Ithaca College

The Spring 2012 annual Mayrock Lecture will be given by Dr. Margaret R. Hunt on Thursday, April 5th, at 7pm in Textor 101.  Dr. Hunt is the Winkley Professor of History and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Amherst College.  She is the author of Women in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2009) and The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England 1660-1780 (1996), winner of the Forkosch Prize awarded by the American Historical Association for the best book in British, British Imperial, or British Commonwealth history.

Dr. Hunt’s talk is entitled “Managing Ethnic and Religious Difference in the Early English East India Company: the Mughal Siege of Bombay, 1689-1690.” This talk attempts to reconstruct what “British” soldiers and sailors actually thought about racial and religious difference in this period.  It looks at the multiethnic and multi-confessional alliances the Bombay authorities were forced to make in the face of the military and demographic crises of the 1680s and 1690s.  And it examines one of the more striking challenges to a polity ostensibly based on ethnic and religious solidarity, the phenomenon of East India Company soldiers and sailors deserting the Company’s service and converting to Islam.   

The lecture is free and open to the public.