Connected Histories Twenty-Five Years Later

Description:

The one-day symposium ‘Connected Histories Twenty-Five Years Later’ is meant to be an opportunity to debate over the different ways in which Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s article ‘Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’ (1997), a milestone in contemporary historiography has shaped and continues to shape the work of historians of the early modern world.

The conference will bring together researchers from different academic traditions, disciplines, and generations. The aim is to test and discuss methods employed by scholars when they work across cultures, languages, and archives. In particular, the focus will be on the challenges posed by the practice of ‘connected histories’ and other attempts to engage with the complexity and asymmetry of early modern sources and the contexts in which they were produced. 

Limited seats are available. To register please contact giuseppe.marcocci@history.ox.ac.uk

Programme:

9.30am Welcome

9.45am Giuseppe Marcocci (University of Oxford) Archival Threads and Unconventional Geographies: Introductory Remarks from the Margins of Eurasia

10am Malika Dekkiche (University of Antwerp) DiplomatiCon: A Connected History of Medieval Mediterranean Diplomacy

Discussant: John-Paul Ghobrial (University of Oxford)

11.15am Coffee break

11.45am Jorge Flores (University of Lisbon) Disposable Gifts, Commensurability, and ‘Difficult Junctions’ at the Viceregal Court of Goa

Discussant: Indravati Felicité (Paris Cité University)

1pm Lunch

2pm Subah Dayal (New York University) A Sea of Scribes: Persian-Dutch Documentary Culture and Port-City Bureaucracies in the Indian Ocean

Discussant: Christopher Markiewicz (University of Birmingham)

3.15pm Coffee break

3.45pm Susan Stronge (Victoria & Albert Museum, London) The Internationalisation of Mughal Court Art, c.1560-1650: A Curator’s Perspective

Discussant: Rosalind O’Hanlon (University of Oxford)

5.15pm Keynote Speech

Sanjay Subrahmanyam (University of California, Los Angeles) Across the Green Sea: Looking Back at Connected Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1450-1550