CSEAS Friday Lecture: Dr. Richard Pegg

Director and Curator of Asian Art, The MacLean Collection

Title: "Maritime Routes of Southeast Asia: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century Maps, Ships and Goods"

In the seventeenth century, trade in the north to southeast corridor of the Pacific was a complex set of relationships between the port cities of East and Southeast Asia locally, with the introduction of participants from Portugal, Spain, England, and Holland internationally. This enormous economic engine, which still exists today, had numerous working parts driven by the exchange of goods. Extant indigenous maps about trade routes and specific ports in East and Southeast Asia during the seventeenth century help tell a variety of stories related to that trade. This lecture will examine these stories through cartography: who had access and when, what was traded, what people and types of ships were involved, and what the associated routes were.

The MacLean Collection, located north of Chicago, is a private collection that includes the Map Library (more than thirty-five thousand maps  that date from the fifteenth century to present) and the Asian Art Museum (more than five thousand pieces dating from the Neolithic to present).