Seeing the Early Indian Ocean as a Peopled Seascape

This joint lecture will take place online; a Zoom link will be provided via email to registered participants.

Registration is required at THIS LINK.

This lecture, by two distinguished scholars of Indian Ocean maritime networks and trade, will focus on the crossing and experience of the first-millennium seascape. By drawing from epigraphic, artifactual, and spatial evidence, stories of mariners and merchants, church officials, holy men, artisans, enslaved people, Indians, Christians, and others – and sometimes their shipwrecked goods – will people the first-millennium Indian Ocean bringing culturally-specific human concerns to light. Who were these intrepid travelers from the Red Sea region and the ports of South Asia? Were they plying a luxury trade? What did they live, love, and carry home with them across the monsoon sea?

Ranabir Chakravarti, an eminent expert in the social and economic history of early India, is known for his enduring interests in the Indian Ocean maritime trade during the pre-modern times. A regular contributor to peer-reviewed journals and edited academic volumes in India and abroad, he has authored/co-authored and edited/co-edited the following works: Warfare for Wealth: Early Indian Perspectives (Calcutta, 1986); A Sourcebook of Indian Civilization (Hyderabad, 2000); Trade in Early India (New Delhi, 2001); Indo-Judaic Studies in the Twenty First Century: A View from the Margins (New York, 2007); Exploring Early India up to c. ad 1300 (New Delhi, 2016); History of Bangladesh: Early Bengal in Regional Perspectives up to c. 1200 ce in two volumes (Dhaka, 2018). He has also written three books in Bangla on early Indian history. Dr. Chakravarti was elected to preside over the section on Ancient Indian History by Indian History Congress in 2011. He is Retired Professor of Ancient History, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Eivind Heldaas Seland is Professor of Ancient History and Premodern Global History in the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies, and Religion at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has written extensively on early trade and mobility in the western Indian Ocean trade, especially on the social networks forming at the intersection of commerce, religion and political power. Currently, he is investigating how the physical environment influenced travel and communication along both sea and land routes. He also studies how historians, archaeologists and paleoclimatologists have cast climate as an agent of historical change, in order to identify good models of climate-society interrelation. A prior project, funded by the Research council of Norway, investigated networks of commercial, religious and political nature within and across fluctuating imperial borders in the Near East in the Roman period. His latest book is A Global History of the Ancient World. Asia, Europe and Africa before Islam (Routledge 2021).

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