Some six weeks after sending out a questionnaire to the wider GHCC community to survey their localised responses to the global pandemic (read more here), GHCC director Anne Gerritsen returns to the responses she received and surveys them in the light of the subsequent global responses to the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. Connecting the pandemic, privilege, and global history, this post closes our GHCC pandemic mini-series.

Amidst the current Covid-19 pandemic, the issue of wearing masks has become a topic of international public concern. During the early stages of this global pandemic, wearing masks was mostly associated with certain regional identities in Asia. Yet, as Zhu Jing shows in this latest contribution to the GHCC pandemic mini-series, wearing masks as a public health precaution has a very long and global history. Perhaps surprisingly, the introduction of masks in Republican China in the first half of the twentieth century was a direct outflow of interactions with, and influences from, the West. 

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."

If anyone was under the impression that the widespread practice of wearing facemasks originated with the 2002-3 SARS outbreak in China, they would be mistaken. People in Asia have worn masks for much longer. Amy Evans, secretary of the Global History and Culture Centre for over ten years, remembers wearing face masks when she was growing up in Shanghai (and hating it with a passion). In this fourth instalment of the GHCC pandemic mini-series, Amy talks to GHCC director Anne Gerritsen about her upbringing in China, her move to the UK in the wake of the hand-over of Hong Kong, and her experience of pandemics both in Shanghai and the West Midlands.

In early May GHCC director Anne Gerritsen wrote to the extended GHCC community to start mapping their experiences of the global pandemic. She has written about the idea behind the survey here and discussed concepts of the 'local' during the pandemic here. In this third instalment of the GHCC pandemic mini-series, Dr Christian Hess (Sophia University, Tokyo) reflects on his life in lockdown from the vantage point of a North American academic in suburban Western Tokyo.

With 'lockdown' having been a near-global experience for the past several months, and with restrictions now increasingly being relaxed in many places around the world, perhaps the time has come for some reflections on what ‘staying at home’ has meant for members of the extended community of the Global History and Culture Centre. We pride ourselves on our boundary-crossing research, our international partnerships and, when we are feeling hubristic, our global reach. So, what did we do, when we suddenly all had to stay home? In this blog, GHCC director Anne Gerritsen reflects on the detailed responses she received on a question she posed to the GHCC community: ‘What has been specific to your local situation?’ It is the second post in a brief blog series on GHCC and the pandemic (see the first post here).

Early in May, already several weeks after the start of what seemed a near-global ‘lock-down’ policy, the director of the Global History and Culture Centre, Anne Gerritsen, wrote to past and present members of the Centre to inquire about their experiences of the pandemic. Of the 130 members of the extended GHCC community she contacted, a total of 45 responded with descriptions of life in lockdown from Berlin to Tokyo to Caracas. In this first of a small series of blog posts, Professor Gerritsen introduces the short survey she sent out and amalgamates the answers she received to the first question: where is the wider GHCC community spending the weeks and months of this first global pandemic of our lifetimes?