Liz Egan, Jim Hulbert, and Catriona Sharples report on the workshop ‘New Frontiers in Imperial Networks’, which took place in the Wolfson Exchange, University of Warwick. Kindly funded by Midlands4Cities, this event was designed to bring together doctoral and early career researchers with more established academics, to discuss the latest research and new directions in the field of imperial history. The workshop focused particularly on the place of “networks” in our study of imperialism and colonialism

In this post, Emanuele Podda explores the life and works of French jurist, Christian Democrat politician, and international civil servant Émile Giraud (1894-1965). Giraud, a hitherto neglected historical figure, worked for most of his life for the League of Nations (1927-1946) and the United Nations (1947-1954) Secretariats. While at the UN, he acted as head of the Research Section of the Human Rights Division between 1947 and 1950, contributing to the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948).

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.