CIDRAL Public Lecture: Michael North, 'Connected Oceans: Seas as Media of Global Exchange'
| Dates: | 2 May 2018 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 19:00 |
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| What is it: | Lecture |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Alumni, Current University students, General public, Post 16 |
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This event is part of CIDRAL's 2017/18 programme, The Constraints of Creativity.
Hallsworth Visiting Fellow, Michael North (Professor of Modern History, University of Greifswald), will deliver a public lecture entitled 'Connected Oceans: Seas as Media of Global Exchange'.
The Earth is a water planet. Three-Quarters of the surface is covered by water, and over 90 percent of the world’s trade is carried by sea. Despite a flourishing field of global history, seas as media of global exchange have attracted only little attention of historians.
Nevertheless, in the last fifteen years individual seas, such as the Mediterranean (Abulafia), Baltic (North), Atlantic (Butel), Indian Ocean (Pearson), or Pacific (Matsuda) found their authors. Most of them – following the model of Fernand Braudel – construct „their“ sea as closed system, without taking the various connections with other seas into account.
My lecture wants to overcome these limited perspectives and demonstrate the global connectivity of the seas from the Vikings until the 19th century, focusing at the same time on global and regional exchanges. Unlike Fernand Braudel, the seas are not understood as all-powerful nature that determined peoples’ lives. On the contrary, people such as merchants and sailors are the protagonists of the lecture. They not only witness, experience and perceive the seas, but also reinvent and constitute them via trade and cultural exchange.
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A113
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
