Dr Peter Good, ‘The Indian Ocean Trade in Persian Wine: New Perspectives on Cultural Exchange' - Thursday 18th January, 11am, DLT1.
In 1708, Queen Anne of Great Britain was presented with a distinctive and rare gift; a luminous blue bottle filled with wine from the Shah of Persia. The bottle, with a distinctive tulip shape and long neck carried both liquid and a cultural heritage celebrated in all facets of Persian artistic life from poetry to painted miniatures. Wine from Persia was an important export commodity for the Safavid Empire, while also forming one of the pillars of the trade carried out by European trading companies and local merchants alike. In this paper, I will explore some of my preliminary findings from my two-year JSPS funded project concerning the history of Persian wine as a cultural vector and trade good. Using images of objects, artworks and archival material, I will show how Persian wine represented an important part of Safavid “soft power” and how its trade was used by Europeans to tap into the rich cultural cache of the product, as well as its financial value.
Dr Peter Good is Postdoctoral Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, and Honorary Fellow of MEMS, University of Kent. He studied Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies with Persian (2007-2011), then a Master’s in Middle East History 2011-2012) at the University of Exeter. In 2013 he received an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Fellowship with the University of Essex and the British Library. He is currently working on his first monograph under the title The East India Company in Persia: Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Eighteenth Century with I.B. Tauris. He has worked as a researcher at the University of Kent and the University of Manchester and has been an active member of the British Institute of Persian Studies. He sits on the organising committee of the biennial Symposia Iranica Conference. Most recently, he established the Indian Ocean History lecture series at the University of Kent. Peter’s research focusses on issues of trade and political links in the Indian Ocean, especially the role and status of written agreements. He tweets @PeterGood7.
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