The art of lacquer involves a glue-like material applied in layers to the surface of objects to make them visually dazzling. From the early sixteenth century, lacquerwares made in Asia were increasingly brought to Europe and highly valued for their quality. Later they were also included in European paintings. How did artists choose to represent this precious and mysterious material? In this blog post, Cheng He shows that a liquid substance like lacquer could be expressed on canvas with different emphases. It was at the same time assimilated into different genres and contexts in paintings, which conversely enriched the cultural meanings of lacquer.

When rapper Kendrick Lamar released his now critically acclaimed album To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015, he shocked audiences with a fusion of genres, influences, and stories not seen before. In the years since we have come to appreciate this album as a Pan-African work of art. But what does this actually mean? Is Pan-Africanism a political project, an ideological framework, a specific movement, all of these combined, or something else entirely? How do we write a history of such a movement whilst grappling with its very nature? Most importantly, why does this matter today? Jack Bowman gives an overview of the movement from its origins to the modern-day, arguing that it is an ever-changing global project, and needs to be assessed by historians as such.

A cotton growing scheme in the British ruled Aden Protectorate, the Abyan Scheme was built on transfers of knowledge from across Britain’s shrinking empire that were truly global in scope. From the immense cotton fields in Sudan to the agricultural methods taught at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad, there was much more to the cotton grown at Abyan than met the eye. Equally, the Abyan Scheme was also not immune to the existential threat of Arab nationalism in the 1950s, as its cotton crops soon became embroiled in Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s criticisms of British imperialism. As William Harrop argues in this blog post, Abyan stands as an important case study of how global ideas of development, expertise and anti-colonialism interacted and became reshaped on a local scale.

Until 1979, Britain contended with an avowedly segregationist element in its population, with complex but significant legacies. Located on the fringes of ‘Greater Britain’ in Southern Africa, 250,000 ‘Britons’ in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) justified white-minority rule, and rebellion against the Crown, using transatlantic discourses of white nationalism which had a significant impact on discussions regarding race and identity in the British metropole. Through Rhodesia’s experience and the discourses white Rhodesian propagandists produced, we can grasp the manner in which imperial nostalgia was transformed into transnational white nationalism, a discourse that continues to haunt present debates. Unravelling this must be one of the key tasks of global historians today, argues Niels Boender.

What does ‘being modern’ mean? The current pandemic brings this perennial question once again to the fore. Is a strong centralised state that enforces strict public health measures to save lives ‘modern’? Or is a free society where people can make their own choices and control their own body ‘modern’? Is a population that firmly believes in science over all other values ‘modern’? Or is a society where there is no single fundamental assumption, but only constant scepticism and debate ‘modern’? Taking cues from Ruth Rogaski's Hygienic Modernity (2004), Bobby Tam seeks to complicate the idea of what 'modern' is based on his observations of the pandemic response in the UK, Hong Kong, and Singapore.