“Climate Futures’ Past: Insurance, Cyclones and Weather Knowledge in the Indian Ocean World”
Debjani Bhattacharyya, Associate Professor of History, Drexel University
Faculty Commentator: Charles Maier, WIGH Co-Chair and Professor of History, Emeritus
Student Commentator: Alexander Geelen, Global Fellow, WIGH; PhD Candidate in History, the International Institute of Social History and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands
The mid-18th-19th century was marked with financial and scientific experiments by the various company-states active in the Indian Ocean sometimes operating in the shadows or outside the metropolitan regulatory regimes. This chapter locates those disparate moments when weather disturbance – or ecological limits – were financialized in the service of marine insurance.
This event is open to in-person attendance by Harvard/MIT ID holders only. Others are invited to participate via Zoom.
To request the precirculated paper and Zoom link, please sign up below. You will receive an automatic email confirmation, and approximately one week before the seminar we will manually send you the paper and link.
This graduate-faculty research seminar is designed to bring together interested faculty and students on a continuing basis to cover topics on global history. It is part of History 2950A/B, Approaches to Global History, and includes both reading sessions designed for graduate students and research sessions open to the interested public during which students and faculty participants will present current research. Faculty participants will be drawn from a number of schools, and, most especially, from the group of fellows in global history who are spending the academic year 2021-2022 at the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History. Discussions will be moderated by Professors Sven Beckert and Charles Maier.
LOCATION:Hybrid- via Zoom and in person (Harvard/MIT ID holders only) at 1737 Cambridge Street, K262 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20211101T194500Z DTEND:20211101T214500Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR