The written heritage created by scholars, theologians, jurists, historians, mystics, linguists, and thinkers born and educated in the territory of present-day Uzbekistan constitutes an invaluable part of world civilization. These scholars produced fundamental works that shaped intellectual traditions in theology, law, philosophy, science, and literature across the Islamic world and beyond. Today, their manuscripts and lithographic works are dispersed across libraries, museums, archives, and private collections on all continents. This article provides an overview of the major manuscript repositories in Uzbekistan that preserve and study this rich heritage. Special attention is given to four principal institutions: the Fund of Oriental Manuscripts of the Abu Rayhan Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies, the Library of the Muslim Board of Uzbekistan, the Source Treasury of the International Islamic Academy of Uzbekistan, and the Alisher Navoi State Literary Museum. The article highlights the historical formation of these collections, their thematic scope, and their significance for contemporary scholarship. By introducing these major repositories, the study aims to encourage further academic engagement with Uzbekistan’s manuscript heritage and to emphasize its importance for global intellectual history.

Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820–1891) was a towering figure of 19th century Bengal, who emerged as a pioneer in education, social reform, and Bengali literature. His contributions revolutionized society by advocating for women’s rights, promoting education for all, and simplifying Bengali prose for the common people. This article explores his multifaceted legacy, contextualizing his work in the socio-political fabric of colonial India. Through an analysis of his literary and reformist contributions, this paper highlights his enduring influence on Indian society and global intellectual history.

This article examines why and how scholars could bridge intellectual traditions in research by developing the notion of “a bi/multi-cultural intellectual mind”. It begins with outlining the historical emergence of Western-centric dominance in global academia and its consequential unequal worldwide knowledge flows. Drawing on elements from the model of bicultural competence, including attitudes, knowledge, skills, and behaviors, this study suggests research directions for examining individual scholars to bridge intellectual traditions. It emphasizes that individual efforts can bridge intellectual traditions in research truly effectively. This article then highlights research pathways of examining intermediaries in global intellectual history, who successfully navigate Euro-American and their own intellectual traditions. In doing so, it proposes an analytical framework for the study of a bi/multi-cultural intellectual mind. Finally, this study calls for diverse and inclusive approaches to research on bridging intellectual traditions, while encouraging an equal dialogue between Euro-American and other intellectual traditions in the global higher education landscape.

This article examines core-periphery dynamics within global international relations (IR), focusing on how intellectual history informs the ongoing dialogue between the core, primarily the United Kingdom and the United States, and the 'periphery', representing the rest of the world. The study critically engages with Turton's conceptualisations of cores and explores how the concept of the periphery can be rethought to promote a more inclusive global IR framework. The article uses qualitative methods, including content analysis of key reference texts and historical sources, to examine the evolution of the core-periphery divide. The concept of epistemological freedom is discussed, prompting the question of whether a convergence of epistemologies or the pursuit of independent epistemic freedom is a more attainable objective for the expansion and diversification of the intellectual foundation of global IR. The importance of dialogue in reshaping the discipline is emphasized, and the potential of civilizational discourse to advance Global IR is considered. However, the article critically assesses whether such a discourse may inadvertently promote exceptionalism and essentialism. Ultimately, the article argues for a more balanced and pluralistic approach to global knowledge production that integrates perspectives from historically marginalized regions to challenge the traditional centre/periphery binary and promote intellectual diversity in the discipline. Drawing on the insights of scholars such as Shahi, Moshirzadeh and Kuru as well, the article explores the complexities of establishing genuine dialogue and inclusivity within IR, considering alternative approaches such as Shahi's 'dialogic approach' and Kuru's emphasis on global intellectual history.

In global intellectual history, there exists a tension between analytical concepts often carrying a Western or colonial pedigree andtheir ability to capture the multifaceted reality of historical actors who cannot be placed in one language or culture alone. The thematic section titled ‘Analytical Concepts for Transcultural Settings’ highlights the role of global intellectual historians as mediators who balance local realities with global narratives. It emphasises how rethinking the crucial role of analytical concepts can help historical actors challenge and transcend conventional categories, urging historians to adapt their analytical frameworks for transcultural settings accordingly.

This article uses translation analytically in order to address the issue of context. This can be elusive in global intellectual history, especially when the ideas at stake claim to be valid anywhere, with no regard to circumstances. Examples are drawn from the oeuvre of the universalist Indian thinker M. N. Roy in order to argue that his ‘contingent contexts’ of personal political circumstances and tactical decisions can illuminate historical arguments, as well as positing that contexts were not merely what Roy operated in, but also what he operated with.

By concentrating on the case study of Seyfeddin Thadée Gasztowtt (1881–1936)—a peripatetic activist, journalist and convert to Islam of Polish origin, who tied the issue of Poland’s independence to the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim world in the wake of the 1905 Japanese victory over Russia, this paper discusses opportunities of biography for global intellectual history. Focus on mobile individuals who operated in transcultural settings can help us to understand how major turning points in international history become global moments as these moments gain global significance only by virtue of activists seizing them and employing them in the service of their respective causes. A biographical approach gains us insights into how individuals were shaped by these watershed moments and at the same time were productive in them. A microscale analysis offered by biography can elucidate the processes of cross-cultural intellectual transfer and transregional entanglement in all their complexity.

This article explores the evolving discourse surrounding global history. While historians initially embraced global history as essential for comprehending a globalised world, recent debates have questioned its desirability and feasibility. The author examines the intersection of global history with intellectual history, discussing the establishment of dedicated publications—such as the journal Global Intellectual History—and evaluating the three heuristic approaches proposed in the volume edited by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori in 2013 (universalist interpretations, comparativist perspectives, and investigations into networks and interactions across space). The author highlights challenges such as translatability and the dominance of English-language scholarship. The article concludes with a call for a critical examination of the ‘global’ as a concept, acknowledging the need for reflectivity, collaborative efforts, and a nuanced understanding of historical contexts in shaping the future of global history. Image Caption: David d’Angers, plaster cast for the bronze bas-relief commissioned by the municipality of Strasbourg for the monument of Gutenberg in Gutenberg Square (1840), Angers, David d’Angers Gallery, inventory no. MBA 842.7, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0. Jean Pierre Dalbéra) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Statue_of_Johannes_Gutenberg_on_Place_Gutenberg_in_Strasbourg#/media/File:La_diffusion_des_id%C3%A9es_en_Asie_(!)_gr%C3%A2ce_%C3%A0_l'imprimerie_par_David_d'Angers_(Angers)_(15095158141).jpg

Intellectual history is a field of scientific research developing intensively throughout the 20th century has constantly become the subject of heated debate at any stage of its evolution up to the present day. Scientists recognize the important interdisciplinary significance of the term itself, which expresses a general methodological tendency towards synthesis within social and humanitarian knowledge. At the same time, the very fact that the analysis of the content of this concept still raises questions and gives rise to doubts seems paradoxical. The issues surrounding the rapid spread of the idea that intellectual history, having barely managed to form as a scientific direction, found itself in a situation of methodological impasse, which is provoking a feeling of cognitive dissonance among its supporters everywhere, require an adequate understanding of the reasons for such a state of mind. A constant source of crisis phenomena is the inability of many adherents of intellectual history to recognize the complex and rather fragile structure of its analytical methods, which allow the study of diverse social phenomena from an interdisciplinary perspective. However, many theoretical disagreements, which at first glance seem difficult to overcome, are of a very relative nature if they are considered from the point of view of the world historical tradition of the evolution of various types of intellectual activity in various cultures — ancient and modern. It is in this context, in our opinion, that we should consider the international turn that has emerged in the last decade towards a “global intellectual history”, within the framework of which a creative synthesis of diverse national traditions is being carried out.

Abstract This essay traces different historiographical framings of the modern university in South Asia. Although the trajectories of this institution are manifold and complex, the university's deep imbrications with colonial expansion and developmentalist ambitions lend it to both national and global perspectives. Focusing on the late colonial to early postcolonial period, I examine how recent scholarship has positioned the university across multiple scales. In particular, I consider how the turn toward global, networked, and “entangled” perspectives — with examples drawn from global intellectual history and the history of international development — suggest fresh approaches, clearing the way for new questions as well as encountering unique limits. Ultimately, these frameworks help reorient the university toward its translocal dimensions: as a site of national imagining, internationalist claim‐making, development meaning‐making, global connectivity, and the transnational circulation of knowledge.

Abstract This article offers a reassessment of Arab Socialist Baʿth Party founder Michel ʿAflaq's thought in the context of decolonization and global intellectual history. Engaging with ʿAflaq's thinking in terms of its metaphysical foundations and its relationship to universality, this work examines four key concepts in his oeuvre: resurrection (baʿth), faith (īmān), spirit (rūḥ), and unity (waḥda). In essence, ʿAflaq's metaphysics links the Arab nation with the past while his universalist aspirations open the way forward for the future. While numerous scholars in recent years have explicated the universal ambitions of anticolonial nationalists, the place of Arab nationalists and their relationship to decolonization are in need of greater scholarly attention. In turn, I argue that ʿAflaq's ambition of national resurrection ought to be understood as such a quest to realize the universal.

The Idea of The Muslim World, A Global Intellectual History | Cemil Aydin | London: Harvard University Press, 2017.
 The notion of "The Muslim World" as a binary point of opposition to "The West" has become a global narrative, accepted by many Muslims and non-Muslims alike. In fact, Muslims reside in different parts of the world, speak different languages, live in different traditions and cultures, and have different nationalities and political interests. Besides, the those who believe in notions of the Muslim world have rarely discussed or imagined the Christian world, the Buddhist world, and so on in similar terms. Thus, how did this narrative about the 'Muslim World' come into being and become a mainstream belief in the modern world? This issue constitutes the main point of discussion in Cemil Aydin's book, as the title suggests, "The Idea of The Muslim World." Questions such as who, when, how, and why this notion arose and persists in the modern era are discussed.

Abstract In the light of the Second World War, the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and decolonization in Asia, the newly established UN organization for education, science and culture (UNESCO) initiated a global research project in 1947. Its main task was to find out how tensions within and between societies can be explained and tackled to secure peace and social justice. Combining peace history with the global history of social sciences and global intellectual history, this article assesses the design and conduct of the Tensions Project in India and Israel at the crossroads of post‐fascism and post‐colonialism. It finds the reasons for the Project's limited impact in the contradictions between universal knowledge claims and local specificities, its over‐confidence in scientific solutions for social problems, interfering nation‐building in early postcolonial states, the limited comparability of research, and its neglect of political activism.

Abstract The Eurocentric critique of the International Relations discipline has brought welcome attention to non-European international thinkers, and anti-colonial or anti-imperial thinkers in particular. Frequently these thinkers and associated movements are rightly described in thematic terms of emancipation, equality, and justice, in opposition to the hierarchical worldview of empires and their acolytes. Notwithstanding the broad validity of this depiction, a purely oppositional picture risks obscuring those aspects of ‘non-European’ international thought that evade simple categorisation. Drawing upon archival material and historical works, this article applies approaches offered by global intellectual history to the works of late colonial Indian international thinkers, exploring the mixed registers of equality and hierarchy, internationalism and imperialism present in their writings. Concentrating on three ‘sites’ connected by the common themes of diaspora and mobility: the plight of Indians overseas in East Africa; the concept of ‘greater India’; and the international political thought of Benoy Kumar Sarkar, the article complicates the internationalism/imperialism divide of the early twentieth century, showing how ostensibly opposed scholarly communities sometimes competed over similar forms of knowledge and ways of ordering the world. This offers a framework by which the contributions of global intellectual history can be applied to the study of international political thought.

Abstract This essay advocates “refugee political thought” as an autonomous category which needs to be centre-staged in global intellectual history. I concretise this by studying Bengali Hindu refugees who migrated from Muslim-majority eastern Bengal (after the Partition of British India in 1947 part of Pakistan, and after 1971, the sovereign state of Bangladesh) to the Hindu-majority Indian state of West Bengal, and occasionally their descendants as well. By studying the transnational horizons of Bengali refugees from the late 1940s to today, I posit them as part of modern global intellectual history. Bengali refugees and their descendants connected their experiences with those of refugees elsewhere in the world, seeing themselves, for example, as “new Jews.” Later, some of them aligned themselves with the Palestinian cause. Refugee politics became enmeshed with Cold War revolutionary currents. European, Soviet, and Chinese Marxist theory—and latent Lockean assumptions—propelled the everyday politics of refugee land occupation. Marxism, sometimes with Hegelian inflection, nourished the East Bengali-–origin founders of Subaltern Studies theory and Dalit (lower-caste) thought. Ultimately, this essay shows how Bengali refugees instrumentalised transnational thinking to produce new models of democratic political thought and practice in postcolonial India. I describe this as “refugee democracy.”

Abstract This article explores the unconventional life of Ugandan Akiki Nyabongo, an “intellectual misfit” whose career and legacy reveal some of the limitations of global intellectual history. Nyabongo led a remarkably global life: he lived and worked with George Padmore, collaborated with W. E. B. Du Bois, and introduced civil rights activist Eslanda Goode Robeson to Uganda during her trip to the African continent in 1936. He conducted research for his doctorate degree at Oxford University, and he pursued additional projects in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and numerous universities across the United States. Thus far, though, Nyabongo has remained at the margins of stories about pan-Africanism, Black internationalism, or African anti-colonialism. This article argues that conventional global frameworks—often determined by scholarly priorities and interests that originated outside the African continent—have confined Nyabongo's relevance and importance. This scholarly and international invisibility is worth correcting, in part because he remains an important figure in western Uganda. And, his importance there reveals the limitations of conventional scholarly categories and sheds light on how western Ugandans, using oral traditions and long-standing idioms of power and prestige, understood global mobility and international importance in the midst of an increasingly globally connected world.

This article argues for a transregional historical approach to explain the career of political secularism, i.e. the ideas and practices that inform the modern state’s relationship to and administration of religion, in the 20th century. More specifically, it asks in how far we can understand secularism in South and Southeast Asia between the end of the First World War and decolonisation after 1945 as a result of transregional patterns that evolved within and beyond these regions. The argument is based on three brief case studies on Atatürk’s Turkey as a contested source of inspiration for state secularity and religious reform, regional women’s networks to foster secularism and social change in the 1930s, and secularism as a strategy of postcolonial state-building and territorial integration. Conceptually, the article suggests to use global intellectual history as a means to combine research on connectivity with historical comparison.

This paper argues that Mr. Science and the May 4th Movement was a significant chapter in the global history of science. To contextualize the story better, I will adopt three broad interpretive frames. First, I shall place Mr. Science and May Fourth in a longer view than the particular events in the 1910s–1920s. This will allow us to trace the historical changes and the evolving institutions, discourses, and practitioners of science over a few generations. Second, I shall highlight the most relevant global conditions. Western imperialism was of course a crucial setting, but there were more specific historical moments that also deserve attention. Finally, comparisons and connections; it is necessary to examine the transmutations of ideas, knowledge, and institutions across political and cultural borders. In other words, we should study Mr. Science and May Fourth in the mode of global intellectual history. Other than China, my main comparative cases are India and Japan, though I will also refer to Ottoman Turkey. Taken together, these examples provide a range of comparisons central to our inquiry into Mr. Science and the global history of science.

This article is devoted to the problem of political emigration in the Cold War period. This problem has been studied by a large group of intellectuals-thinkers, writers, and academics. The author of the article focuses on the individual strategies of sentiments among Central and Eastern European intellectuals. Their decisions were as much the result of an impulse and reaction to circumstances as the rational premise that the outside world was a place where they would be safer with their family and friends, and where they would not have to succumb to political pressure in their work and research. The author relies on conceptual developments among specialists in the field of the analysis of behavioral patterns of intellectuals. Particular attention is paid to the example of Adam Ulam, whose personality combined the specific features of emigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. Much attention is paid to the theoretical and methodological aspects of the problem of intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe. The author analyzes the approaches of researchers to the problem of the formation of the Polish intelligentsia. As a result of the study, it has been shown that, during the Cold War, intellectuals were mobilized on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Some of them played an important role, such as in US Cold War strategies, especially within the so-called Cultural Cold War. Сonclusions drawn from such study are of a more universal nature and allow one to pose a question about the specificity of the intellectual émigré as an important element of global intellectual history.

ABSTRACT How have intellectuals from around the world thought about inequality in the world? In light of the call for a less Eurocentric history of ideas as well as recent debates about global inequality, this article introduces a special issue on the global intellectual history of an unequal world. The issue supplements the already available scholarship in at least four ways: it delves further into other kinds of inequalities than first and foremost economic inequality; it historicises key concepts in the intellectual history of an unequal world; it incorporates fine-grained analysis of indigenous languages and concepts; it extends the analysis of historical inequality vocabularies to how inequalities were critiqued. Moreover, this introduction sheds lights on possible methodological approaches for an intellectual history of global inequality. There is a need to go against a modular approach to the history of ideas to embrace the dialectic between the specific situatedness of our topics of research and ‘global’ contexts. Questions of transfer, circulation, connections, or diffusion of ideas need to be asked on an empirical case to case basis. We therefore propose location, temporality and legitimisation/critique as key analytical concepts when exploring historical thinking on an unequal world.