The Colonial Gulf: How Empires Documented a Region -- Exhibit Opening and Student Poster Session

How have colonial and imperial regimes imagined and represented the Persian Gulf? 

This exhibit explores how the British, Ottoman and American empires documented the human and non-human geography, resources, and landscapes of the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It features historical maps and artifacts from the collections of the Branner Earth Sciences Library and the David Rumsey Map Center alongside cartographic visualizations created by the OpenGulf research collective. 

Featured materials include maps derived from a dataset collected from the British Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Arabia, and Oman created using QGIS, including the map of mentions of date palms displayed here.  By placing these historical materials and contemporary analyses in conversation, we uncover a genealogy of geographical thinking alongside the power structures embedded in imperial and colonial record-keeping.  This exhibit aims to illustrate and critically engage the breadth, depth, and nature of colonial and imperial knowledge production regarding the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula, highlighting its varied expressions in texts, maps, and charts.

This event will include a tour of the exhibit followed by a poster session with lighting talks by undergraduate students who have contributed to data creation and developed their own research outputs with the OpenGulf research collective.  Student presentations will include explorations into how the British Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Arabia and Oman represented the Gulf’s climate, its religious minorities, its flora and fauna, and its agricultural production.

A morning symposium session will be hosted at the David Rumsey Map Center from 9:00AM-12 noon.

Please register to attend.

A current Stanford ID is needed to enter the library, visitors must present a government issued ID card to sign-in at the front desk.