Distinguished Lectures in Humanities - The Object of History: Writing the Early Modern Past through Things
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Date
09 Nov 2026
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Organiser
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Faculty of Humanities, HKPM-PolyU Joint Chinese Textile Centre
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Time
16:00 - 18:00
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Venue
Y301, PolyU Main Campus & Online via Zoom
Speaker
Prof. Giorgio Riello
Prof. Anne Gerritsen
Summary
Distinguished Lectures in Humanities - The Object of History: Writing the Early Modern Past through Things
Co-organised by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University Faculty of Humanities and the HKPM–PolyU Joint Chinese Textile Centre (JCTC), the lecture presented by Prof. Giorgio Riello and Prof. Anne Gerritsen explores how engaging with material culture unlocks innovative approaches to conceptualizing and writing history across early modern studies. The lecture is organized around seven distinct subfields, spanning macro-level phenomena—such as global trade networks, imperial diplomacy, environmental systems, and capitalist inequalities—to micro-level perspectives, including human subjectivity, worldmaking practices, and technological developments. By unifying these diverse areas under a single material framework, the lecture highlights the overarching value of artifact-based historical inquiry.
Abstract
The field of history has been transformed by several ‘turns’. In recent times, two are 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 as well as unique art objects, came to exemplify the same kind of mobility that people had. Things did not just move across vast geographies and continents but as people moved, objects came to embody the ‘otherness’ of the worlds that human mobility brought into focus. Scholars as well as public historians and broadcasters 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 in 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.
Keynote Speaker
Prof. Giorgio Riello
Giorgio Riello is Professor of Early Modern Global History at the European University Institute, Florence. He has published widely on the material exchange between Europe and Asia in the early modern period. Among his books Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (2013), Luxury: A Rich History (2016), and the forthcoming In Times of Wealth (with Dagmar Schaefer 2027). Giorgio is the PI of the European Research Council Advanced Grant Project entitled ‘CAPASIA: The Asian Origins of Global Capitalism, 1500-1800’ (2022-27).
Prof. Anne Gerritsen
Anne Gerritsen is Professor of History at the University of Warwick in the 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 and sites of trade and production and gender. She has authored and co-authored over ten books, including recently The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 2020).
