In this episode, Chella Ward and Salman Sayyid talked to Adnan Husain about some of the challenges involved in reorienting history. We spoke about the opportunities and limitations of the idea of ‘the global’ as a way of organising history, and explored the relationship between the global and the decolonial. Adnan Husain is a Medieval European and Middle Eastern historian at Queen’s University, Canada. He has a particular interest in the relationship between Muslims, Jews and Christians in the medieval Mediterranean and we particularly enjoyed talking to him about the question of methodology: how do we write a new history of the world?