Human social development takes place on many different levels—individual, local, regional, national, continental, hemispheric, oceanic, global, just to start. Studying and understanding these processes historically can lead to a greater knowledge of the human experience. On this basis, the American Historical Association and the Ford Foundation—in partnership with the Library of Congress and a group of professional societies, including the African Studies Association, the Association for Asian Studies, the Community College Humanities, Association, the Council on Latin American History, the Latin American Studies Association, the Middle East Studies Association, and the World History Association—organized a series of conferences meant to help historians develop new ways of organizing knowledge about and thereby understanding the larger world. The first of these conferences was held in February, 2001, and called Interactions: Regional Studies, Global Processes, and Historical Analysis.

Now, the first volume of essays from that conference, Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History, is available though the University of Hawai’i Press. The essays in this volume are meant to be a sample of recent scholarly reflections on the processes of cross-cultural interaction, and several distinct and promising approaches to the analysis of these processes.

The essays in this volume are:

• "Regional Histories, Global Processes, Cross-Cultural Interactions" by Jerry H. Bentley
  
  
• "From Archaic Globalization to International Networks, circa 1600– 2000" by C. A. Bayly
  
  
• "Sufi Brother-hoods: Transcultural/ Transstate Networks in the Muslim World" by John O. Voll
  
  
• "Cotton: A Global History" by Sven Beckert
  
  
• "From Red Crosses to Golden Arches: China, the Red Cross, and The Hague Peace Conference, 1899–1900" by Caroline Reeves<
  
  
• "Constructing Africa: African American Writers before Emancipation" by Colin Palmer
  
  
• "Migration Control and the Globalization of Borders: China and the United States, 1898–1911" by Adam McKeown
  
  
• "Smuggling and Its Malcontents" by Alan L. Karras
  
  
• "Cartographies of Connection: Ocean Maps as Metaphors for Interarea History" by Kären Wigen
  
  
• "Chronology, Crossroads, and Commonwealths: World-Regional Schemes and the Lessons of Caucasia" by Stephen H. Rapp, Jr.
  
  
• "Regimes of World Order: Global Integration and the Production of Difference in Twentieth-Century World History" by Charles Bright and Michael Geyer.