The East India Company, Japan and the Globalising World – Derek Massarella

Lecture by Professor Derek Massarella
Khalili Lecture Theatre, SOAS,
Russell Square, London, WC1H 0HG
15 March 2013

Review by Timon Screech

Professor Derek Massarella of Chuo University spoke to a large audience on the theme of globalising trade in the seventeenth century, using a wealth of period texts and citations. He detailed the relationship between the East India Company and Japan. Despite the rain and it being late of a Friday evening, the Khalili Lecture Theatre in SOAS was nearly full with an enthusiastic audience.



The event was made possible by the support of the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation.



Professor Derek Massarella is Professor of History in the Faculty of Economics, Chuo University, Tokyo, where he has taught since 1981. His research interests include early modern European-Asian relations, the history of globalization, and seventeenth-century English history. He is the author of A World Elsewhere: Europe’s Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1990), co-editor of The Furthest Goal: Engelbert Kaempfer’s Encounter with Tokugawa Japan (1995), and has contributed to a number of other books and scholarly publications. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the International Representative, Japan, for the Hakluyt Society. Last year, in 2012 his book Japanese Travellers in Sixteenth-Century Europe A Dialogue Concerning the Mission of the Japanese Ambassadors to the Roman Curia (1590) was published by the Hakluyt Society (ISBN: 978-1-908145-03-1)