Living in the cheery old town of Blackpool, it isn’t often I get the opportunity to experience talks first-hand from award-winning or renowned historians. When I found out Dr Michael Scott would be doing a lecture in Lytham I was super excited to attend, despite having interests in more modern history than ancient. He has been to my college before too due to my teacher’s borderline obsession but the topic of this lecture interested me much more: historical globalisation.
It was a really hard concept to get my head around and I must admit, my brain was aching a little on my bus ride home, but it was definitely food for thought. The basic concept he was presenting was a question of the way history is currently taught to us. We break history up into distinctive periods, modern and ancient, middle ages and medieval times, categories similar to these. Our understanding of ancient civilisation is obviously much more limited and so the divisions become a little looser. However, Dr Scott raised a very valid point. When referring to the study of ‘ancient worlds’, historians are more often than not talking about ancient Greece and Italy solely and ignoring the other regions such as China and South America which have an equally interesting amount of history. He debated how it is very common that the teaching of history forgets to mention how globally connected we are historically, and when the ‘globalisation’ of our past began.
It was certainly a really interested debate to listen to and I am waiting in great anticipation for his new book this Summer which promises to explore these historical explorations in even more depth. I’ll link his webpage below as well as a documentary on Delphi which I watched recently and found fascinating.
