Speakers’ Corner provides lectures online for The British Scholar Society community to enjoy. The videos are listed in chronologically descending order.
Sir John Major discusses the need to consign the phrase “The Special Relationship” to the dustbin of history in the John C Whitehead Lecture at Chatham House, 10 November 2011.
Lecture Description: The Jolly Roger, peg legs, parrots, eye patches, walking the plank, Johnny Depp, Blackbeard, and Long John Silver. All of these images and names immediately bring to mind a romanticized vision of pirates. But in recent years, mere mention of piracy off the coast of Somalia brings a darker vision into our collective consciousness. This lecture will investigate global piracy from the sixteenth century to the present and seek to separate romantic notions from the harsh reality of life as an outlaw on the open seas. Piracy has been around since man first took to the water and as long as shipping and trade continue to ply these international routes it will remain an issue of global importance. Join us as we explore the history of piracy through the men and women who both practiced and fought it, the states that supported and attacked it, and the authors who chronicled it.
About the Speaker: Bryan S. Glass, BA, MPhil, ABD, is the Founding Member and General Editor of The British Scholar Society, an international non-profit educational organization dedicated to investigating Britain’s interactions with the world from the seventeenth century to the present. He serves as an Editor of the Britain and the World book series with Palgrave Macmillan and in Fall 2011 is teaching a class at Texas State University entitled “Pirates of the Mediterranean.”
Professor Linda Colley delivers a Keynote Address at the University of Melbourne’s Festival of Ideas in June 2011.
Professor Sir David Cannadine delivers a Keynote Address at the University of Melbourne’s Festival of Ideas in June 2011.
Niall Ferguson discusses his newest book on the rise of Western Civilization at Chatham House in May 2011.
