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Description
As members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), the families Starbuck, Folger, and Rotch, were connected by both creed and economic. They were descendants of a whaling community that, due to their loyalty to the British crown in the events accompanying the American Revolution, dispersed across the Atlantic.
Relying on their contacts and experiences, they were among the first British whalers to enter the South Seas. Combining social network analysis and other strategies of family biography, the project aims at reconstructing the transoceanic networks, which established sea frontier as a socio-ecological, economic, and political space across the colonial “Anglo-world” (James Belich).
A crucial part of these networks were Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, Māori, and Pacific Islanders. As a result, the sea frontier was an uneven and shifting space, fractured along specific local particularities and power differentials, connected by the waves of two oceans.
Speaker Bios
Eva Bischoff teaches International History at Trier University. Her research interests include colonial and imperial history, postcolonial theory, and gender/queer studies. She is a visiting scholar at the Stout Research Centre in March 2019. Her most recent research focusses on British imperial history and settler colonialism. Her publications include an edited volume entitled Dimensions of Settler Colonialism in a Transnational Perspective. Experiences, Actors, Spaces (Routledge 2019).