What We're Reading This Week, selections by our Editors-at-Large. Edited by Nicholas Sy.

Sir Brian Urquhart (1919-2021): A Tribute

One of the most resilient topoi of writing on Black Africa is that of the so-called silent trade. It first appears in Herodotus and from there it is dutifully repeated in geographies, histories, descriptions and travel accounts that portray African people (in Latin, Arabic, and different European vernaculars) well into the 19th century. So much so that already by the 15th century Venetian captain Alvise Cadamosto concluded in the account of his travel to the rivers of Guinea: “Since it is related by so many we can accept it as true.”

The Toynbee Prize Foundation regrets to announce that Raymond Grew, a Board of Trustees member of the Toynbee Prize Foundation, former President of the Toynbee Prize Foundation, and a leading scholar of global history, social history, and comparative history, passed away in September 2020. Grew, who was Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Michigan, was 90.

As we face a set of unknown changes to humanities scholarship and education that will inevitably unfold in the coming months, we are confronted with the meaning of Global History and the directions in which it will move. In March 2019, precisely one year before the global lockdown, four scholars, Amitava Chowdhury, Heather Streets-Salter, Julia McClure, and Joseph McQuade, reflected on how the field of global history developed over the course of their careers and imagined future directions. With special attention to how the roots of what we call global history today developed institutionally, our panelists discuss how graduate education in global history developed and what shape it might take in the future.

The digital revolution has seen millions of pages of Spanish manuscripts digitized and shared through the free PARES (portal de archivos españoles) platform in recent years, the Spanish government’s archive web portal. These include sources for the study of topics including Iberian voyages of discovery and conquest, the Atlantic slave trade and the diverse experiences of slavery in the Iberian world, and indigenous revolts against colonial rule such as the Tupac Amaru rebellion. Scott Cave led a one-hour ‘hands on’ seminar guiding participants on how to find and read digitized documents relating to this rich history through PARES.