Featured Interviews

Money is far from a commonplace and benign object. It carries political significance and power even beyond the symbols emblazoned upon notes and coins. Yet money and currencies seldom emerge as a focal point in histories of colonialism and empire; normally they are an accessory to express value, a tool of exchange, or a medium of early encounters. In Colonialism’s Currency: Money, State, and First Nations in Canada, 1820–1950, Brian Gettler sets out to correct this narrative. He shows how money, in its materiality and from the practices surrounding it, can be conceived of as a political force that reshapes space, mediates the colonial project, extends sovereignty, and modulates behaviours. It is for him, more precisely, a technology that allows us to trace the emergence of the colonial state in what becomes Canada, as well as its complex and changing relationships with Indigenous peoples.

Emphasizing the centrality of American missionary children in the domination of the Hawaiian Islands during the second half of nineteenth century, Dr. Joy Schulz's analysis exposes the potency of youth power through a series of chapters that trace the development of these young evangelists into colonizers and revolutionaries. In the process, she draws attention to the complexities born at the intersections of childhood and empire and underscores the capacity of children to record their own histories in ways that may complement or complicate adult ambitions.

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.

The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush draws on hundreds of documented voyages, some painstakingly recorded by participants, some only known by their archeological remains or indigenous memory.  This leads to a window into the commercial, cultural, and ecological upheavals following the initial contact period, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Do industrial development and environmental transformation often happened in the same time?  What makes Professor Igler shift from American history to Pacific history?  Can humans have a dialogue with the Ocean? Professor Igler and Tiger Li, Editor-at-Large for the Toynbee Prize Foundation, discuss these questions in the following interview.

Our latest guest to the Global History Forum, Fiona Paisley, specializes in international history. Her work is about internationalism, settler colonialism, gender and race in the first half of the twentieth century, from an Australian perspective.

Scan the news these days for news from the western and southern Pacific, and it doesn't require too much reading for the outlines of a multipolar future to emerge. There are, of course, the obvious stories: competition between the United States and China; that relationship's reverberating effect on the Korea-Japan-China triangle; and the effect of a dynamic and rising Vietnam and Indonesia on what is likely to be the main engine of global economic growth in years to come. Sometimes obscured through a focus on the areas of Northeast and Southeast Asia, however, can be the important role that Australia plays in the broader region. While party to numerous strategic agreements with other Commonwealth countries and the United States, the world's twelfth largest economy plays a role as a key trading partner for China. Indeed, one of the major ongoing debates within Australian politics is how this former Dominion, so far from "old" British and former Imperial markets and so close to a region with a near-unlimited appetite for raw materials (plenty of those in Australia's arid interior) should balance between the Angloworld and the East, China in particular.

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.

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