Event Type: Branch

Takes Place: 18th March 2026

Time: 7pm

Venue: Via Zoom

Description: Through his association with the Plantations Office, the Board of Trade and the Privy Council over three decades in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, William Blathwayt was intimately associated with the expanding world of English colonies, both westward across the Atlantic Ocean and eastward to the Indian subcontinent and beyond. The collections of Blathwayt’s country house at Dyrham Park provide a perspective on the globalizing world he was instrumental in creating, reflecting the economic and commercial ties the Bristol region had with the expanding Atlantic economy in exactly the same period. One exemplary item historically drawn from these collections is the Blathwayt Atlas, which has been in the collections of the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island (USA) for over a century. In this talk, Dr Mandelblatt will discuss William Blathwayt as an imperial agent, as a collector and indeed as a commissioner of works that drew from and revealed the global networks of empire that Blathwayt and his social and political circles sought to strengthen and intensify.

How to book: Zoom link via email

Price: Free

Email: Edbury@cardiff.ac.uk

Organiser: Cardiff Branch HA

Lecturer: Dr Bertie Mandelblatt

Comments: Dr. Bertie Mandelblatt George S. Parker II ’51 Curator of Maps and Prints, John Carter Brown Library Dr Mandelblatt is curator of maps and prints at the John Carter Brown Library, developing the map and print collections; curating exhibitions and dev

Region: Wales

Branch: Cardiff