Event Description
What makes a region? Historians have different ideas. For many, a region is a cluster of cultural, linguistic, and historical traits. Others point to commerce, or geography. But what happens when these networks break down—or when the ecology itself changes? This talk will introduce one such region in flux: the Black Sea. It will trace the Black Sea’s evolution, as both a geopolitical and physical space, through its history of fishing. More specifically, the presentation will explore the interaction of six kinds of animals: three fish, one marine mammal, an invasive comb jelly, and us. Aquatic wildlife shaped the diets and cultures of the Black Sea’s humans for millennia. Yet in recent centuries, these creatures acquired new economic, scientific, and diplomatic significance—with immense (and eventually catastrophic) consequences for the Black Sea environment. This seminar will reconstruct this historical arc, from the Greek colonies of Antiquity to the competitive industrialization of the 1930s, to the environmental diplomacy of the Cold War. The presentation (based on fieldwork in Italy, Romania, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, and the US) will conclude with a discussion of the Black Sea’s ongoing precarity, as a home and battlefield.
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. Please email Eileen Huhn at [email protected] with any questions.
Hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.
