When historians have talked of British territorial power in India it was almost always to the experience of eighteenth century they referred. For good reason. That was, after all, when the Raj annexed vast swathes of the subcontinent. I suspect that the foundations had been laid earlier. And yet the historical problems were evident enough. How was it possible for the East India Company – a private joint-stock trading company – to become a fully-fledged colonial power, particularly when faced with the might of the Mughal empire and rival European powers, notably Portugal and the Netherlands?

Islamic Manuscripts in the Royal Library

This talk provides an accessible overview of the author’s first monograph project, an intellectual biography of the historian John Hope Franklin (1915-2009). Perhaps the pre-eminent African American historian working in the late-twentieth-century United States, Franklin penned the best-selling Black history survey From Slavery to Freedom (1947) and engaged in tireless historical activism, supporting the NAACP on the landmark school desegregation case Brown v. Board (1954) and spearheading President Clinton’s One America Race Initiative.

We used to take trade for granted. Trillions of dollars of goods and services crossed borders each year. Nobody paid too much attention: it just worked. Now, surging oil prices can hit your mortgage. Trump’s latest tariff announcement can crash markets and ruin your pension. Brexit can sever Britain from its closest trading partners. Chinese restrictions can bring the West’s car production to a crashing halt. Curbs on trade in cutting-edge chips could determine who wins the AI race.

Mental disorders are among the top 10 leading causes of health loss worldwide: in 2023, 15% of the world’s population experienced mental disorders and 17% of the total years lived with disability in the world were due to mental disorders.

This talk discusses how political developments in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from 1918 to 2022 are integrated into or diverge from the common narrative of European history, focusing on significant turning points such as the Second World War, the collapse of the Soviet system, and the enlargement of the EU and NATO.

Global governance today is increasingly shaped by fragmentation – between major powers, across regions, and within societies.

This year's guest lecturer is Fania Oz Salzberger, Professor of History (University of Haifa), widely respected public intellectual and peace activist. All attendees are invited to join a drinks reception following the talk.

Join Nadia Murad, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and Amal Clooney, Blavatnik School of Government Visiting Professor of Practice in International Law, for a discussion on their ongoing fight for justice for survivors of genocide and sexual violence around the world. In 2014, ISIS attacked Nadia Murad’s hometown in Sinjar and began a genocidal campaign against her community, the Yazidis, in Iraq. After escaping from captivity, Nadia devoted her life to fighting against the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. Visiting Professor Clooney has been Nadia’s counsel for the past ten years.

In this talk, David Boyk draws from his new book, Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India (Cambridge, 2025), to tell the story of Patna, in the north Indian region of Bihar, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A century and more earlier, Patna had been an important and populous city, but it came to be seen by many—and is still seen today—as merely part of the mofussil, the provincial hinterland.