Distinguished Lectures in Humanities: The Object of History: Writing the Early Modern Past through Things

Abstract

The field of history has been transformed by several "turns." In recent times, two have been of specific importance: the global turn and the material turn. Inspired by today’s fully connected world, a generation ago historians began to pay attention to the increasing connectivity that characterised the early modern (c. 1400–1800) world. Material artefacts—including commodities, luxuries, scientific tools, ethnographic specimens, and unique art objects—came to exemplify the same kind of mobility that people had. Things did not just move across vast geographies and continents; as people moved, objects came to embody the "otherness" of the worlds that human mobility brought into focus. Scholars, public historians, and broadcasters alike came to see material artefacts as a productive way to explain the connectivity of what has been called "the first global age."

The Object of History discusses a book-length project on the potential of material culture to unlock new ways of thinking and writing about history across seven areas of early modern scholarship, ranging from global exchange, the study of self, and worldmaking, to histories of science and technology, diplomacy and empire, the environment, capitalism, and inequality.

About the speaker

• Prof. Giorgio Riello is Professor of Early Modern Global History at the European University Institute, Florence. He has published widely on material exchange between Europe and Asia in the early modern period. His publications include Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (2013), Luxury: A Rich History (2016), and the forthcoming In Times of Wealth (with Dagmar Schäfer, 2027). Giorgio is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Advanced Grant project "CAPASIA: The Asian Origins of Global Capitalism, 1500–1800" (2022–2027).

• Prof. Anne Gerritsen is Professor of History at the University of Warwick (UK) and Chair of Asian Art at Leiden University. Her research interests include material culture in history—particularly porcelain, food, and food cultures in Asia and Europe—the theory and methods of history, transcultural merchant networks, sites of trade and production, and gender. She has authored and co-authored over ten books, most recently The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 2020).