David Armitage gave annual history Emden Lecture 2023

On Thursday 12 October, around 90 Aularians and historians came to Oxford to hear the annual A B Emden Lecture given by Professor David Armitage, Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History, Harvard University.

David’s engaging lecture was on ‘Gulliver’s Travails: Treaties in the Making—and the Breaking—of the Modern World’, exploring the biggest treaties that formed modern society around the globe. David Armitage, MA, PhD, LittD, CorrFRSE, FRHistS, FAHA, MAE, is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History, Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies and former Chair of the Department of History at Harvard University, where he teaches intellectual history and international history.

He is the author or editor of eighteen books, most recently Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017). Among his earlier works are The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), which won the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Award, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), which was chosen as a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013) and The History Manifesto (co-auth., 2014), a New Statesman Book of the Year and one of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s most influential books of the past 20 years. His most recent edited books are A Cultural History of Peace in the Age of Enlightenment (co-ed., 2020), Oceanic Histories (co-ed., 2018), The Law of Nations in Global History (co-ed., 2017) and Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (co-ed., 2014).

He is completing an edition of John Locke’s colonial writings and is working on a global history of treaty-making and treaty-breaking and on a study of opera and international law. His articles and essays have appeared in journals, newspapers and collections around the world and his works have been translated into fifteen languages.

The lecture is available to watch on St Edmund Hall’s YouTube Channel.