About Global History at Glasgow

Our mission

Welcome to the University of Glasgow Global History Cluster. The cluster aims to facilitate the development of a dynamic global history research community to support staff and students at Glasgow and beyond, coming to global history from different time periods, regional specialisms, theoretical approaches, and disciplines. Our membership continues to grow (anyone can be added to the mailing list) and the cluster continues to reflect on how best to serve the changing needs of scholars and students engaged in global historical research in Glasgow and beyond. We support research seminars, reading groups, special speakers, co-organised conferences, staff and student opportunities for fellowships and mobility.

Highlights from our history

The cluster was founded in 2017, with a roundtable and publication on ´Inequality: The Future of Global History?´ In 2020, during the changed research environment of lockdown, we co-organised an event with the University of Sussex and Tax Justice Network on ´Imperial inequalities: states, empires, taxation and reparations´, which led to the publication of Imperial Inequalities: The Politics of Economic Governance across European Empires (MUP, 2023).

In 2021, the city of Glasgow hosted the COP26 summit on climate change and our global history research cluster theme was global environmental history and climate change, and the cluster hosted an online event exploring how global environmental histories are important for responses to climate change. In 2021 we hosted the Commodities of Empire International workshop.

In 2022, we co-organised a conference with the Centre for Global History at Queens University on ´poverty and scarcity in global history´.

In 2022-23, the theme of the cluster was Indigenous People in Global History, and we held a fantastic international conference on Displaced Peoples, Unsettled Histories: kinship, migration, and belonging´, and visited museums to explore Glasgow´s connections with Indigenous histories.

This years theme is ´Revisiting Colonialism and Empire´.