Date/Time
Friday, May 15, 2015–Saturday, May 16, 2015
All Day
Core Program 2014–15
Explorations, Encounters, and the Circulation of Knowledge, 1600–1830
Conference 3: Commerce, Culture, and Natural Knowledge
—organized by Adriana Craciun, University of California, Riverside, and Mary Terrall, University of California, Los Angeles
The circulation of knowledge, objects, and people has attracted scholarly attention in recent years from a variety of disciplines. Explorations, Encounters, and the Circulation of Knowledge, 1600–1830 is a series of three conferences that draw on several strands of this scholarship to examine how knowledge was shaped by long-distance voyages and encounters in the global seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Recent work on global trade in the early modern world has examined the impact of commercial networks and the objects they exchanged on European knowledge of nature. Commercial concerns shaped the collection and trade in artificial and natural curiosities (in the metropolis and in the field), the enslavement and transportation of people, as well as the transplantation of natural resources for exploitation in imperial sites. The third conference gathers scholars working on commerce, science and material culture in the early modern world, with the specific goal of addressing issues raised by the circumstances of encounter and exchange, aiming to complicate this picture by developing some of the symmetries outlined above.
Speakers:
Alan Bewell, University of Toronto
Ted Binnema, University of Northern British Columbia
Jonathan Eacott, University of California, Riverside
Markman Ellis, Queen Mary University of London
Catherine Molineux, Vanderbilt University
Elizabeth Montanez-Sanabria, University of California, Los Angeles
Kathleen S. Murphy, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Eric Otremba, University of California, Los Angeles
Michael Ziser, University of California, Davis
Program
Friday, May 15
9:30 a.m.
Morning Coffee and Registration
10:00 a.m.
Barbara Fuchs, University of California, Los Angeles
Welcome
Mary Terrall, University of California, Los Angeles, and
Adriana Craciun, University of California, Riverside
Opening Remarks
Session 1
Chair: Mary Terrall, University of California, Los Angeles
Ted Binnema, University of Northern British Columbia
“’Even the Rudest Indian Sketch’: Aboriginal People and the History of Cartography in the Hudson’s Bay Company”
MP3: https://ucla.box.com/s/dhrx4rr9azmie0k189z9afukckigkemp
Catherine Molineux, Vanderbilt University
“The Thamesian Imagination: Political Ecology and Ephemeral Monopolies in British West Africa, 1670–1720”
11:25 a.m.
Coffee Break
11:35 a.m.
Elizabeth Montanez-Sanabria, Ahmanson-Getty Fellow
“Pirates, Darien Indians, and Commercial Companies in the Atlantic Market, 1670–1730”
MP3: https://ucla.box.com/s/k0benbqxjpaiwzuf571p4g5s8tej148h
Discussion
12:45 p.m.
Lunch
2:15 p.m.
Session 2
Chair: Matthew Goldmark, Ahmanson-Getty Fellow, UCLA
Alan Bewell, University of Toronto
“Natures in Circulation”
MP3: https://ucla.box.com/s/245boa4yr3y9knajeqb7axe4ua9rfmd5
Kathleen S. Murphy, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
“Collecting Specimens, Collecting Slaves: The Production of Natural Knowledge through the British Slave Trade”
MP3: https://ucla.box.com/s/qrfyvlmygrlz8kfxi5w6um842xdyvmz5
3:25 p.m.
Coffee Break
3:35 p.m.
Markman Ellis, Queen Mary University of London
“Tea as an Object of Knowledge between Britain and China, 1690–1730”
MP3: https://ucla.box.com/s/8rou37mtqwt7jy4tv2l6tpws1esamobl
Discussion
4:45 p.m.
Reception
Saturday, May 16
9:00 a.m.
Morning Coffee and Registration
9:30 a.m.
Session 3
Chair: Adriana Craciun, University of California, Riverside
Jonathan Eacott, University of California, Riverside
“Elephants and the Nature of the British Empire”
Eric Otremba, Ahmanson-Getty Fellow
“Experimental Empire: Baconian Science and Plantation Slavery in the English Atlantic, 1626–1688
MP3: https://ucla.box.com/s/o98wlyq5klxl8mzaee11xzmjqu00cs10
Michael Ziser, University of California, Davis
“Smugglers, Pedlars, and Quacks: Transposing Commercial and Scientific Micro-Geographies at the Turn of the 19th Century”
MP3: https://ucla.box.com/s/4ttlbhihc6166054av9mof0t2rbc5jrb
Discussion
11:45 a.m.
Roundtable Discussion of Conference Themes
12:30 p.m.
Program concludes