The Lair will be hosting our Guest Speaker Series each Tuesday evening at 8:00 p.m. via Zoom, beginning Tuesday, June 16 (Week 2) and running through Tuesday, August 11 (Week 10). Speakers are esteemed members of the Cal community, including distinguished professors and faculty members.

We’re excited to keep this Lair tradition going in 2020 despite not being together in Pinecrest.

This week's speaker is:  Munis D. Faruqui, Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies

Topic: The Theft that Created the Modern World

In the late 1580s a Dutchman named Jan van Linschoten left his job as the secretary to the Portuguese Archbishop of Goa (in India). In his possession, as he headed back to Europe, were maps and detailed nautical information about how to sail from Europe to India and back again. This information was priceless. The Portuguese had been jealously guarding it from other European competitors – especially the Dutch and English – for almost a century now. Linschoten’s theft and his subsequent publication of the maps broke the Portuguese monopoly over sea routes to India and inaugurated a new world order in which, first, the Dutch and then the English would become the dominant European power in Asia and the Indian Ocean.

Munis D. Faruqui is a historian in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, and Director of the Institute for South Asia Studies at CAL. In 2014, Dr. Faruqui was one of three recipients of UC-Berkeley’s most prestigious honor for teaching, the Distinguished Teaching Award.


Time: Tuesday, August 11th at 8:00 p.m.  (Week 10) Open to all!

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