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.

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.

Job opportunity at the European University Institute

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. 

Sujit Sivasundaram and Chris Clark discuss the coronavirus pandemic and the history of animal-human encounters.

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.

Archival Reflections

Using the register of seventeenth century media anata payments in Manila, Filipinas.

Adam Tooze and Chris Clark discuss the economics of the coronavirus pandemic.

Since its publication in 2016, Sebastian Conrad’s What Is Global History? has been read and debated not only by historians of modern Europe but also by historians of different parts of the world and scholars in different disciplines. Who writes global history? How and for whom? And why now?