Journal of World History

• 1. Introduction

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  The Journal of World History launched in 1990 with a simple but ambitious premise: history does not stop at the borders of nations or civilizations. Jerry H. Bentley, based at the University of Hawaii, founded the publication to give scholars a dedicated home for something most historical journals of the era barely attempted. What happens when you look at the past not through the lens of a single country or culture, but across the connections between them? What forces move across boundaries and reshape human life on a scale that no one empire or nation ever controls? Those are the questions this journal was built to answer, and the list of subjects it covers reads like a map of humanity's deepest shared experiences: mass migrations, the movement of trade goods across continents, the spread of infectious diseases, shifts in religious faith, and the slow transfer of technologies from one society to another.

• 2. A Journal Takes Shape

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  Jerry H. Bentley chose the University of Hawaii as the institutional home for a reason that the journal's own scope reflects. The university sits at a crossroads between the Pacific world and the Americas, between Asia and the West. From its founding in 1990, the journal served as the official publication of the World History Association, giving that organization a scholarly platform to match its intellectual mission. The University of Hawaii Press took on the role of publisher, anchoring the journal within a respected academic infrastructure.

  For its first thirteen years, the journal came out twice a year. That pace suited the slow, careful work of peer-reviewed historical scholarship. Editors, contributors, and readers settled into a rhythm built around long-form analysis rather than rapid commentary. Then, in 2003, the journal moved to a quarterly schedule, reflecting both the growth of the field and the expanding community of scholars who had come to rely on it.

• 3. Crossing Into the Digital Age

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  In 2000, the Journal of World History was included in Project MUSE, a digital platform that made humanities and social science journals available to libraries and readers online. The MUSE archive runs back to volume 7, covering issues from 1996 onward. That digital presence meant that scholarship published in the journal could reach researchers well beyond the libraries that held physical subscriptions.

  Nine years later, in 2009, the journal joined JSTOR, the widely used academic archive. Its inclusion came with what JSTOR calls a moving wall of three years, meaning that issues become freely accessible in the archive only after a three-year delay from the date of publication. That structure reflects a balance the publishing world has long negotiated between open access and the financial sustainability of academic presses. For historians working on topics that span centuries, a three-year delay matters little. The scholarship does not age the way a news article does.

• 4. What the Journal Covers

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  Long-distance trade routes appear repeatedly across the journal's published work, connecting the economics of ancient and medieval societies to patterns that persisted for centuries. Population movements on a large scale, whether voluntary migrations or forced relocations, form another core thread. These are not topics that fit neatly into a single national history.

  The spread of infectious diseases across civilizational boundaries is a subject the journal was examining long before modern audiences became acutely aware of how pathogens ignore political borders. Religious faiths and the ideas and values that travel with them receive sustained attention as well. Technology transfer, the process by which one society's innovations make their way into another's daily life, completes the picture. Taken together, these subjects represent the forces that have done the most to make the human world a connected rather than isolated place.