For those of us fortunate enough to be healthy, secure, and without caring responsibilities, the pandemic has offered an opportunity to pause and reflect on globalisation and the ways we write about it. In this guest blog, Professor Trevor Burnard, formerly Warwick History's head of department and currently Director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, talks us through his lockdown reading. In the wake of Covid historians will need to revise their accounts of globalisation, he suggests, although not quite as dramatically as political economists: "at least we sometimes get the past right while others speculate badly on the future."