For more information, e-mail Bruce Holsinger (bwholsinger@gmail.com)
As the impact of climate change intensifies, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Indian Ocean region, with its fast-accelerating economies, its innumerable oil and gas producers, its collapsing ecosystems, its vulnerable yet rapidly-increasing populations, and its swiftly-expanding carbon footprint, will be the theatre in which the future of the world will be decided. How will the ongoing changes affect the material and cultural lives of the region’s peoples, who are simultaneously drivers and victims of climate change? Many of the world’s major zones of conflict are already clustered around the Indian Ocean, and the region is also the theater of many accelerating arms races. How will these developments affect the global balance of power? What lessons might past climatic shifts offer for the future? These are some of the issues that will be discussed over the four two-hour sessions of this workshop.
November 6: The Little Ice Age in Tokugawa Japan, the Dutch Republic, and Mughal India: Early Modern Perspectives
With guest speaker, Julia Adeney Thomas (Notre Dame)
- Dagomar Degroot, excerpt from The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720, Cambridge UP, 2018.
- Julia Adeney Thomas, “Practicing Hope in the Anthropocene” (unpublished work)
- Julia Adeney Thomas, “History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value,” American Historical Review, December 2014.
- Sugata Ray, “Hydroaesthetics in the Little Ice Age: Theology, Artistic Cultures and Environmental Transformation in Early Modern Braj, c 1560-70” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 40:1, pp1-23.
- Amitav Ghosh, excerpts from Gun Island
