Join professor Michael Feener for a lecture presenting some broad context for understanding the brief, but impactful, period in which merchant seafarers from the early American Republic traded with the Sumatran province of Aceh. The establishment of that trade in the expanding pepper-producing region of Aceh’s west coast will be situated within a long history of commercial and cultural circulations that stretch back to medieval networks of Buddhist and Muslim merchants with connections across both the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

Today with growing interest in both Salem and Aceh of their early 19th-century connections it is more important than ever to be able to place that specific period of history within long-term perspectives and cross-cultural contexts of maritime trade.
R. Michael Feener is a Professor at the Kyoto University Center for Southeast Asian Studies and an Associate Member of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. He is also a Senior Associate of the Centre for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society at the Melbourne Law School, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and Director of the Maritime Asia Heritage Survey (MAHS). In the last of these positions, he leads full-time field teams working simultaneously in some of the most remote and understudied areas of the Maldives, Indonesia, and Thailand to digitally document archaeological and historic sites, and coordinates the processing and publication of that data by the MAHS Lab in Kyoto for the project’s open-access online archive.

This is a free event, co-hosted by Hamilton Hall and Pickering House. Donations to the upkeep of our historic buildings are always appreciated. Registration is required, register here!