The next Vice-Chancellor’s Esteem Lecture on Indian Ocean Journeys will take place on Wednesday 11 February at 6pm in Grimond Lecture Theatre 1.

Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah’s lecture will re-imagine the Indian Ocean as cosmopolitan site which preceded and survived colonialism rather than another chapter in the grinding and inevitable consolidation of European power.

The Indian Ocean as open waters rather than closed in by a southern land-mass. Fra Mauro was a Venetian monk who lived on the island of Murano in the Venice Lagoon and who studied a variety of Arab, Indian and European sources from which he constructed a map of the world. There are many remarkable matters concerning the map, its construction, its history and the detailed information it managed to pack into the tiny banners that decorated its empty spaces, but what makes it an appropriate starting point for this discussion was its representation of the Indian Ocean as so thoroughly knowable and interlinked, as a world connected and enriched by travel and by stories.

This way of thinking of the site contrasts with the more familiar narrative of a mythologised terrain into which erupt rapacious Europeans breaking out of medieval wars towards the fulfilment of their capital-driven destiny.