Presentation by Kerry Ward, Rice University.

Thursday, March 7, 2013
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
10383 Bunche Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90305

Kerry Ward’s presenation will explore transitions between the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and British rule at the Cape of Good Hope between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. VOC rule created a shifting network of forced migration linking the Cape to the southwest Indian Ocean which was dismantled after British conquest. The Cape was inserted into British maritime imperial networks with a completely different orientation towards forced migration – it became the headquarters for the Royal Navy’s anti-slavery squadron for the East African coast. Attempts to include the Cape in British networks of penal transportation resulted in widespread public protest. The development of Simonstown as a British naval base created a lynch-pin in British maritime networks in the Indian Ocean.

Kerry Ward is Associate Professor of World History at Rice University. She is the author of Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company published by Cambridge University Press in the Studies in Comparative World History series in 2009. Ward has published in the fields of slavery and forced migration, Indian Ocean history, South African and Indonesian colonial history, and historical memory and public history. She is currently Secretary of the World History Association and Co-Director of the inaugural Rice Seminar on Human Trafficking – Past & Present: Crossing Borders, Crossing Disciplines.

Cost : Free and open to the public; pay-by-space and all-day parking ($11) available in lot 3.

www.international.ucla.edu/africa

Sponsor(s): African Studies Center, UCLA Department of History