In her most recent book Caribbean New Orleans: Race, Empire, and the Making of a Slave Society, Dr. Cécile Vidal offers an alternative picture of New Orleans as a transatlantic outpost and bastion of racial openness that linked the French Caribbean to southern North America. It raises important questions on how race and slavery can be used to explain the development of colonial slave societies. How did trans-colonial systems of slavery ultimately shape the social order of New Orléans during a period of rapid geopolitical evolution? How can we rethink the history of race and racialization in the formation of the French Atlantic world? In what ways can the intersections between legal, cultural, and sociopolitical histories be used to map the intricate networks of slavery and colonization throughout various parts of the global French Empire? To answer these questions, and many others, it is a pleasure to welcome two leading scholars on race and chattel slavery in the French Atlantic Empire to a roundtable discussion on Caribbean New Orleans.

Victoria Philips's recent book provides an innovative and relevant example of the “politics of antipolitics”: the life and works of Martha Graham. Through a carefully knitted narrative that spans decades of touring, Philips provides us with a detailed account of the role that the “Highest Priestess of Modern Dance in America” played during the Cold War. Drawing from archival sources all around the world, Philips captures the paradoxes, tensions, and contradictions that surrounded Graham’s involvement in a series of dance tours around the world in which she served as an emissary of Unitedstatesean soft power, in the midst of a international struggle for the mantle of political modernity. Graham’s project was deeply anchored in a modernist understanding of time. But as Philips shows, the promise of modernity was full of ambiguities and ambivalence.

What role did cities play in imperial expansion and globalization? Despite massive urbanisation and a revolution in transport technologies and systems, did the modern period see a decrease in truly global cities? Have some cities become less global over time? What about global villages? Can we think of a small Dutch town “with families that drink coffee and have some cotton clothing” as a global place? These questions are at the heart of debates in the growing field of global urban history. This is the transcript of the conversation that these questions inspired between four leading scholars with expertise in different world regions and time periods working at the intersection of global and urban history. They include the Global Urban History Project’s Dries Lyna Radboud University Nijmegen) and Cyrus Schayegh Graduate Institute Geneva), along with Leiden University’s Anne-Isabelle Richard and Catia Antunes.

2022 Winner of the Toynbee First Book Manuscript Workshop competition: Ana María Otero-Cleves (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia)

Manuscript Commentators: Toynbee Trustee Jeremy Adelman (Princeton University); Jeremy Prestholdt (University of California, San Diego); Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck, University of London)

Book manuscript: Cherished Consumers: Global Connections, Local Consumption, and Foreign Commodities in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (provisional)

Ganadora 2022: Ana María Otero-Cleves (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia)

Comentaristas del manuscrito: Toynbee Trustee Jeremy Adelman (Princeton University); Jeremy Prestholdt (University of California, San Diego); Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck, University of London)

Título del manuscrito: Cherished Consumers: Global Connections, Local Consumption, and Foreign Commodities in Nineteenth-Century Colombia

Toynbee Editor-at-Large Daniel LoPreto interviews Caelyn Cobb, Editor at Columbia University Press, on how to navigate academic publishing.

Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper jointly win the 2023 Toynbee Prize.

Daniel Ricardo Quiroga-Villamarín (The Graduate Institute Geneva) describes his dissertation, ‘Architects of the Better World’: The Birth of the International Conference Complex (1918-1998), a study of how infrastructure, commodities, and material objects have shaped the contours of global governance and law in just sixty seconds.

A new Archival Reflection by Christopher Szabla on refugees and world order and the unique figure of T.F. Johnson of the League of Nations. "I came across Johnson’s memoir, International Tramps: From Chaos to Permanent World Peace, while researching my dissertation on attempts to govern all global migration at the level of international law and institutions. Refugees were a naturally important element of that story. But although there was already a robust literature on the history of international refugee aid and institutions, few key individuals in that history had been singled out for extended treatment...Yet among them were also more obscure figures like Johnson."