Professor Sir Christopher Bayly participates in a symposium on 6-9 January in his honour entitled `Bayly, Benares, and the Making of World History'. The event is organised under the auspices of the Jnana-Pravaha Centre for Cultural Studies and Research (link is external), Varanasi and Jnana-Pravaha of Mumbai (link is external) with the help of Dr Faisal Devji (Oxford) and Dr Shruti Kapila (Cambridge). It was Bayly's highly original study of the trading and social networks of the Benares market-place in north India that resulted in his first monograph, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (1983) (link is external), making this symposium especially poignant. Prof Bayly's emergence as one of the world's leading global historians owes much to his early work; it affirms his view that global history is about multiple interconnections and that local contexts form part of wider wholes.