movie palaces proliferated in both the International Settlement and in the Chinese City sections of Shanghai, the world's sixth-largest city. The great Art Deco structure The Grand accommodated an audience of two thousand people.260 Despite low buying power and occasional nationalist boycotts against foreign goods, the icons of Western and Japanese consumerism grew in familiarity •[ 99° )■ in China. Ads for lipstick, face cream, women's fashions, and a variety of patent medicines found their way into all of these new media outlets. Women's fashions in Shanghai, taking cues from French designs and American movie stars, were popularized in the widely disseminated calendar posters. Dresses narrowed to become more fitted; hems rose; and side splits revealed legs with Western-style shoes. Hair that was bobbed or curled with new permanent-wave machines often complemented these styles."1 The British-American Tobacco Company advertised its cigarettes on the first neon sign in Shanghai and hired local graphic artists to adapt appeals appropriately to the local setting. Although new Chinese mass consumers generally came from the affluent class, people from across the income spectrum became familiar with the look and tastes associated with mass consumerism—products such as French designer dresses, Singer sewing machines, RCA records, Colgate toothpaste, Palmolive soap, and Max Factor makeup. Shanghai's International Settlement became famous for its neon lights, night life, and entertainments. Jazz music and ballroom dancing provided the sounds and signs of a consumerist culture. The products and images from America and the West entered China in conjunction with several other major trends: Western colonialism (with its unequal administrative authority as well as a Marxist, anti-imperialist critique of this inequality); Chinese hopes for a modernity consistent with Chinese nationalism; an often chaotic political system faced with trying to accommodate the vast geographical and ethnic diversity within China; and the emergence of an urban sensibility that challenged the intellectual status quo. Within this complex of circumstances, the semiotics of consumerist messages became shifting and ambiguous. Karl Gerth's study of consumerism and nationalism in early twentieth-century China, China Made, discusses the movements that sought to promote the idea that China could become a modern nation by avoiding foreign imports and encouraging the purchase of Chinese-made fashions, foods, and fun. The development of nationalistic consumerist actions and rituals—boycotts of foreign products, exhibitions of Chinese goods, commemorations of national humiliations, and celebrations of Chinese entrepreneurs—came together under the slogan "Chinese people should consume Chinese products!"242 Just as consumerism could express nationalism and generate codes against foreign incursion, however, it also contributed to a cosmopolitanism that welcomed ■f 991 1- EMILY S. ROSENBERG TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD external influences. In the interwar era, Shanghai, a city often seen both as a part M: of but also as different from the rest of China, exemplified a hybrid worldliness. Department store display windows, calendar posters, magazine advertisements, and movie palaces complemented each other in emphasizing visuality, display, - v f-and spectatorship. Leo Ou-fan Lee argues that the respectable display of the female body became "part of a new public discourse related to modernity in everyday life."263 The Young Companion (Liangyu huabao), a magazine established in Shanghai in 1915, specialized in photography and featured a "modern" woman on the cover of each issue—at first actual women and later fantasy women. Such publications exemplified the ways in which Chinese cosmopolitans adapted and rescripted cultural forms. Lee describes, for example, how Western formulas for plots in popular cinema and magazine articles were neither rejected nor appro priated outright; they were, instead, often shaped to suggest traditional Chinese narratives and values. Similarly, Chinese female film stars borrowed from Western fashions and poses, but often also conveyed independence less through sexuality than by posing with books as well-educated women. Intellectuals, after all, constituted the most enthusiastic audience for foreign cinema and were most open to the kind of new relationships between men and women that were shown on the movie screens. Although the Chinese "modern girl" of the 1910s and 1930s clearly drew upon the Japanese moga style, which had been heavily influ- ■: enced by Hollywood, she nonetheless projected a complex imagery. For example, the qipao, which came to dominate fashions by the late 1920s and 1930s, provided a look that was both modern and Chinese,264 Wen-hsin Yeh's Shanghai Splendor, which elaborates Shanghai s complex modernity, concludes that "no: only was it possible to be simultaneously 'modern' and 'Chinese,' it was virtually imperative for a patriotic Chinese to be modern."265 People in interwar urban China, of course, were not alone in the complex ways in which they interacted with the spread of consumerist culture. Miriam Silverberg has analyzed how Japanese women in the interwar era used code-switching in consumer practices to articulate identity. Examining the Japanese women's magazine Shofu no Tomo, she points out the juxtaposition of Western products and consumer practices with distinctly Japanese aesthetics and contexts. Similarly, the contributors to the "Modern Girl Around the World" proj- % ect note both the commonalities in the "modern girl" image and also the local differences. Cosmetics and soap advertisements throughout the globe confirm the proliferation of skin-whitening products and their association with sexual attractiveness and modernity; yet individual ads also show significant locally rooted differences in how the ads directed their appeals. In fashion, Parisian houses that set the pace for much of the world's fashion industry attracted an internationally oriented elite clientele, but down-scale adaptations with local twists quickly emerged and catered to larger groups with differentiated tastes.266 The images and practices of consumerism thus helped shape the visual environment, particularly of cosmopolitan cities; and by offering code-switching possibilities, consumerism encouraged a style of modernity characterized by pastiche and allowing for differentiated commonalities. Mass consumerism undoubtedly bolstered the power of the world's capital centers, especially those in the United States, an export powerhouse in the 1920s. But it also challenged and played with many seemingly fixed definitions, particularly those related to gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and national culture. The emergence of an increasingly globalized mass culture may have been one of the most important characteristics of this age. Innovations in media—mass publication, traveling shows, and film—helped create the era's adventurers, entertainers, and mass marketers, whose spreading transnational networks channeled the spectacular forms and formulas that, in turn, looped back to feed the new media. Radiating through the protean and nonspatial geographies of trans-nationalism, the currents that carried mass cultural products mapped, unmapped, and remapped the globe. The sureties of territoriality gave way to movement and to the ever-changing configurations of connectivity. The new worlds born within the expanding availability of images and codes could be ones of shrunken space and dissolved boundaries, but they could also be worlds that accentuated difference and incommensurability. By drawing together the world's people within representational, often moneymaking, forms of written and visual images, dissimilarities could be both muted and exaggerated. Like all of the global networks of this era, the highly symbolic realms of media worked in no simple or uniform way toward building a global audience or toward accommodating global variation. •[ 991 1- -ľ 1- EMILY S. ROSENBERG The multiplication of consumer codes that different people could accept, reject, adapt, or combine in almost limitless patterns became a hallmark of spectacularized cultural modernity. As transnational circulation of an evei ■ widening variety of consumer codes spread, the possibilities for interpellation (and reinterpellation) into an increasingly broad array of cultural identifications accelerated. By code-switching to create different assemblages of consumerist goods and activities, individual and national identities could be constructed in a kind of modular fashion. Variously coded attributes could be switched on or off, combined with others, and modified in different degrees. Even as mass consum-erism's main productive and profit-making centers remained firmly anchored in the West, its symbols presented an aspirational world of self-fashioning thai spanned the globe. The rise of transnational mass cultural enterprises and codes signaled the broader transformation that was at work during this era—"the move from a nineteenth-century imperial tactic of spatial discovery by occupation to one of territorial ubiquity through technology and representation."267 The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries' obsessions with cartography, territorial exploration, nation building, and empire building were parts of a worldview that had framed a civilizing project of global improvement marked by territorial acquisition. The seeming solidity of geographical maps provided an apt symbol of that teleological sensibility. What Charles Maier has called the "hyperstates" that embraced communism and fascism tried to use law and repression to control cultural codes they deemed threatening. So did many imperial, and anti-imperial, authorities. By the mid-twentieth century, however, the fleeting and spectacularized images of a transnational, consumerist mass culture increasingly beckoned the future. Coproduced and complex networks stood ready to invade any demarcated territory. Flows of images and other codes held potential for a continual remapping of significations and relationships. The onset of this flickering, unstable, and electronics-shaped modernity came linked, perhaps, to the rise of the United States' particular brand of global dominance in its short "American Century" (famously announced by Henry Luce in 19 41), but state power could hardly control the increasingly interactive landscapes of meaning. TRANSNATIONAL CURRENTS IN A SHRINKING WORLD As the world shrank between 1870 and 1945, changes in one domain and one geography connected, often quickly and unpredictably, to transformations in numerous others. Two closing examples underscore how interconnections and disjunctures coexisted. As entrepreneurs raced to lay oceanic telegraphic cables during the second half of the nineteenth century, the demand rose sharply for a natural rubber-like substance called gutta-percha, which could protect electric lines from seawater corrosion. Found in Southeast Asia and extracted by forest dwellers who would kill the wild trees to extract the profitable gum, the gutta-percha boom deforested land and changed the power relationships and living patterns of nearby people. This ravaging of specific Southeast Asian forestland enabled both a European-centered communications revolution and also a global network of connectivity. It helped draw people and nations together even as it created new inequalities among them.268 Thinking simultaneously about the forest dwellers, living locally, and the near-instantaneous telegraphy, which obliterated space, helps suggest the many unpredictable interrelationships within this era's local, national, imperial, international, and transnational networks of people, goods, and ideas. During the next generation of the communications revolution, in the first half of the twentieth century, innovators laid the production and distribution networks for motion pictures and radio. Entrepreneurs and governments understood that their efforts depended on electrical energy. Generated primarily from coal, oil, and hydroelectric dams, electricity rapidly transformed not only how people traded, traveled, and made war, but also their ability to manufacture symbol-laden images that circulated meanings, aspirations, identities, and desires. Electricity increased human energy consumption exponentially, and access to electrical energy facilitated both "hard" and "soft" power, even as two world wars highlighted the important connections between being able to produce what was "real" and "reel." Rivalries for control over energy supplies, especially oil, and over symbolic industries, especially movie production and radio, shadowed each other. Nations, colonies hoping to become nations, businesses, localized groups, and transnational organizations all engaged in complicated moves to enhance their influence in a conjoined world. Every network affected every other •f 994- 1- •[ 995 > EMILY S. ROSENBERG one. Materiality and representation, once imagined as fairly separable realms, increasingly fused together. These two examples suggest how the new technologies of connectivity rippled globally and cascaded from realm to realm, affecting livelihoods, cultures, identities, geopolitics, and power relationships of all kinds. Such networked processes epitomize the invisible and irregular currents of global change within transnational space during this period, and they foreshadow the complexities of power that would characterize the late twentieth century and beyond. •[ 996 ]•