Over the last decade, we have witnessed a sustained increase in the scholarship on the origins and history of human rights. Eric Weitz’s A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States deepens this historiographical corpus, presenting us with an expansive history that covers over three hundred years and spans the world. The book examines the complex politics of human rights history. It exposes the paradoxical relationship between human rights and nation-states whereby states identify as guarantors of the rights of citizens while also exercising the power to exclude groups from the remit of such a guarantee. The scope of the book lends itself to rich discussion, as evidenced by the diversity of comments it elicited from the participants in this panel. Three eminent scholars of diverse historiographical interest reflect on the book’s central themes. Followed by a response from Professor Weitz.

The commonly-accepted COVID-19 narrative is that those most at risk are people with underlying medical conditions, immunocompromised people, and the elderly. While biological factors such as immune function and age seem to be paramount for determining whether someone who contracts the virus will become critically ill or not, social factors are equally as important. By centering queer and trans experiences of COVID and analyzing these in the context of LGBTQ history, Eleanor Franklin and Aaron Wiegand's "Queering the Pandemic" project gives a platform for future historians to understand the pandemic from the view point of a group that has historically been forgotten and left at the margins of history.

Archival Reflections

A single folder of British Foreign Office records (FO 371/180366) held at the National Archives in Kew details the private visit to the UK by the third wife of Indonesian President Sukarno, Dewi, in June 1965. British officers, determined to make a good first impression on Dewi to soften her bellicose husband, quickly found themselves attending to out-of-the-ordinary tasks: scrambling to find a “young enough” companion for having tea with Dewi, infiltrating a wedding reception to gather information on her, and even disposing of an unwanted gift that Dewi brought for none other than Queen Elizabeth II.

Toynbee Coronavirus Series—A global historical view of the coronavirus pandemic: Interview with Dominic Sachsenmaier.

"The concept of ‘deglobalization’ has been gaining currency during the past five years, and already before 2020 there was a corresponding pressure on some aspects of international academic life, particularly the humanities. For instance, Sino-Western collaborations in the academic sector came under much pressure—both from an increasingly authoritarian government in China and from a Western public that increasingly felt threatened by greater Chinese academic influence. What I observe right now is that there are a growing number of voices that see any kind of collaboration with China as highly problematic, if not altogether endangering the academic ethos and a supposedly intact academic community. What I am concerned about is that if this type of deglobalization—of which Sino-Western collaboration patterns are only one element among several—continues, we could potentially witness a return to regionalism in the humanities." Toynbee Prize Foundation President Dominic Sachsenmaier on China's global role, the academy, and deglobalization trends post-COVID-19.

Toynbee Coronavirus Series—A global historical view of the coronavirus pandemic: Interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty.

"Many Earth system scientists, evolutionary biologists, and Anthropocene scholars have been reminding us that the global economy is destroying bio-diversity and that, on human scales of time, biodiversity is a non-renewable resource that is critical to the flourishing of all life, including ours. It is time we debated the kind of civilization humans would want to live in. The Cold War battle between capitalism and socialism is well and truly dead. But that does not mean that the question of debating capitalism has lost any of its importance." Dipesh Chakrabarty on the pandemic, zoonotic pathogens, migrancy, and globalization in the age of the Anthropocene.

Toynbee Coronavirus Series—A Global Historical View of the Pandemic: Forum

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.

Toynbee Coronavirus Series—A global historical view of the coronavirus pandemic: Interview with Erez Manela.

"Out of inertia, the US remains the biggest contributor, but diplomatically and politically it doesn’t care. What replaces it are organizations like the Gates Foundation, which in some ways, though not all ways, represents a return to the inter-war period, when the leading spender on global health was the Rockefeller Foundation. You can say all sorts of bad things about the WHO, but the one thing the WHO does is it gives some sort of voice to small nations and was designed to do precisely that." Erez Manela on the concept of global health, the WHO, smallpox eradication, and the need for renewed internationalism amid the pandemic.

In tracing the intellectual genealogy of the Philippine nation, Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz excavated what turned out to be far more complex theoretical and historical bases to the construction not only of the Filipino, but also of Asia, race, and a concept of place that could challenge imperial claims of rightful sovereignty. Her book Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912 investigates precisely what ground the Philippine nation built itself upon intellectually, excavating its neglected cosmopolitan and transnational Asian moorings in particular, in order to reconnect Philippine history to that of Southeast and East Asia. It also recovers the “periphery” of the discourse of Pan-Asianism, which was built on material aid and the fantasy and affect of transnational anti-colonial Asian solidarity. The book seeks to make that periphery legible to the center and to expand our discursive, East Asia-centric understanding of Pan-Asianism more generally.

VIDEO—Toynbee Coronavirus Series—A Global Historical View of the Pandemic: Historians' Statements.

We spoke with Toynbee Prize Foundation Trustee Selçuk Esenbel, Professor of History at Boğaziçi University and the founding Director of the Asian Studies Center at the same institution. She earned her PhD in Japanese history at Columbia University, and her research interests center on Japan and the world of Islam, Japanese pan-Asianism, and modernization in Japan and Ottoman Turkey. Esenbel has received numerous awards, including the Order of the Rising Sun.

VIDEO—Toynbee Coronavirus Series—A Global Historical View of the Pandemic: Historians' Statements. 

We sat down with Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English at Duke University. She teaches U.S. literature and culture from the mid-18th to mid-20th centuries. Her research centers on the narratives of medicine, science, science fiction, the environment, and law. Her most recent book, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, examines the idea of contagion and its evolution, at the intersection of medicine and myth.

Kenneth Pomeranz has been named winner of the Toynbee Prize for 2021.

Toynbee Coronavirus Series—A Global Historical View of the Pandemic: Historians' Statements. 

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.

Reflections from the archives: The colonization of the Americas created a level of diversity not seen before by European powers. Not only did Iberians intermix with native populations, but also with African slaves. As the viceroyalties became increasingly ethnically complex, authorities created a socio-racial hierarchy in an attempt to establish a sense of order. Given my professional background, I noticed the critical role that clothing—and the regulation of such items—played in the struggle to assert status in the public sphere. 

Toynbee Coronavirus Series: A Global Historical View of the Pandemic

If we are stuck with analogies of war, then these same histories warn us not only that we cannot wait for the pandemic to be “over”, but also that during each major war extensive political and social movements supported intertwined national and multilateral responses to the global dimensions of health and economic challenges. But where invocations of war, of battles against the virus enemy, might offer comfort precisely because they posit a moment of victory—a V-Day—the intersecting global challenges of pandemic, capitalism and planetary destruction we now face allow us no such complacency.