Venue: Ireland House, 1 Washington Mews

Dates: March 7-9, 2019

Organizers: Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper

Program (PDF Version)

Thursday, March 7:

5:00 – 6:30 pm 

          Introductory talks by Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper

Friday, March 8:

9:30                  Opening Remarks: David Ludden, Jane Burbank, Fred Cooper

10: 00 – 12:00.    Panel 1: Indian Ocean Connections over Time and Space

Central idea: connections across the Indian Ocean (East Africa, Gulf, South Asia, Southeast Asia), covering an extended period of time, informing discussion of long-term patterns and changes.

Papers:

Duane Corbis (NYU Shanghai): “Protestant Missions and Trans-Imperial Connections in the Eighteenth-Century Indian Ocean and Beyond”

Kenneth Hall (Ball State University): “Identity and Spatiality in Indian Ocean Ports of Trade c1400-1800”

Hollian Wint (Wagner College): “Contractual Conversions, Commensurability and the Limits of Trust and Intimacy in the Nineteenth Century Indian Ocean”

Prita Meier (NYU): “East Africa and the Indian Ocean: Notes on the Aesthetics of Difference”

Commentator: Kerry Ward (Rice University)

1:30 – 3:30.  Panel 2:  Ports and Polities

Central idea: each paper examines a port city in relation to an imperial polity and considers the importance of ports to the development of empires

Papers: 

Susanah Shaw Romney (NYU): “Why Build Batavia? Port Cities, Empires, and Early Modern Oceans”

Trina Hogg (Oregon State University): “Abolition and Apprenticeship in Nineteenth-Century Freetown, Sierra Leone”

Ian Coller (University of California Irvine): “Port/e City: Marseille as a Hinge of Empire”

            Commentator: Edyta Bojanowska (Yale)

4:00 – 6:00.   Panel 3: Continental Connections

Central idea: papers explore long distance connections, over both land and sea, including the formation of regional structures and concepts such as Eurasia and Eurafrica

Papers:

Ayse Baltacioglu-Brammer (NYU): “The Notions of Border and Border Formation in the Early Modern Ottoman-Safavid Relations”

Thomas Kuehn (Simon Fraser): “Government contractors, tax lords, and supply lines: Non-territorial forms of imperial governance in Ottoman Yemen, 1872-1914”

Tatiana Linkhoeva (NYU): “Five Races Living in Harmony: Japan and Eurasia”

Muriam Davis (UC Santa Cruz): “EurAfrica and the Postwar Reinvention of the Mediterranean”

Commentator: Zvi Benite Ben-Dor (NYU)

Saturday, March 9:

9:00 -11:00.  Panel 4: Ports and Hinterlands

Central idea: exploration of the regional connections of port cities (including desert-edge as well as maritime ports)

Papers:

Karl Appuhn (NYU): “How Wide Was My Hinterland? The Spatial Dynamics of Mediterranean Commercial Centers in the Early Modern Period”

Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi (University of California Riverside): “Who Broke Lagos?: Mapping the Politics of a West African Lagoon Complex”

Lale Can (City College of New York): “Crossing the Bosphorus: Central Asian Hajjis in Ottoman Istanbul, 1869-1914”          

Commentator: Norman Underwood (NYU)

11:15-1:15.    Panel 5: Oceans

Central idea: to explore and compare relations within and across different bodies of water and how they affect lands within and adjacent to them

            Papers:

Ravi Ahuja (Göttingen): “Indian seafarers, ‘racial management’ and the British Empire”Seamen, 19^th and 20^th centuries”

Lisa Lindsay (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill): “Transatlantic Itineraries and Imperial Echoes in the Nineteenth Century”

David Rainbow (University of Houston): “New York to Paris by Rail: Pacific Empires and the Bering Strait, 1898-1907”

Nadin Heé (Freie Universität Berlin): “How Tuna became a Global Commons. Migrating Species, People and Knowledge across Oceans and Empires”

Commentator: Rebecca Scott (University of Michigan)

1:30 – 2:30.   Closing remarks