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.

Every Tuesday evening in August, Oxford-based orchestra Instruments of Time & Truth in collaboration with Warwick's Global History and Culture Centre and Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century Centre presents a digital series of performances and talks exploring the lives of musicians and their patrons in eighteenth-century London. The series will premiere on Youtube on 4 August at 7pm. This blog post features an historical essay accompanying the concert series by Professor Maxine Berg, detailing the rich musical culture of eighteenth-century London and Britain more generally and its historic links to empire, slavery, and changing global patterns of consumption.

On 21 February 2020, the Global History and Culture Centre hosted a workshop to celebrate the career of Professor Maxine Berg. Focused on the question "Why Does Economic History Matter?", the event concluded with the presentation of a volume of essays written and edited by Maxine's friends and colleagues, titled Reinventing the Economic History of Industrialisation (McGill-Queen's University Press: 2020). In this guest blog, Professor Tirthankar Roy (LSE) responds to the book and the central place of Berg's scholarship in shaping the field of global economic history.

On Friday 7 June 2019 the last of three V&A Salons took place as part of the AHRC-funded Global Microhistory network, with the theme of 'Information, Writing, and Cultures of Correspondence'. Organised by Maxine Berg along with Warwick-colleagues Jo Tierney and Guido van Meersbergen, this third salon session took place at the V&A stores at Blythe House, London, under guidance of the V&A's curator of South Asian textiles, Avalon Fotheringham. In this blog post, Guido van Meersbergen reports on the event accompanied with a slide show of spectacular photos by Adrianna Catena.

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.

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!