Winds and Empires - Lecture with Professor Greg Bankoff

Aeolian Empires: The Influence of Winds and Currents on European Maritime Expansion in the Days of Sail

Too little attention has been paid to the influence of winds and currents. The rise of Western European states to global dominance and world empires from the sixteenth century is usually characterized as maritime but should more fittingly be described as Aeolian or “wind-driven”. This talk examines the role winds and currents played in influencing the outline, structure and nature of Western European seaborne empires and the environmental changes that resulted from that contact. While the ability to harness old energy sources in new ways permitted regular long distance maritime travel on a global scale, the patterns of winds and currents in each ocean still largely dictated the routes, timings and destinations of such voyages. Only with the industrial application of coal and oil to marine transportation did a new geography of empire begin to emerge in the later nineteenth century.

Speaker Bio

Greg Bankoff is a historical geographer who focuses on the way societies interrelate with their environments over time, especially the way people adapt to frequent hazards. For the last 30 years, he has focused his research primarily on Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Pacific, and the North Sea seeking to understand how societies, both past and present, have learnt to normalise risk and the way in which communities deal with crisis through an applied interdisciplinary approach that combines archival analysis with fieldwork, community mapping, interviews and focus groups. He is a Research Fellow at Ateneo de Manila University and Professor Emeritus of Environmental History at the University of Hull and has published extensively including over a 120 referred journal articles and book chapters. Among his recent publications is a co-edited volume, Why Vulnerability Still Matters: The Politics of Disaster Risk Creation (2022).