CHAIRPERSON
Dr Connor Graham, Asia Research Institute, and Tembusu College, National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
Southeast Asia’s marine environment became a site of global importance in the first half of the twentieth century. From Singapore to Manila, its protein riches were harnessed to feed the growth of industrial agriculture, urban society, and postwar recovery. And yet, scholars working at the intersection of science and technology studies and environmental history have narrated this period of transition through changes in the land, obscuring the ways in which these processes were anchored in the ocean as a site of encounter.
It is within the context of these developments and their implications for knowing the marine environment that this presentation looks at the history of the Manila Aquarium in the early twentieth century. By tracing how the ocean was brought ashore and made public through the rise of Southeast Asia’s first colonial aquarium, this talk brings attention to the role science and technology played in shaping knowledge about the region’s fishes as well as the coral reefs and shallow seas they inhabited. Indeed, the story of this aquarium and its connections to other aquaria across the Indo-Pacific reveals the hidden history of how Southeast Asia became globally significant not just for its fishery wealth, but also for its biological diversity.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Anthony D. Medrano is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. From 2013-2015, he was a research fellow at the National University of Malaysia. His work has been supported through fellowships and grants from Mellon, Fulbright, Boren, ASEH, KITLV, and the East West Center. His dissertation, titled “History between the Tides: Scientific Currents, Fishery Resources, and the South China Seas, 1878-1948”, draws together the fields of world history, histories of science and technology, environmental history, and Southeast Asian history to explain why fish and the scientists that studied them were central to the rise of urban society, industrial agriculture, marine conservation, and postwar recovery in the Indo-Pacific world.
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