Myriad Materialities: Towards a New Global Writing of Colonial Ports and Port Cities

3 x 20-minute breakouts + 3 x 5-minute changeovers

 

Format: The participants will be organised into 3 groups on the day and will rotate through the 20-minute breakouts, before reconvening for a general discussion.

 

Breakout 1 

Materiality and Commodities/Consumption: Rethinking Colonial Ports Through Luxury Goods and Everyday Items

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Hosts: Hatice Yıldız (CPAGH/University of Edinburgh, UK) and Ayse Polat (University of Cambridge)

Moderator: Min-Erh Wang (CPAGH/University of Oxford)

 

Session Blurb:

How did the production and consumption of commodities shape global connections through colonial ports? 

 

This session will explore the ways in which the production and consumption of materials including textiles, sugar, tea, coffee, spices, oil, and silver shaped (and continues to shape) connections and power relations built within and through global ports. 

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Breakout 2

Materiality and Place

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Host: Olivia Durand (CPAGH/University of Oxford)

Moderator: Helena F. S. Lopes (CPAGH/University of Bristol)

 

Session Blurb: 

What can the interior urban landscape reveal about colonial port dynamics and exchanges taking place beyond the marine? 

Most studies of the legacies of colonialism have focused on port cities. However, the global connections fostered by imperialism did not stop at maritime borders and infiltrated the interior of most territories. Taking the example of Oxford – city and university – as a nexus of knowledge and empire, this session will survey the ways in which the materiality of the urban landscape reveals stories of expansionism, displacement, and networks that reach well beyond the marine.

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Breakout 3

Materiality and Provenance

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Host: Julia Binter (CPAGH/Zentralarchiv/Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin-Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz)

Moderator: Katharina Oke (CPAGH/Universität Graz, Austria)

 

Session Blurb:

When do port cities become colonial, and what material traces of this shift in power and hierarchies can we find in the museum?

 

Many colonial port cities grew out of, or violently replaced, existing hubs of translocal trade. Objects which can be found in museums today materialise this shift in power and hierarchies. This session will trace the routes of objects from colonial port cities to ‘Cities of Empire’ like Berlin, and also explore how provenance research and its focus on materiality can provide new insights into the agency with which various social actors shaped emerging colonial port cities.