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.

Some six weeks after sending out a questionnaire to the wider GHCC community to survey their localised responses to the global pandemic (read more here), GHCC director Anne Gerritsen returns to the responses she received and surveys them in the light of the subsequent global responses to the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. Connecting the pandemic, privilege, and global history, this post closes our GHCC pandemic mini-series.

If anyone was under the impression that the widespread practice of wearing facemasks originated with the 2002-3 SARS outbreak in China, they would be mistaken. People in Asia have worn masks for much longer. Amy Evans, secretary of the Global History and Culture Centre for over ten years, remembers wearing face masks when she was growing up in Shanghai (and hating it with a passion). In this fourth instalment of the GHCC pandemic mini-series, Amy talks to GHCC director Anne Gerritsen about her upbringing in China, her move to the UK in the wake of the hand-over of Hong Kong, and her experience of pandemics both in Shanghai and the West Midlands.

With 'lockdown' having been a near-global experience for the past several months, and with restrictions now increasingly being relaxed in many places around the world, perhaps the time has come for some reflections on what ‘staying at home’ has meant for members of the extended community of the Global History and Culture Centre. We pride ourselves on our boundary-crossing research, our international partnerships and, when we are feeling hubristic, our global reach. So, what did we do, when we suddenly all had to stay home? In this blog, GHCC director Anne Gerritsen reflects on the detailed responses she received on a question she posed to the GHCC community: ‘What has been specific to your local situation?’ It is the second post in a brief blog series on GHCC and the pandemic (see the first post here).

Early in May, already several weeks after the start of what seemed a near-global ‘lock-down’ policy, the director of the Global History and Culture Centre, Anne Gerritsen, wrote to past and present members of the Centre to inquire about their experiences of the pandemic. Of the 130 members of the extended GHCC community she contacted, a total of 45 responded with descriptions of life in lockdown from Berlin to Tokyo to Caracas. In this first of a small series of blog posts, Professor Gerritsen introduces the short survey she sent out and amalgamates the answers she received to the first question: where is the wider GHCC community spending the weeks and months of this first global pandemic of our lifetimes?