GHCC » Global History and Culture Centre Blog (tag [Environmental History])

Book review: Saul Guerrero, 'Silver by Fire, Silver by Mercury: A Chemical History of Silver Refining in New Spain and Mexico, 16th to 19th Centuries' (Boston: Brill, 2017)

Wed, 09 Oct 2019 08:34:18 GMT

Saul Guerrero turns the received view on silver refining in the Hispanic New World on its head in his remarkable 2017 book, Silver by Fire, Silver by Mercury: A Chemical History of Silver Refining in New Spain and Mexico, 16th to 19th Centuries. The book, which has its origins in the MA programme in Global History at the University of Warwick which Guerrero completed in 2009, is discussed by Michael Bycroft.

Workshop Report: “The War of the Locust, 1940-45”

Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:17:17 GMT

At the height of WWII, the British Empire launched an ambitious campaign to eradicate locusts in East Africa, South Asia and the Middle East. The The War of the Locust workshop which took place at Warwick on 8 December 2017 brought together an historian, an entomologist, an artist and an ecologist to discuss their collaborative research on this campaign. A collaboration between Dr Robert Fletcher (Warwick, History), Dr Katherine Brown (Portsmouth, Forensic Entomology), Dr Greg McInerny (Warwick, Ecology), and Dr Amanda Thomson (Glasgow, Art), the The War of the Locust project seeks to understand the twentieth-century campaign to monitor and eradicate the desert locust. In this blog, Sophie Greenway reflects on interdisciplinarity and the intersection of history and environmental issues pertinent to both The War of the Locust workshop and her PhD research.

Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis (2017) – Global History Reading Group

Mon, 26 Mar 2018 21:05:00 GMT

Although we are well aware that climate-induced disasters are bound to occur, British historian Geoffrey Parker argues in Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century , ‘we still convince ourselves that they will not happen just yet (or, at least, not to us), and so fail to take appropriate action.’ Parker’s unnerving account of policymakers always remaining ‘one disaster behind’ is as topical now as it was when his analysis of the seventeenth-century "Little Ice Age" was first published in 2013. On Wednesday 22 November 2017, the GHCC’s Global History Reading Group convened to discuss selected sections from Parker’s revised edition, published in July 2017. Adrianna Catena and Guido van Meersbergen report on what was a lively and instructive meeting.