Seeking out recent cutting-edge scholarship in World History? Then join us for Baobab #13 featuring the three winners from our 2021 WHA Dissertation Prize. This session will be moderated by Dr. Ruth Mostern, Chair of the prize committee.
“The Pacific Sailors: Global workers at and on the edge of the Spanish empire (1580s – 1640s)”
Kristyl Obispado has completed a remarkable study of 1,500 global sailors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using impressive archival research and data analysis to describe the life experiences of individuals who plied Pacific waters and joined the trade that their ships were involved in. Her work combines data analysis with close reading and global history including microhistory. Dr. Obispado’s work helps to define Pacific history as a field in world history.
“Liberated Africans and Law in the South Atlantic, c. 1839 – 1871”
Jake Richards’ dissertation is an impressive study of the treatment and experiences of “liberated Africans” seized by the British navy from slave ships in the decades around the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Dr. Richards examines records created by courts set up in the New World, Europe and Africa to process liberated Africans once the British Naval Squadron deposited them at some port. This is a study of transnational law and the institutions and practices that surrounded it, yet it’s also a study of what actually happened to liberated Africans and as far as it is possible to ascertain, how they themselves thought, felt and acted.
“A Sea of Wealth: Sayyid Sa’id bin Sultan, His Omani Empire, and the Making of An Oceanic Marketplace”
In this dissertation about the Omani Empire and its role in global economic imperial developments in the nineteenth century, Nicholas Roberts builds an extraordinary case from widely dispersed archival materials that reveal both economic and imperial narratives about the Omani empire. Dr. Roberts has written a dissertation that is well-structured, well-researched and well-written and one that demonstrates an awareness of some major problems with global history narratives.
This session will conclude with an informal Q&A session.