Weatherhead Initiative on Global History

Weatherhead Initiative on Global History WIGH strives to create a global conversation about global history.

The Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH) responds to the growing interest at Harvard in the encompassing study of global history. The Initiative is committed to the systematic scrutiny of developments that have unfolded across national, regional, and continental boundaries as well as to analysis of the interconnections—cultural, economic, ecological and demographic—among world societies

. We do not claim that the traditional cadres of historical change and study—some intensely local, some national—are of diminished relevance. But an era of global change has impelled scholars to understand them simultaneously in the broadest spatial scale. Technological diffusion, religious zeal and material aspirations, the ambitions of empire or emancipation, the ramifications of war and the hopes of overcoming it, growing commitments to human rights have connected communities the world over.

TODAY 2/9/2026: Global History Seminar with Siân Davies on "Between Plantation and Penrhyn Quarry: The Transition to Wag...
02/09/2026

TODAY 2/9/2026: Global History Seminar with Siân Davies on "Between Plantation and Penrhyn Quarry: The Transition to Wage Labour, in Stone, in North Wales, in Jamaica." Historians focused on the transition to wage labour in one geographic zone have infrequently considered its relationship to this transition elsewhere. The geographic separation of management and business records has contributed to a lack of attention to the connections and interactions between these endeavors. This presentation analyses efforts to establish wage dependency and ‘industriousness’ through managers’ letters from North Wales before turning attention to similar efforts in post-emancipation Jamaica. https://wigh.wcfia.harvard.edu/event/global-history-seminar-sian-davies

1/26 Global History Seminar: “Fuel of Empires: Agronomy, Autarky, and Interwar Soybean Frontiers” -
01/20/2026

1/26 Global History Seminar: “Fuel of Empires: Agronomy, Autarky, and Interwar Soybean Frontiers” -

For more information and to register, please visit  our website. Registered participants will receive the precirculated paper.

12/1 Global History Seminar: "Community, Corporation, and the Institutions of Britain’s Early Modern International Trade...
11/19/2025

12/1 Global History Seminar: "Community, Corporation, and the Institutions of Britain’s Early Modern International Trade" -

For more information and to register, please visit  our website. Registered participants will receive the precirculated paper.

"For the first time in most people’s memory, our economic future seems uncertain for a new reason: The immediate past ca...
11/05/2025

"For the first time in most people’s memory, our economic future seems uncertain for a new reason: The immediate past cannot tell us what comes next." WIGH Chair Sven Beckert has a guest essay in the New York Times "The Old Order is Dead. Do Not Resuscitate."

We are in the middle of the capitalistic order reinventing itself.

Exciting news from our chair Sven Beckert!
10/09/2025

Exciting news from our chair Sven Beckert!

A landmark event years in the making, a brilliant global narrative that unravels the defining story of the past thousand years of human history No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively...

10/6 Global History Seminar: “Indigenous Roots for Rationality Conditions in Political Economy" -
09/29/2025

10/6 Global History Seminar: “Indigenous Roots for Rationality Conditions in Political Economy" -

Indigenous Roots for Rationality Conditions in Political Economy: Ireland, Senegal and the Origins of Critique in the Eighteenth Century JAMES LIVESEY Professor of History, University of Galway Commentators: TBA

04/22/2025

April 24-26, 2025: The Nature of Commodity Frontiers Conference.
The Nature of Commodity Frontiers conference aims to contribute analyses at the intersections of ecology, race, gender, Indigeneity, and more-than-human life in the historical analysis of commodity frontiers. Our focus is the transformation of the global countryside, in all its diversity and unevenness across time and space. In line with this bottom-up approach, we shift the perspective away from the urban and industrial core regions of the world towards the countryside and agrarian change, and give a central place to ecological limits, local initiatives, resilience, and conflicts as drivers of change. https://wigh.wcfia.harvard.edu/event/conference-nature-commodity-frontiers

Send a message to learn more

A nice update from out Global Network Partners in Dakar, Sheikh Anta Diop University.
04/09/2025

A nice update from out Global Network Partners in Dakar, Sheikh Anta Diop University.

We closed out the semester with a presentation by seminar alum Swarnabh Ghosh (center) with commentators Moisés de Freit...
04/08/2025

We closed out the semester with a presentation by seminar alum Swarnabh Ghosh (center) with commentators Moisés de Freitas Cunha and Anny Li. See you in the fall!

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