Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences Annual Graduate Lecture 2025 - Stories at the Edge of Empire: Newfoundland, 1763-1829
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
Join us for the 2025 Annual Graduate Lecture hosted by Birkbeck's Faculty of of Humanities & Social Sciences (FHSS). It will be delivered by the award-winning historian Professor Julia Laite (School of Historical Studies) who will discuss new research on settler colonialism, place-making, family history, and storytelling in her home of Newfoundland.
Welcome: Professor Sally Wheeler, Vice-Chancellor of Birkbeck.
Chair: Professor Heike Bauer, Head of Research, Innovation & Knowledge Exchange, FHSS, Birkbeck
All welcome but please book your free place.
STORIES AT THE EDGE OF EMPIRE: NEWFOUNDLAND, 1763-1829
Consigned to the cold and watery edge of empire, Newfoundland was more of a work-camp than a colony. To the colonial officials in their mahoganied offices in London and the merchants in their mansions in Poole, the island was (in the words of Patrick O’Flaherty) a ‘a sub-colonial fishing berth, an outlying cod abattoir’. The interior was thought too barren and empty for landward expansion, but its foreshores and coastal waters were of vital economic and strategic importance to the British Crown, and this produced a unique form of negligent colonization, which produced one of the Empire’s oldest and most isolated settler populations and led to one of its most totalizing genocides. This lecture will examine some official and unofficial, and colonial and indigenous, ways of mapping and knowing this hinterland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and will reconsider the place of this ‘unknown’ island and its difficult history within the British Empire.
About the speaker
Professor Julia Laite's is a historian at Birkbeck and teller of stories. She works as a historical consultant in British media and has published widely on the history of sexual labour, migration, and crime history including Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960 (2012) and The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey (2021), which won the Crime Writer's Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction, and the Bert Roth award for Labour History.
Contact name: Heike Bauer
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