Events

Loading Events

« All Events

  • This event has passed.

Signed, Sealed, and Undelivered: The Voyage of the Santa Catharina and the Global Microhistory of the Indian Ocean

June 3, 2019 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm +04

About the Event: 

In the early hours of the morning of April 30, 1748, at the height of the War of the Austrian Succession, a British naval squadron intercepted a merchant vessel called the Santa Catharina in the Indian Ocean on its return voyage from the port of Basra in the Persian Gulf to the Bengali port of Calcutta. Like many “country ships” involved in the port-to-port trade of the Indian Ocean, the Santa Catharina had a crew with a diverse and cosmopolitan background hailing from different parts of Europe and South Asia. Moreover, two of its passengers were Armenian merchants from New Julfa (Isfahan), freighting the ship and owning most of its cargo. The ship’s cargo included bales of raw silk, Bengali textiles, lead, iron, rice, Persian rosewater, palm dates, and silver species. Most importantly perhaps, at the time of its capture, the Santa Catharina was carrying a payload of about three thousand pieces of business and family correspondence written from Italy, the Ottoman empire (Istanbul, Tokat, and Diyarbekir), and especially from Isfahan and addressed to recipients throughout India and as far afield as Canton and Beijing in China. Along with the rest of the ship’s belongings, these letters were confiscated by the British and sent to London where they were presented as exhibits during a high-stakes Admiralty trial (1749-1752) on the fate of the ship. My talk treats the Santa Catharina as a vessel, instrument, and metaphor of Indian Ocean and Armenian history. The talk focuses on the sensational trial of the ship that took place in London and attempts to assess the historical value of the ship’s traveling “archive” for global, Armenian, and Indian Ocean history.

About the Speaker: 

Sebouh David Aslanian is the Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair of Modern Armenian History and Associate Professor in the Department of History at UCLA. Aslanian specializes in early modern world and Armenian history and is the author of From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), which was the recipient of the PEN Center’s Exceptional UC Press First Book Award and winner of the Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award, Middle East Studies Association (MESA), 2011. His essay “Une vie sur plusieurs continent: Microhistoire globale un agent arménien de la Compagnie des Indes orientales (1666-1688)” is scheduled to appear in Annales: Histoire, Science Sociales in 2019. Aslanian is now completing his second book manuscript (under contract at Yale University Press) dedicated to early modern global print history and provisionally titled Early Modernity and Mobility: Port Cities and Printers Across the Armenian Diaspora, 1512-1800. He is also working on a manuscript on the global microhistory of the early modern Indian ocean based on the voyage of a ship called the Santa Catharina.
 
Language: Armenian 

Details

Date:
June 3, 2019
Time:
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm +04
Event Categories:
,

Organizer

Phone
+374 60 69 40 40

Venue

308E, PAB
Baghramyan 40
Yerevan, Armenia
+ Google Map