With this volume we start our new series in intercultural transfer studies, which aims to present innovative scholarship that reveals the interconnected nature of human cultures and societies. The concept of intercultural transfer studies is based on the recognition that humans have always lived in an interconnected world. They moved around and, in the process, transferred ideas and objects across continents and oceans. Such transfers shaped all human societies and cultures across the globe. And even though limitations on transportation and information exchange in the premodern world could cause one to believe that such transfers of ideas and objects were more characteristic of the modern world, intercultural transfers are nothing new. Historians of the modern era have, however, one decisive advantage over historians of the premodern area when it comes to the exploration of intercultural transfers. Intercultural transfers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were much better documented than intercultural transfers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Our series focuses on the circulation of notions, images, things, living beings, capital, and practices across cultures and societies around the globe and the creation or disruption of relations and spaces that shaped the perception and reality of individuals. These circulations created spaces of their own that overlapped and competed with spaces created by states, empires, and nations. This series provides a home for scholars who explore and analyze historical phenomena in their entirety rather than segments of such phenomena within specific and isolated regional or national settings. Such an approach provides for a comprehensive understanding of specific phenomena that could never be reached within a state-or nation-centered approach.

Nation-centered accounts of history seem to have exhausted themselves. Phenomena such as football have, for instance, received much attention by scholars in the context of nation-building and the creation of national identity. And while there is no doubt that football has become intertwined with nationalism, historians have largely failed to explore how this sport came into existence and how it spread across the globe. Football was born at English public schools (Rugby and Eaton) and was transferred from there to high schools across Europe and South America as part of school reform efforts.