On the 19th and 20th April 2024, the annual British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) Postgraduate Conference took place in the Zeeman Building, University of Warwick. The conference was kindly funded by the BSHS as well as the Global History & Culture and History of Medicine Centres at the University of Warwick. This breadth in institutional support mirrored the conference’s similarly broad theme: the global history of science, technology, and medicine. The focus on the ‘global’ extended beyond the academic focus of individual papers. The call for papers attracted students from all over the globe, with delegates traveling from locations as far as Brazil, the United States, India, Japan, and continental Europe.

In 2024, the year marking the 700th anniversary of the death of one of the world’s great explorers, Marco Polo, the University of Warwick is proud to partner with 36 global institutions to launch the Marco Polo International ProgrammeLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window.

As part of the Marco Polo International Programme, Warwick academics, in conjunction with our European, Singaporean and Chinese partners, are involved in several collaborative events, including a number organised by GHCC members, focusing on travel, material culture, and cross-cultural exchange.

Anaïs Walsdorf reviews the new ‘Collectible Minerals’ temporary exhibition at the Mineralogy Museum of Mines Paris – PSL. The exhibition explores the history of the collection’s acquisitions within the context of 18^th – 20^th century global networks of geology. This review highlights the importance of human histories in natural history and science collections. The exhibition runs from 6 September 2023 to 9 March 2024.

In this blog post, Jeremy Goh recounts his first experience in researching Chinese businesses based in colonial Singapore, the capital of the British Straits Settlements. This research later developed into an article published in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies in 2023. He reflects upon the opportunities and challenges that he faced as he undertook archival research and fieldwork in Singapore, Hong Kong, and China, and draws useful lessons for early-career researchers.

Guillemette Crouzet and Eva Miller report on the conference 'Archaeology, Antiquity, and the Making of the Modern Middle East: Global Histories 1800–1939'. The ‘Middle East’ is both a geographical descriptor and a much grander conceptual designation, associated with emerging empires, antiquity, antiquities, and the forging of modern political, religious, ethnic, and national destinies. What competing imperial, national, and transnational narratives about the present and future of this geopolitically crucial region were fed by archaeology, philology, and history? How were these emergent disciplines themselves forged through Middle Eastern contexts they purported to study? How were temporalities of modernity and progress constructed in relation to the ruptures, continuities and heuristic challenges suggested by the excavation and exegesis of traces of ancient civilisations? How did the return of the remains of the past assist Western and Eastern empires, and new Middle Eastern countries in understanding their own futures?