Call for Editors – Journal of Global History

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Professor William Gervase Clarence Smith, Professor Barbara Watson Andaya, and Professor Merry Wiesner-Hanks will shortly be coming to the end of their tenure as editors of the Journal of Global History (JGH). Cambridge University Press, in collaboration with an Editorial Board search committee, is now inviting applications for their successor(s).

The deadline for applications is 30 September, 2018.

JGH addresses the main problems of global change over time, together with the diverse histories of globalization. It also examines counter-currents to globalization, including those that have structured other spatial units. The journal seeks to transcend the dichotomy between ‘the West and the rest’, straddle traditional regional boundaries, relate material to cultural and political history, and overcome thematic fragmentation in historiography. The journal also acts as a forum for interdisciplinary conversations across a wide variety of social and natural sciences. Continue reading “Call for Editors – Journal of Global History” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

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John Tenniel cartoon from 1862 showing Britannia visiting starving mill workers during the cotton famine

Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen

From exporting US economic nationalism to rediscovering the 1860s cotton famine, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.

Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH ExeterLeave a comment

Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen

From reading Marx on migration to the anti-imperial empire, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

“The present is never present – it is already past. Humanitarian action in an age of reorder” – by Markus Geisser

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2 ICRC Staff Members Killed in Attack in Yemen

Cross-posted from Humanitarianism & Human Rights

AHRC Care for the Future, in partnership with Exeter’s IIB and the GHRA 2018, invited Markus Geisser, Senior Humanitarian Policy Advisor at the International Committee of the Red Cross to give a public keynote at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery Exeter. Markus looks back to a long career as humanitarian practitioner and accordingly he referred in his talk to this long experience.

Markus joined the ICRC in 1999 and carried out his first mission as an ICRC delegate in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This was followed by several years managing field operations in Myanmar, Thailand, Liberia, Darfur (Sudan) and then again in eastern DRC. From 2006 until 2013, he worked in senior management positions in countries affected by the so-called “Global War on Terror”, first in Iraq and Jordan, then in southern Afghanistan and in Washington DC. From 2013 until 2015, he served as Deputy Head of the division working on humanitarian policy and multilateral diplomacy at the ICRC’s headquarters in Geneva. In March 2015 he joined the ICRC Mission to the United Kingdom and Ireland as Senior Humanitarian Affairs and Policy Advisor.

What Christopher Nolan left out: Dunkirk’s Indian soldiers

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Len Puttnam, Men of K6 shortly after disembarking at Marseille, January 1940. Imperial War Museum F2016.

Ghee Bowman
University of Exeter

It’s been a year now since Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk was released to critical acclaim, public approval and criticism. Much of the criticism arose because the film omitted any mention of the Commonwealth troops who were in the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and at Dunkirk.[1] It felt like a missed opportunity to correct an anomaly in the collective memory of Britain and the world: to remember the mule drivers of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps (RIASC) who were also on those beaches.

So here’s the missing piece of the story, derived from my research into Dunkirk’s Indian soldiers.

On May 29, 1940, in the middle of the evacuation of Dunkirk, with thousands of British soldiers lined up on the beaches east of the French town, with a giant pall of smoke from the burning oil refinery, with regular sorties by Luftwaffe planes scattering the queues, and with ships large and small taking men off the beaches, Major Mohammed Akbar Khan of the RIASC marched four miles along the beach at the head of 312 Muslim Indians, en route from Punjab to Pirbright.

These were the men of Force K6. Continue reading “What Christopher Nolan left out: Dunkirk’s Indian soldiers” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

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Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen

From liberal romances of empire to a Russian sailor’s tomb in Singapore, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Brexit, Food Prices, and History

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workhouse

Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen

In case you missed it,  rumors of the May government’s plan to stockpile food supplies have finally gotten people talking about what Brexit will mean for food prices. As dedicated readers of the Forum know, I’ve been trying to draw attention to this important issue ever since the referendum vote.

Two years ago, I organized and chaired a roundtable, “Brexit and Food Prices: The Legacy of the Hungry Forties,” as part of our Global Economics & History Forum at History & Policy. The panelists were Prof. Anthony Howe (East Anglia); Geoff Tansey (Food Systems Academy); Dr. Lindsay Aqui (Queen Mary); and Prof. Sarah Richardson (Warwick).

Professor Anthony Howe (East Anglia) – The Hungry Forties and the Rise of Free Trade England

Dr Sarah Richardson (Warwick) – Food is a Feminist Issue: the legacy of the hungry forties and women’s rights in England

Dr Lindsay Aqui (Queen Mary) – Butter, Bacon and the British Housewife: Food Prices and the 1975 Referendum

Geoff Tansey (Curator, Food Systems Academy; Chair, Fabian Commission on Food and Poverty) – Food: policy, (in)security, poverty, inequality, power, control & Brexit

You can  listen to the podcast recording of the roundtable below: Continue reading “Brexit, Food Prices, and History” →