Historical and classical studies seminar: Stuart Ward

Global Imaginaries

The Department of Historical and Classical Studies would like to invite all to the first of our 2025 Research Seminars. Please join us on March 24 (12pm Napier 618) to warmly welcome Professor Stuart Ward to the university. Morning tea provided! For those unable to attend in person, a Zoom link is provided below.

Global History has come under intense scrutiny in recent years for its alleged ‘convergence bias’. A sustained emphasis on long-range connectivity, porous boundaries and cosmopolitan social formations, it is said, has tended to screen out the contingencies of locality and social rank. This paper draws on recent insights in the field of ‘global microhistory’ to trace the origins of global history’s implicit confidence in world-wide patterns of economic integration and cultural convergence

Abstract: It does so by bringing individual subjectivities to the fore, tracing the globetrotting exploits of the young radical, Charles W. Dilke, in the mid-nineteenth century. Dilke set out in 1866, aged 22, on a world tour lasting just over a year, stretching from America, across the Pacific to New Zealand, the Australian colonies and India – culminating in his bestselling two-volume travelogue Greater Britain (1868). Dilke’s impressions left a deep imprint on his vast readership, recasting the fixed coordinates of the British Isles in a global register. But although historians have acknowledged his profound influence (not least given his long and chequered career in Victorian politics), virtually no attention has been paid to the micro-historical texture of the voyage that originally made him famous. The early global sensibilities that Dilke embraced and embodied in equal measure were not simply a response to the flattening effects of new technologies. They were also a crucial means of coping with the unprecedented disruptions they caused.

Biography:
Stuart Ward is Professor of Global and Imperial history at the University of Copenhagen, shortly to take up a new position as Professor of Global History at Adelaide University. During the academic year 2025-26 he will hold the Whitlam-Fraser Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University.