Global History and Culture Centre Blog

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.

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.