The popular annual history lecture by Dr. Marvin Thomas, professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, will address wars over trade and sovereignty between China and Great Britain during the mid-19th century.
Thomas’s talk, “Bread Cast upon the Waters: The Opium Wars,” will take place at 7 p.m. April 10 in Rice Auditorium in Fisher Hall. It is free and open to the public.
Thomas will begin with China at the beginning of the 19th century, a self-contained, isolated economic world that needed nothing from the outside world and traded only for gold and silver.
To access Chinese raw materials and products, Western powers led by Britain introduced opium to Chinese society, and with it, addiction, eventually breaking through Chinese isolationism.
Thomas has been teaching European history at Pitt-Bradford since 1969. In 1997, the Pitt-Bradford Alumni Association chose him as the recipient of its Teaching Excellence Award.
In 2016, he published “The Saxon Aspect of the Bavarian Alloidal Succession 1777-1779: The History of a Legal Dispute,” which deals with the decade before the French Revolution and the last days of absolute monarchical rule in Europe.
