Global History and Culture Centre Blog

On 21 February 2020, the Global History and Culture Centre hosted a workshop to celebrate the career of Professor Maxine Berg. Focused on the question "Why Does Economic History Matter?", the event concluded with the presentation of a volume of essays written and edited by Maxine's friends and colleagues, titled Reinventing the Economic History of Industrialisation (McGill-Queen's University Press: 2020). In this guest blog, Professor Tirthankar Roy (LSE) responds to the book and the central place of Berg's scholarship in shaping the field of global economic history.

Saul Guerrero turns the received view on silver refining in the Hispanic New World on its head in his remarkable 2017 book, Silver by Fire, Silver by Mercury: A Chemical History of Silver Refining in New Spain and Mexico, 16th to 19th Centuries. The book, which has its origins in the MA programme in Global History at the University of Warwick which Guerrero completed in 2009, is discussed by Michael Bycroft.

On Friday 7 June 2019 the last of three V&A Salons took place as part of the AHRC-funded Global Microhistory network, with the theme of 'Information, Writing, and Cultures of Correspondence'. Organised by Maxine Berg along with Warwick-colleagues Jo Tierney and Guido van Meersbergen, this third salon session took place at the V&A stores at Blythe House, London, under guidance of the V&A's curator of South Asian textiles, Avalon Fotheringham. In this blog post, Guido van Meersbergen reports on the event accompanied with a slide show of spectacular photos by Adrianna Catena.

On Wednesday 8 May 2019, the GHCC’s Global History Reading Group gathered to discuss excerpts from Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018). In this blog post, GHCC member Josh Patel gives his take on this latest contribution to a fast growing scholarly literature which seeks to define what neoliberalism is and how it developed over the course of the twentieth century.

In this blog post GHCC member Dr James Poskett presents his new book, Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815–1920, published by the University of Chicago Press. His book tells a story of skulls from the Arctic, photographs from India, books from South Africa, and letters from the Pacific. By following these objects across the world, Poskett shows how the circulation of material culture underpinned the emergence of a new materialist philosophy of the mind. As well as a history of phrenology, the book also offers a broader reflection on what it means to write a global history of science.

On 14-15 February 2019, the Warwick-Stanford conference on 'Mapping the Global Imaginary, 1500-1900' was held at The David Rumsey Map Center. In this guest blog, Professor Kären Wigen (Stanford) explains how the items on display during the conference frame our discussions of early modern cartography, after which Dr Bertie Mandelblatt (John Carter Brown Library) illustrates her research on subsistence agriculture and the American plantation economy by focusing on an eighteenth-century estate plan produced in the French colony of Saint Domingue: the Plan géometrique de l'habitation de Mr. Guilleaume François Vallée by the royal surveyor, Mancel.

The AHRC Network: A New Global Microhistory Pathway (Warwick, Oxford, EUI and V&A) held the second of three late evening public discussions in ‘The Globe’ at the V&A on Friday 8 March 2019. Organised by professor Maxine Berg and focused on the theme 'Diplomacy and Gifts', this event brought together curators and (art) historians on a spectacular tour of the museum's South Asian, Islamic Middle East, and Medieval & Renaissance Galleries. The evening was concluded by way of a roundtable discussion in the 'Globe' space in the Europe 1600-1815 gallery, a recording of which can be found here.

The AHRC Network: A New Global Microhistory Pathway (Warwick, Oxford, EUI and V&A) held the first of three late evening public discussions in ‘The Globe’ at the V&A on Friday 19 October 2018. Organised by professor Maxine Berg, this event brought together a new generation of historians and curators to participate in a public discussion of the microhistories and material cultures that objects, from treasure chests to tea sets, in the Europe Gallery open. A recording of the discussion can now be found here.