Indian Ocean Environments Past and present

The Stenton Lecture is the Department of History's annual public lecture. This year's Stenton Lecturer is Prof. Sujit Sivasundaram (Cambridge), who will speak on 'The Indian Ocean and Our Environmental Past and Present'. The Indian Ocean's history brings together the richest diversity of human exchanges, migrations, and cultural patterns. Though it trails behind the other two major oceans by way of its size, it is estimated that around one third of the global population lives facing this vast sea. This ocean is also a coming together of a range of lifeforms. Across the World Ocean, species richness is greatest in the central Indo-Pacific belt, linking the eastern half of the Indian Ocean to East Asia and Australia. In order to provide some new insights into the environmental history of this busy maritime highway, this lecture works from history, outwards to other disciplines. It also concentrates on various environmental 'bits and pieces', which I call fragmentary or elemental, in order to think through how humans and material from nature, including various species, interacted across this sea over the long-term. Here I focus on four of the 'bits and pieces' that I'm currently working on: coir rope, cowrie shell, ambergris and sea cucumber. Their persistence over the long-term despite their smallness or slipperiness; their durability when worked up and cast as technique in human hands; their ability to build up to structures like exploration, religiosity, capitalism, imperialism or globalisation; the way in which they create material composites and symbolic associations with other materials but also critically here in what I will say with the human frame itself; all of this means that there is a case for further scrutiny of this class of stuff which is often misplaced in historical narration.

For more information contact: r.blakemore@reading.ac.uk - Telephone number: 0118 378 7736