REVIEW: Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century
Article

REVIEW: Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century

In this monograph Dr José Lingna Nafafé of the University of Bristol uses the figure of Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, a member of the Ndongo royal family, as a means of disrupting the history of slavery abolition. Exiled from his homeland in Angola in December 1671, Mendonça was sent to Brazil and then Portugal, before finally heading to the Italian Peninsula in 1684, via Spain, to present his case against the trans-Atlantic trade of enslaved people. And this court case, in which Mendonça called for the abolition of slavery, is the central focus of the text, what Lingna Nafafé sees as the culmination of the seventeenth century ‘Black Atlantic Abolition Movement.’ A book review by Editor-at-Large Michael Aidan Pope.

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Mobilizing medieval art for history wars between Russia and Ukraine
Article

Mobilizing medieval art for history wars between Russia and Ukraine

Life in Moscow has changed dramatically since the beginning of the "special military operation" in Ukraine, with history lessons to be found everywhere. The omnipresence of history in the ordinary life of its citizens did not exist prior to this tragic event. The patriotic re-write of the past is a key tool for the Russian government in justifying its current agenda. A recently opened exhibition The Grand Duchy. The Treasures of Vladimir-Suzdal lands at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow stands out as a prime example. This new development uses art history to re-write the emergence of Russian statehood. It has an unprecedented scale, ambition, and aesthetic appeal in doing so. It serves as a response to the Ukrainian historians' claim that the legacy of Kyivan Rus belongs to Ukraine, and not to Russia.

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SIDE BY SIDE: Allan Lumba's Monetary Authorities and Jamie Martin's The Meddlers Reviewed
War, Plague and Inflation: Is this time different?: An Interview with Dr. Natacha Postel-Vinay
Interviews

War, Plague and Inflation: Is this time different?: An Interview with Dr. Natacha Postel-Vinay

World economies are facing a troika of challenges in the form of war (in Ukraine), disease (COVID19) and return of inflation, all of which have led to dampened growth globally. This invites us to ask how new these challenges, individually and as a combination, are, and what lessons we can draw from history? To answer these questions, we take a long-run view from more than 100 years of history to discuss the implications of war, disease, and inflation on our economies. Dr. Natacha Postel-Vinay an expert on the economic history of the Great Depression. Her research focuses on public finance, private finance, and welfare. More specifically, her research looks at the connections between bank risk-taking, banking crises, banking crisis resolution, public debt, and moral hazard, all from a historical perspective.

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European Communities in South America and the Global Total Wars of the 20th Century: An Interview with Dr. María Inés Tato
Interviews

European Communities in South America and the Global Total Wars of the 20th Century: An Interview with Dr. María Inés Tato

Total wars do not just affect the belligerent societies. The two global conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century had repercussions in neutral countries and colonial territories that could not escape of their economic and political impact. This was certainly most evident for the European diasporas in the South American region. How did overseas Europeans participate in the war effort? What were the tensions surrounding the mobilization? What were the effects on the relationship with the adoption countries? These are some of the questions that the authors of Transatlantic Battles. European Immigrant Communities in South America and the World Wars (Brill, 2022) address.

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The Soviet Union as a Development Actor in West Africa: An Interview with Alessandro Iandolo on Arrested Development
Interviews

The Soviet Union as a Development Actor in West Africa: An Interview with Alessandro Iandolo on Arrested Development

The recently published work Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955–1968 (Cornell University Press, 2022) explores the Soviet Union’s economic partnership with three newly-independent countries in West Africa during the Nikita Khrushchev era. The Toynbee Prize Foundation interviewed the author, Alessandro Iandolo, on the story and the main arguments of his book. Alongside discussing the emergence of the Soviet Union as an international development actor and the challenges it encountered in post-colonial Africa, Iandolo explained the characteristics of the Soviet development model, its similarities and differences to the Western alternatives, and why the Soviet development assistance in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali was not primarily oriented around spreading the communist ideology.

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Recovering the History of Interwar International Environmental Law: An Interview with Omer Aloni
Interviews

Recovering the History of Interwar International Environmental Law: An Interview with Omer Aloni

For a long time, international legal scholars and practitioners tended to see the League of Nations solely as a historical failure. In leading textbooks and inside the classroom, it was not uncommon to read and hear depictions of the interwar international institutions as a mere prelude to the post-1945 international order. The League, in comparison to the United Nations, was dismissed as a moment of not yet. In the last decade or so, however, more nuanced waves of scholarship across disciplines have unearthed the inner lives of international ordering, exploring the immense efforts and disappointments that surrounded the work of the League and other interwar institutions. In his recent monograph, Omer Aloni joins this renaissance of historical scholarship, adding a distinctively socio-legal perspective grounded in rich archival research to a conversation in which lawyers have been relative latecomers. In this sense, The League of Nations and the Protection of the Environment (Cambridge University Press, 2021) provides an exploration the ways in which the relations between “nature, environment, and humankind” were legally regulated at the international plane in the interwar period—and beyond.

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Roundtable Panel—Christy Thornton’s Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy
Article

Roundtable Panel—Christy Thornton’s Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy

Christy Thornton’s Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy (University of California Press, 2021) places Mexico at the center of histories of international economic governance. In the wake of Mexico’s exclusion from international capital markets following its 1914 default, she argues, Mexican economists and diplomats began to consider the nature of sovereignty, political and economic, and imagine a reconfiguration of international credit-debt relationships in order to foster development. Rather than envision autarky, Mexican leaders pursued a politics of both recognition and redistribution on the international stage from the interwar period to the crafting of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) in the 1970s. Recognition entailed equitable representation in multilateral institutions, while redistribution meant long-term, concessionary lending. According to Thornton, their reckonings with the existing international economic order presaged modernization and dependency theory and reached a climax when President Luis Echeverría Álvarez led the movement to author and pass the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States.

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Archival Reflections—Insights from the Vast and Rich Resources at the Barings Archives
Article

Archival Reflections—Insights from the Vast and Rich Resources at the Barings Archives

The House of Barings was established in 1762 and started out by trading on its own account, and on joint account with other merchants, buying and selling commodities and other goods in British and overseas markets. They also acted as London agents for overseas merchants, arranging shipping and insurance, making and collecting payments. Over time, Barings reduced their stakes in commodity trading due to its speculative and risky nature, and heavily ventured into the work of issuing securities for governments and businesses, especially railway companies. Barings also acted as paying agents, being particularly associated with Argentine, United States, Canadian and Russian governments.

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Cómo escribir Historia Global desde América Latina: Entrevista con Ana María Otero-Cleves ganadora del Toynbee First Book Manuscript Workshop Competition (2022) (ESPAÑOL)
Interviews

Cómo escribir Historia Global desde América Latina: Entrevista con Ana María Otero-Cleves ganadora del Toynbee First Book Manuscript Workshop Competition (2022) (ESPAÑOL)

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

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Theme

Toynbee Coronavirus Series

Living through historically unprecedented times has strengthened the Toynbee Prize Foundation's commitment to thinking globally about history and to representing that perspective in the public sphere. In this multimedia series on the covid-19 pandemic, we will be bringing global history to bear in thinking through the raging coronavirus and the range of social, intellectual, economic, political, and scientific crises triggered and aggravated by it.

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The Foundation

The Toynbee Prize Foundation — a Hub for Global History

Named after Arnold J.Toynbee, the Toynbee Prize Foundation was chartered in 1987 “to contribute to the development of the social sciences, as defined from a broad historical view of human society and of human and social problems.” The Foundation seeks to promote scholarly engagement with global history.

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REVIEW: Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century
Article | May 31, 2023

REVIEW: Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century

In this monograph Dr José Lingna Nafafé of the University of Bristol uses the figure of Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, a member of the Ndongo royal family, as a means of disrupting the history of slavery abolition. Exiled from his homeland in Angola in December 1671, Mendonça was sent to Brazil and then Portugal, before finally heading to the Italian Peninsula in 1684, via Spain, to present his case against the trans-Atlantic trade of enslaved people. And this court case, in which Mendonça called for the abolition of slavery, is the central focus of the text, what Lingna Nafafé sees as the culmination of the seventeenth century ‘Black Atlantic Abolition Movement.’ A book review by Editor-at-Large Michael Aidan Pope.

Read more about `REVIEW: Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century`
European Communities in South America and the Global Total Wars of the 20th Century: An Interview with Dr. María Inés Tato
Interviews | May 1, 2023

European Communities in South America and the Global Total Wars of the 20th Century: An Interview with Dr. María Inés Tato

Total wars do not just affect the belligerent societies. The two global conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century had repercussions in neutral countries and colonial territories that could not escape of their economic and political impact. This was certainly most evident for the European diasporas in the South American region. How did overseas Europeans participate in the war effort? What were the tensions surrounding the mobilization? What were the effects on the relationship with the adoption countries? These are some of the questions that the authors of Transatlantic Battles. European Immigrant Communities in South America and the World Wars (Brill, 2022) address.

Read more about `European Communities in South America and the Global Total Wars of the 20th Century: An Interview with Dr. María Inés Tato`
Quote of the month

“…even the nation—super-relevant, super-charged—is itself the effect of global processes, and not some product of what we may call an auto-poietic process that emerges from the inside of the society, sticks out the grounds for a national identity, and then agrees to lock arms with other nations and societies in the creation of something called international. The causality goes the other way around.”

Toynbee Prize Foundation Trustee Jeremy Adelman
About

The Toynbee Prize Foundation — a Hub for Global History

Named after Arnold J.Toynbee, the Toynbee Prize Foundation was chartered in 1987 “to contribute to the development of the social sciences, as defined from a broad historical view of human society and of human and social problems.” The Foundation seeks to promote scholarly engagement with global history.

Read more
The Prize

The Prize

The Toynbee Prize was established to recognize social scientists for significant academic and public contributions to humanity. It is awarded biennially for work that makes a significant contribution to the study of global history.

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Contribute to Toynbee Prize Foundation

Our Editors-at-Large gain exposure to one of the most vibrant fields in the discipline today, while participating in, covering, and staying up-to-date with new debates, conversations, and movements in global history.

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These include essential cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site, as well as others that are used only for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, not all functions of the website may be available.

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