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TERRAQUEOUS HISTORIES*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2017

ALISON BASHFORD*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
*
Jesus College, Cambridge, cb5 8blacb90@cam.ac.uk

Abstract

In her Inaugural Lecture, Alison Bashford, Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, introduces the concept of ‘terraqueous histories’. Maritime historians often stake large claims on world history, and it is indeed the case that the connections and distinctions between land and sea are everywhere in the many traditions of world history-writing. Collapsing the land/sea couplet is useful and ‘terraqueous’ history serves world historians well. The term returns the ‘globe’ to global history, it signals sea as well as land as claimable territory, and in its compound construction foregrounds the history and historiography of meeting places. If the Vere Harmsworth Chair of Imperial and Naval History has recently turned from ‘imperial’ into ‘world’ history, so might its ‘naval’ element become terraqueous history in the twenty-first century.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

Inaugural Lecture, Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, University of Cambridge, 8 October 2015.

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71 ‘Stories from the Sandstone: the archaeology and history of quarantine’. This project investigated  inscriptions on North Head between 2012 and 2016, collaboratively undertaken by Alison Bashford, Anne Clarke, Ursula Frederick, and Peter Hobbins.

72 Translation by Emeritus Professor Michael Carter for the Quarantine Project, University of Sydney.

73 Statement by the President of the Board of Health, ‘The history of the outbreak’, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 Feb. 1898.

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