Over the past two decades, historians have dedicated a growing amount of research to the history of globalization. This introduction shows how the articles in this issue contribute to this dynamic, aiming to illustrate its heuristic potential in historicizing educational phenomena. The field of education is presented as a relevant platform for an analysis of transnational dynamics, a fact which is demonstrated in the various articles in this issue: they offer a diversity of original case studies that shed new light on the complexity of transfer mechanisms related to education policies, models, and knowledge over the last two centuries. The introduction underlines how this issue renews knowledge on the international production of education policies and practices, focusing on four key methodological issues that run through the various articles: periodization, the myth of progressivism, the multilaterality of circulatory phenomena, and gender relations.