LAUSR

Contributors to this journal have frequently used international organizations as a departure point from which to examine the ways in which global history has been shaped by worldwide interactions. Although these three articles were submitted separately, we have brought them together in a cluster because they share a common theme. From different vantage points, they all focus on the social and professional networks that developed in international organizations, connecting individuals from diverse cultures and often from dissimilar political backgrounds. In different ways, each author demonstrates that personal friendships and shared interests can address a range of problems, and in many cases directly affect the historical trajectories of transnational organizations and movements. However, the articles also reveal the divergences that have imposed constraints on collaboration, undermined cooperative efforts, and given rise to unsettling questions regarding goals and strategies. Some of these critiques can be traced to the fact that international groupings, whether developed by government officials or by private citizens, have been largely dominated by individuals from Europe and the United States. The articles show that differences in outlook and goals can cause strains even within outwardly compatible groups, and among apparently like-minded individuals. Despite the hopes for enhanced global partnerships, networking at all levels has often been overwhelmed or redirected by government policies, as nations themselves jostle for space on the world stage and compete to assert their own priorities. These issues are all brought to the fore in this cluster. The first article, by Tomoko Akami, focuses on the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO), whose members sought to improve the administration of public health in Africa and Asia through collaborative projects. The prime movers in these endeavours were representatives of colonial administrations rather than of sovereign nation-states, but they were regarded as ‘legitimate units’ in intergovernmental meetings, best exemplified in the 1937 Bandung conference on rural hygiene. In comparing activities in Asia and Africa, Akami argues that the LNHO was able to draw on its relationship to the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, established in 1908, which had already created an Asian precedent for collaboration between representatives from colonial administrations. As the Bandung conference showed, personal networks and ‘lateral relationships’ among Asia’s locally based medical experts provided a strong base for generating international health schemes that were especially applicable to rural populations. Even if the primary concern was governance rather than advocating access to medical treatment as a Journal of Global History (2017), 12, pp. 1–3 © Cambridge University Press 2017 doi:10.1017/S1740022816000309