Benjamin T. Smith reports on a recent research trip to Mexico, supported by Global History and Culture Centre funding, in which he conducted archival work into the life of La Nacha, one of the most significant women in the Mexican drug trade.

Collaborative Doctoral Projects offer a PhD candidate the opportunity to work with an external partner on a project devised jointly by the organisation and the university. In this blog, Hannah Dennett highlights her experience of curating an exhibition with the Foundling Museum, as part of her PhD project to uncover the lives of African and Asian children taken into London’s Foundling Hospital during the long eighteenth century.

From a Ghanaian emphasis on respect for state leaders and Soviet-style patriotism to an Israeli interest on agricultural production and a scout-like enthusiasm for bushcraft, the creators of the Malawi Young Pioneers drew inspiration from a range of different places. In this blog, Emma Orchardson traces the origins of Malawi's agricultural-turned-paramilitary youth organisation and explores some of its foreign influences in the 1960s. In doing so it reveals the effect these had on the organisation’s early construction and development, as well as highlighting some of the wider international connections Malawi forged in the initial years of independence.

Like many of us, I’ve been preparing my teaching for the coming academic year. I’m planning on giving a lecture on early modern science as part of our Galleons and Caravans: Global Connections, 1500–1800 module. I was thinking about how to present these debates on Newton, particularly to a group of students who may have no previous experience in the history of science, but are certainly interested in global history.

Recalling a brief former stint as a computer scienceLink opens in a new window student, I spent a few days putting together an interactive map that is now available online. I hope it will be a useful resource, not just for my students, but for anyone teaching the history of science, or indeed global history.

You can check it out here: https://isaacnewton.world/Link opens in a new window

From the Indian cottons that were traded around Asia and Africa in the Middle Ages, to the global dominance of the blue-and-white pottery of Jingdezhen, and new approaches to the global history of science, in this blog the founding director of the GHCC, Professor Maxine Berg, speaks to Benedict King about five books that transformed our understanding of the past millennium and stand as significant milestones in the development of the vibrant field of global history.

In the last ten years or so historians of science have done much to challenge the existing Eurocentric historiography, yet such works are only just starting to make its way onto core reading lists and into the mainstream of the discipline. In this blog post James Poskett surveys the most exciting new scholarship in the field and makes a case for five books he thinks every historian of science should read. These are books that, whilst often focusing on particular regions or periods, nonetheless speak to the bigger concerns of the discipline. And in fact, for anyone more broadly interested in the history of science, who wants to know where the field is headed, these books are a great place to start.

Global History remains a relatively unknown field in Latin American historiography, despite its popularity in European academia. Some Latin Americanist historians, aware of this situation, have recently focused attention to this “lack of attachment” to Global History in the region. In this blog entry, inspired by two articles by Matthew Brown (2015) and Sven Schuster and Gabriella de Grecco Lima (2020), Camilo Uribe Botta discusses the characteristics of the debate about the usefulness of Global History for the analysis of Latin American history, and proposes some new ideas that could help in the development of a new field.

Europeans who ‘explored’ and hunted in eastern Africa in the later nineteenth century engaged local caravan traders to act as guides and protectors on their journeys from the coast to the interior. Each with loads carried by more than 200 porters, caravans brought trade goods into the region, and took out the material culture collected by the Europeans. Fleur Martin discusses how these processes of exchange – and theft – can be understood, highlighting the violence and agency that lies behind imperial collections in a case study of the James brothers’ journeys through Somalia and Sudan. Their collection of eastern African material cultural heritage is now housed at West Dean, an arts and conservation college in Sussex.