Global History and Culture Centre Blog

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.

The ‘transnational’ is an old theme in British imperial history, though continually reinventing itself in new interventions and guises. The two-day workshop Between and Beyond: Transnational Networks and the British Empire engaged with a number of important conceptual and historiographical questions in the field of British imperial history. What role does the British empire play in the facilitation of networks within, without and beyond its boundaries? Do we need to think of the networks of the British Empire following Tony Ballantyne’s metaphor of a “web”? Is the web of networks in the British Empire made of only main arteries or of “multiple filaments”? And what does ‘transnational’ bring to the field of imperial studies, particularly when posited with the ever-expanding category of the ‘global’? By Somak Biswas and Dr Guillemette Crouzet.

In the last post on this blog, Dr Michael Bycroft summarised some of the themes that emerged in the conference A Different Point of View: Scales, Spaces and Contexts in the Histories of the Local and the Global, held at Warwick on 17-19 May 2018. In the current post, Michael offers his own views on the conference ('unpolished opinions, in the grey area between pub talk and publication') from the perspective of the history of science, which for many readers will qualify as a different point of view.

Can there be a global microhistory? This is the question behind the AHRC Global Microhistory Network, which held its first conference at the University of Warwick on 17-19 May 2018. The conference was entitled A Different Point of View: Scales, Spaces and Contexts in the History of the Local and the Global. It consisted of a combination of empirical and methodological papers that examined ‘the global framing of the local’, to quote from the conference blurb. In this post Dr Michael Bycroft summarises the main themes of the conference, which will be followed by a second post in which he offers a number of more in-depth reflections and opinions on them. Stay tuned!

A new generation of historians challenges us to bring together two popular historical methodologies of recent decades: microhistory and global history. A number of micro-historians now seek to engage in the histories of places, events and individuals in a way that also captures the history of global connections as brought to life by global historians. Global historians also seek to move beyond large-scale syntheses and comparative data sets to engage closely with primary sources, philology, and local context. ‘Scales, Space and Contexts in Histories of the Local and the Global’ is the first of a cycle of three conferences on this new pathway of Global History. Taking place at Warwick on 17-19 May 2018, it brings together leading historians to address issues of connection and agency, local spaces, and the multiple contexts of our histories of events and individuals. In this blog, Prof Maxine Berg reflects on the issues underpinning the AHRC Global Microhistory Network.

At the height of WWII, the British Empire launched an ambitious campaign to eradicate locusts in East Africa, South Asia and the Middle East. The The War of the Locust workshop which took place at Warwick on 8 December 2017 brought together an historian, an entomologist, an artist and an ecologist to discuss their collaborative research on this campaign. A collaboration between Dr Robert Fletcher (Warwick, History), Dr Katherine Brown (Portsmouth, Forensic Entomology), Dr Greg McInerny (Warwick, Ecology), and Dr Amanda Thomson (Glasgow, Art), the The War of the Locust project seeks to understand the twentieth-century campaign to monitor and eradicate the desert locust. In this blog, Sophie Greenway reflects on interdisciplinarity and the intersection of history and environmental issues pertinent to both The War of the Locust workshop and her PhD research.