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

The Disney film Encanto aspires to provide a new visual and acoustic vocabulary of what it means to be Colombian for moviegoers in this country, Latin America, and beyond. As such, it offers a promising entry point into a more sustained scholarly inquiry into questions of representation, memory, and culture in global history. Of course, the movie does not aspire to offer a “truthful” representation of Colombia’s troubled history—in fact, its ambiguous chronology and geography show that the Encanto’s Colombia is as much imagined as it is real. But, at the same, how the film curates and packages certain elements of Colombia’s past for global audiences provides much food for thought. In its narrative, some saw a wider metaphor about the state of Unitedstatesean fragmentary politics; others saw a call for the reimagination of “romantic love,” a meditation on the “crushing weight of tradition,” or a commodified and whitewashed “Disneyfication” of Latin American cultures that caters to the growing market share of Hispanic-Unitedstateseans. We convened a roundtable with three Colombian(ist) scholars to tackle these and many other questions.

The 2021-2022 Toynbee Prize Winner Kenneth Pomeranz (University of Chicago) delivered the Toynbee Prize Lecture at the AHA on February 25, 2022 on "Finding, and Hiding, World History on the Frontiers of Qing China."

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.

The environment in China is usually seen as the victim of unfettered industrial production and global consumption starting with the country’s ‘reform and opening up’ period in the late 1970s. But to what extent does this periodization and the logics of the Anthropocene that rest upon it make sense against the longer historical record? A wave of scholarship has scrutinized the abstract idea of the environment in China’s restless history over the past two centuries. Bracketing the origins of the today’s environmental crises exclusively within the globalization debate is to miss something important. Namely, ecological thinking featured prominently in the country’s experiences with modernization, colonialism, and nation-building starting in the long 19th century. Micah Muscolino’s work is a great example that rethinks the conventional framework of modern Chinese history. Muscolino shows how the making of Qing, National, and PRC rule were often built on its relationships to natural resources. He has also come to see many similarities between today’s environmentalist transformations and China’s past. China stands, as he asserts, at the heart of the world’s present-day predicaments.

Collaboration makes sense for global historians. When two (or more) scholars bring different training, sources, and methodologies to a historical problem, they make discoveries that a solo researcher would miss. In contrast to other fields in the humanities and social sciences, historians usually pursue research projects independently rather than as part of a team. We found it exciting to share and develop ideas together, and collaboration inspired and motivated us to put words on paper. Our experiences show that scholars from different yet intersecting fields, located at opposite ends of the globe, and who have never met in person, can write together. The low costs of virtual engagement break down some of the barriers that have historically prevented scholars in the global north and global south from writing together, in addition to facilitating south-south collaborations, and in this sense can be seen as important to efforts to decolonize global history.

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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."