1. Petty warring kingdoms: England and France clash yet again in the Hundred Years’ War
2. The Four Conditions of Society: Poverty by Jean Bourdichon, c. 1500
3. The Triumph of Death by Peter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1562
4. The Yongle Emperor
5. Su Song’s water clock in the Forbidden City, Beijing
6. A game of Chinese golf (chuiwan)
7. The qilin: the Sultan of Malindi’s tribute to the Middle Kingdom
8. The culture of conformity: the Chinese civil service examination in the reign of the Jen Tsung Emperor
9. The victor of the spice race: Vasco da Gama’s tomb, monastery of St Jerome, Lisbon
10. Earl Macartney vainly seeks to arouse the Xianlong Emperor’s interest in Western civilization: a cartoon by James Gillray
11. Jan Sobieski’s men raise the Ottoman siege of Vienna
12. Prisoner of the harem: Sultan Osman III
13. The Ottoman envoy Ahmed Resmî Effendi’s arrival in Berlin, 1763
14. The original manuscript of Frederick the Great’s Anti-Machiavel, with annotations by Voltaire
15. Pages from the German edition of Benjamin Robins’s New Principles of Gunnery
16. The city the Spaniards failed to find: Machu Picchu, Peru
17. Boneyard Beach, South Carolina
18. You do the work … Millicent How’s indenture document
19. … you get the land: Abraham Smith’s land grant
20. The American dream: a piece of Charleston
21. Conquistador: Jerónimo de Aliaga
22. The Washington who wasn’t: Simón Bolívar as seen in present-day Caracas
23. The scars of slavery in the United States
24. The baguette as a legacy of empire: Saint-Louis, Senegal
25. The black sheep who beat the white sheep: Blaise Diagne, the first black member of the French National Assembly
26. Louis Faidherbe, Governor of Senegal, ponders his mission civilisatrice
27. Tirailleurs Sénégalais proudly show off their samples
28. Médecins Sans Frontières, imperial style: French doctors brave the tropics
29. Three photographs of ‘Bastard’ women from the German racial theorist Eugen Fischer’s study of the Rehoboth Basters
30. ‘I didn’t know what the war was really like’: a Senegalese tirailleur on the Western Front
31. Lüderitz, Namibia
32. The sartorial world we have lost: a young woman on horseback, Urga [Ulan Bator], Mongolia, 1913, taken by Stéphane Passet for Albert Kahn’s ‘archives of the planet’
33. Two princes in Savile Row: Hirohito and Edward
34. The Meiji makeover, 1: Observance of His Imperial Majesty of the Military Manoeuvres of Combined Army and Navy Forces, Yōshū Chikanobu, 1890
35. The Meiji makeover, 2: Ladies Sewing, Adachi Ginkō, 1887
36. James Dean unleashes the jeans genie in Giant
37. Levi’s® London flagship store, 174–176 Regent Street
38. ‘They are afraid of freedom. / They are afraid of democracy… So why the hell are we afraid of them?’ The Plastic People of the Universe rock Soviet communism
39. Headscarves on dummies in Istanbul
40. In search of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism: Max Weber in America
41. American cornucopia: The St Louis World’s Fair, 1904
42. The Word comes to Wenzhou: China Inland Mission Students with their teacher, c. 1900
43. The cartography of salvation: an American missionary’s map of South-east China
44. A scene of death and destruction from the Taiping Rebellion
45. Mass-producing scripture: the Nanjing Amity Bible Printing Company
46. Industrial Revelation: China today
47. The end of Western predominance: President Barack Obama bows to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, November 2009