2025-2026 MacKay Lecture Series

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 22:00:00 GMT

The 2025-26 MacKay Lecture features Dilip Menon, Professor of History and International Relations at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Writing by the Sea: Connected History in the Age of Global Warming

Global warming has reminded us of the porosity of the boundaries between ocean and land, belying the hard distinctions that we have been prone to make at least since Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum in 1609. Ironically, Grotius’s argument for a free, open ocean simultaneously laid political claims on the freedom to trade and travel of nations. The fundamental question before us, as humans, in addition to being academics, is how we stop fragmenting the ocean along national claims and ideas of “territorial waters.” The divisions into oceans – Atlantic, Pacifc, Indian – and seas – Red, the Mediterranean – while heuristically satisfying, sometimes forget the underlying fact of one body of water with its tides and seasonal winds, within which human beings negotiate and make claims. Looking at the ocean as one body allows us to recognize the importation of the territorially incarcerative ideas of area studies into a space not amenable to such dictation. We are forced to think beyond the idea of the discrete spaces of Asia, Africa, and Europe to more connected as much as interstitial histories. We have to learn to think athwart and betwixt the geographies of recent origin generated by a worship of the golden calf of the nation state. Temporally, too, we need to think beyond the limited chronologies of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity towards a notion of time dictated by movements across the ocean, as Braudel foundationally did, and historians like Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Engseng Ho have done more recently (Braudel, 1972; Ho, 2006; Subrahmanyam, 2012). We have been prone, as social scientists, to think about a terrestrial imagination, with the ocean on the margins of our thought. A maritime vision would require us to engage with the persistent movement of people, goods, and ideas across the ocean which has always exceeded the remit of states and empires.

Dal Events

2025-2026 MacKay Lecture Series

Writing by the Sea: Connected History in the Age of Global Warming