Although we are well aware that climate-induced disasters are bound to occur, British historian Geoffrey Parker argues in Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth CenturyLink opens in a new window , ‘we still convince ourselves that they will not happen just yet (or, at least, not to us), and so fail to take appropriate action.’ Parker’s unnerving account of policymakers always remaining ‘one disaster behind’ is as topical now as it was when his analysis of the seventeenth-century "Little Ice Age" Link opens in a new windowwas first published in 2013. On Wednesday 22 November 2017, the GHCC’s Global History Reading Group convened to discuss selected sections from Parker’s revised edition, published in July 2017. Adrianna Catena and Guido van Meersbergen report on what was a lively and instructive meeting.

When Jeremy Adelman (Princeton University) published his internet essay What is Global History Now? in March 2017, it featured the ominous subtitle ‘Is global history still possible or has it had its moment?’. Yet unlike what some commentators assumed, Adelman's intention had never been to announce The End of Global History. Quite the opposite. On 1 November 2017, Professor Adelman joined Warwick's Global History Reading Group for a discussion of his thought piece. In this first blog post on the new Global History and Culture Centre Blog, Dr Guillemette Crouzet and Dr Guido van Meersbergen reflect on Adelman’s timely intervention.