This talk revisits the concept of orientalism in a long chronological context, including 4th Century BC Athens, Elizabethan and Caroline England, Enlightenment Europe, and colonial and contemporary New Zealand.
It seeks to identify a specifically geographic component of this construct, which historians have neglected.

Jonathan Scott is Professor of History at the University of Auckland.
Among many other books and articles, he is the author of When The Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identities, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 2011), Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), and England's Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000).