This year, the Annual Lecture takes the form of a roundtable discussion, centred on the question of what Global History and ethnographic museums might mean to each other. Together, the speaker will address the larger questions that concern the ethnographic museum: where is its future? How does a museum broadly concerned with ‘cultures’, and decontextualised ones at that, engage with history? Is there something ‘global history’ can do for the ethnographic museum in this time of fundamental rethinking?