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.

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.