It is always the future that makes the past; the future as it is wished for, as it should be or as it is expected to be. Claims on time, which become claims on normative order, are looked at through varieties of regional and thematic cases and taken as a methodological route through which this book contributes to the writing of global history.

Hagen Schulz-Forberg is Associate Professor of Global and European History at Aarhus University, where he co-ordinates the International Studies programme. His latest monograph, co-authored with Bo Stråth, (2010, paperback 2012), was shortlisted for the European Book Prize 2011.

Contents: Hagen Schulz-Forberg: Introduction. Time and Again Toward the Future. Claims on Time as a New Approach for Global History – Andreas Steen: «The Power of Music»: Strengthening China in the 1920s – Maria Framke: Fascist Italy: Ideal Template for India’s Economic Development? – Omar Guèye: Social Reforms in the Interwar period and the «Revolution» of the Popular Front in French Africa – Christoffer Kølvraa: Space and Spirit in the European Colonial Imagination after the First World War – Kenneth Weisbrode: Contours of the New Diplomacy – Volker Prott: War Aims, Wilsonian Ideas, and the ‘New Diplomacy’. Reinventing the Franco-German Border of Alsace-Lorraine, 1914-1919 – Bertel Nygaard: French Revolution and Communist Future. Historical Time and Agency in European Labour Movements at the End of the First World War – James Kaye: To the Biennale, and the anti-Biennale. How the Lone Cleanser of the World Briefly Contributed to the Globalisation of Art Exhibition in Aestival Venice of 1920-22 – Niels Brimnes: 1918: International Health between and Rural Hygiene – Hagen Schulz-Forberg: Rejuvenating Liberalism: Economic Thought, Social Imagination, and the Invention of Neoliberalism in the 1930s.