The Center for East Asian Studies Humanities Colloquium presents:

"The Spice Trade as Asian History and as Global History"

Speaker: Dr. Eric Tagliacozzo, Associate Professor of History, Cornell University

The search for spices is one of the most important currents that has run through both Asian History and Global History writ-large.  Spices connected regional worlds in Asia from a very early date, but they eventually came to help forge a global story of inter-connection as well over what the French historian Fernand Braudel has called the longue duree, or the "long term".  Yet spices have traditionally been written out of these histories after the Early Modern Age; it's as if these rare but fragrant commodities ceased to hold the eye of historians, as other goods became more important in the narrative of evolving human connectivity.  In this talk, I will ask how West, South, East, and Southeast Asia were connected by these goods, and how this story changed over the centuries.  Looking over the "long term", I also ask how spices can still be seen to be important in our own world, especially in how we fashion ourselves a global society.

Eric Tagliacozzo is the author of “Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865-1915” (Yale, 2005), and editor or co-editor of four additional books.  
 
For more information, please visit http://www.ceas.sas.upenn.edu/events.shtml or contact ceas@ccat.sas.upenn.edu