Featured Interviews

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.

2022 Winner of the Toynbee First Book Manuscript Workshop competition: Ana María Otero-Cleves (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia)

Manuscript Commentators: Toynbee Trustee Jeremy Adelman (Princeton University); Jeremy Prestholdt (University of California, San Diego); Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck, University of London)

Book manuscript: Cherished Consumers: Global Connections, Local Consumption, and Foreign Commodities in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (provisional)

Jorge Cañizares Esguerra details his current project, Radical Spanish Empire. His aim is to historicize, to radicalize, to Americanize (expansively understood), and to show that colonial Massachusetts is unintelligible without Puebla or Tlaxcala in colonial Mexico, that colonial Virginia makes no sense without its Andean and Peruvian counterparts, and that Calvinists should be understood alongside Franciscans.

This conversation with Toynbee Prize Foundation Trustee Jeremy Adelman took place during the global COVID-19 pandemic, the final weeks of the US Presidential election, and the end of the Brexit negotiations. Through the lens of global history, we discussed tense relations amid the most recent wave of globalization and our present moment of resurgent nationalisms.

In his book, From Fascism to Populism in History (University of California Press, 2017) Federico Finchelstein provides the reader with an understanding of many of the most important theories of populism and how these theories stack up in the face of the 'messiness' of the global historical record. This hybrid intellectual-political history demonstrates how fascism and populism are connected but not the same, and why this matters for understanding the world today. In doing so, Finchelstein shows why we cannot afford not to have historians engage in contemporary political conversations.

To further our understanding of the development of industrial capitalism over the past two centuries Greg Cushman claims, we need to write histories 'from below,' in two senses: first, we need to write histories that consider not just those who 'invented the steam engine', but those which trace the origins of the steam engine's parts (material and intellectual) wherever across the globe that leads us – often far beyond the 'Global North'. Second, we need to investigate our planetary history below the earth's surface. Lithospheric history Cushman calls it.

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.

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.

Jeppe Mulich’s In a Sea of Empires addresses how to bridge the local and the global, an issue central to global history since its birth as a subfield. The author rests his approach upon a bold claim: interimperial microregions are crucibles of early globalization. To prove how the microregion “provides an analytical ideal-type that is pertinent to a variety of historical contexts,” Mulich advances his thesis on two levels, one theoretical and the other historical. To start, he constructs a framework for interpreting microregions from a set of thematic categories ranging from the political to the geographical. Putting this concept into practice, Mulich focuses on the Leeward Islands, a Caribbean archipelago, from 1783 to 1834. In doing so, Mulich brilliantly demonstrates the Leeward Islands’ historical importance and provides a typology for microregions on a global scale.

What We're Reading This Week

Please connect us to the local historians in your fields who think globally, but do not have the privilege of working internationally.

When you approach the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in Mexico City, Mexico, you notice large dark fences, big walls, and intriguing architecture. You typically enter through a massive gate, secured by an armed police officer, near the complex's parking lot. The guards and AGN's structural qualities convey a sense of protection and control. One could easily think that this design is to keep documents safely inside. While that is presently true, the original design was to keep people inside.

What We're Reading This Week