The Golden Rhinoceros by François-Xavier Fauvelle is a leading work in the field of medieval African history, exploring this ‘golden age’ through archaeological evidence and accessible narratives. Packed with engaging material and a conversational tone, the book appeals to a wide readership, from established academics to those new to the topic. In this review, Lisa Taberner discusses the strengths of Fauvelle’s approach to this traditionally neglected branch of history, as well as weaknesses of the wider field.

Like many of us, I’ve been preparing my teaching for the coming academic year. I’m planning on giving a lecture on early modern science as part of our Galleons and Caravans: Global Connections, 1500–1800 module. I was thinking about how to present these debates on Newton, particularly to a group of students who may have no previous experience in the history of science, but are certainly interested in global history.

Recalling a brief former stint as a computer scienceLink opens in a new window student, I spent a few days putting together an interactive map that is now available online. I hope it will be a useful resource, not just for my students, but for anyone teaching the history of science, or indeed global history.

You can check it out here: https://isaacnewton.world/Link opens in a new window

Global History remains a relatively unknown field in Latin American historiography, despite its popularity in European academia. Some Latin Americanist historians, aware of this situation, have recently focused attention to this “lack of attachment” to Global History in the region. In this blog entry, inspired by two articles by Matthew Brown (2015) and Sven Schuster and Gabriella de Grecco Lima (2020), Camilo Uribe Botta discusses the characteristics of the debate about the usefulness of Global History for the analysis of Latin American history, and proposes some new ideas that could help in the development of a new field.

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.

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.