The Hakluyt Society Essay Prize
Every year the Hakluyt Society invites students and young researchers to submit an essay in a field of interest to the Society. The best essay earns an excellent monetary prize.
Hakuyt Society Essay Prize competition for 2026
Submissions for the 2026 prize are now invited, the deadline for which will be 1 March 2026. For further details, and instructions on how to submit your essay, please download the information sheet. The Essay Prize Judging Panel for 2026 is: Dr Katie Bank, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Department of History, University of Birmingham. Dr Derek L. Elliott, Educator, Ljubljana International School, Slovenia. Dr Eva Johanna Holmberg, University Researcher, Department of Philosophy, History and Art Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland(Chair of Judging Panel). Dr William Kynan-Wilson, Senior Lecturer, Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Open University. Professor Joyce Lorimer, Professor Emerita, Department of History, Wilfrid Laurier […]
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Winner of the Hakluyt Society Essay Competition 2025
This year’s winner of the first prize of £1250 is George Clay, Georgetown University, for his essay ‘‘The Many Lives of Francisco de Angola’. The judges commended it as ‘an excellent essay in all facets: original, bold, conceptually sharp, and written with verve and sensitivity’. Second prize of £250 was awarded to Peter Wells, University of East Anglia, for ‘“No Land Nor Ice in the Way”: The Collision of Science and Reality in the Speedwell’s Search for the Northeast Passage (1676)’ and due to the exceptional quality of this year’s entries, the judges recommended the award of an Honourable Mention to James Fox, St Andrews University, for ‘Numeracy, otherness and [...]
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Winner of the Hakluyt Society Essay Competition 2024
Due to the exceptional quality of this year’s entries, the judges recommended the award of two Honourable Mentions, to Helen Hawken, Birkbeck, University of London, for ‘White Ladyes of the Pole: Nineteenth-Century British and American Women Travellers in the Arctic’ and to Samuel Cheney, University of Edinburgh, for ‘Exhausting the Ears: Aural Discomfort as Epistemological Disruption in British Travel Writing on China, c. 1860–c. 1911’. Congratulations to Graham, Helen, and Samuel. Details of how to enter the Hakluyt Society Essay Prize Competition 2025 will be announced later in the year. The Last Voyage of Henry Hudson, exhibited 1881 by The Hon. John Collier (1850-1934)
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Hakluyt Society Essay Prize – Judging Procedures for the 2024 Competition
2024 is the tenth year of the Essay Prize, which has a value of up to £1000. I am immensely privileged to have served as one of its judges every year since the competition was established in 2015 and have acted as Chair of the judging panel for the last three years. Each year the judges read exceptional scholarship, but prospective entrants may be surprised to learn that the number of essays submitted to the competition is actually quite modest. Sometimes we receive less than ten eligible entries, more regularly between ten and twenty, rarely more than twenty. This means the chances of success are higher than entrants might think, [...]
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Freshest advices from Barbary
Freshest Advices From Barbary: News & Information Flows between Restoration Britain & the Maghreb - 2021 winner of the Hakluyt Society Essay Prize These newspapers presented to British audiences a view of Maghrebi diversity, and diplomatic relations with Europe free of anti-Maghrebi rhetoric. By Nat Cutter, University of Melbourne Historians often argue that most early modern British people knew little or nothing true about the Maghreb or its people; informed by fictionalised, polemical, allegorical and occasionally factual accounts, Britons viewed Maghreb as alien, dangerous, undifferentiated and chaotic. As part of my research into British expatriates who lived in the Maghreb (see my first three blog posts), I wanted to understand [...]
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Gift-giving in early modern European encounters with Southeast Asia
From the earliest European contact with Southeast Asia through to the era of ‘high imperialism’, the process of gift-giving sits at the fulcrum of a dynamic relationship; it is an instance of continuity apparent through several centuries of dramatic change over the course of which rough-and-ready trade deals came to be replaced by fully functioning imperial hegemony. My research has addressed two broad questions: what role did the gift play in this context and what can be learnt from examining this area of history through the lens of reciprocal gift exchange rather than within the conceptual framework of an ‘age of commerce’? The role of the gift Initial encounters between [...]
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2017 Hakluyt Society Essay Prize winner: Neither “Middle Ground” nor “Native Ground”: Reading the Life of Goggey, an Aboriginal Man on the Fringes of Early Colonial Sydney
The Hakluyt Society is pleased to announce that its 2017 Essay Prize has been awarded to Annemarie McLaren, a doctoral candidate at the Australian National University, Canberra. As runner-up in this year's competition, an Honourable Mention is awarded to Cameron B. Strang (University of Nevada, Reno, USA), for his essay: "Coacoochee's Borderlands. A Native American Explorer in Nineteenth-Century North America". Annemarie McLaren will be awarded a cash prize of £750 for her winning essay. Both the winner and runner-up will also receive one-year free membership of the Society. In this blog post, McLaren reflects upon the research that went into her prize-winning essay, "Neither 'Middle Ground' nor 'Native Ground': Reading the life of Goggey, [...]
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Hakluyt Society Essay Prize 2016: European Conceptualisations of Southeast Asian Sexual Diversity, c. 1590–1640
By Nailya Shamgunova My research focuses on the study of sexual diversity in a transcultural context. The ways in which people from different cultures understood each other’s sexual practices are fascinating. I used Anglophone travel accounts that refer to ‘sodomy’ in Southeast Asia in order to uncover some of the processes through which knowledge of Southeast Asian sexual practices was disseminated and adapted to an Anglophone worldview. I read primary travel accounts alongside other writings referring to sodomy – from medical texts and legal acts against sodomy to new editions of Aristotle and general cosmographies. The broader context of my study is the issue of contact between ‘European’ and ‘non-European’ [...]
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2015 Hakluyt Society Essay Prize: 2016 results and 2015 winner
By Owain Lawson In September 1922, Abbé Émile Wetterlé arrived at the port of Beirut as part of the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon’s agricultural commission. In his subsequent publications, he remarked on the astonishment he felt upon seeing for the first time the gentle rangeland of the Lebanese littoral. Steeped in biblical and orientalist representations of Lebanon, Wetterlé expected to see the dense Lebanese cedar forests described in the Bible. The absence of these forests implied to Wetterlé that Ottoman mismanagement and Arab indolence had devastated Lebanon’s natural splendour, and that France must rehabilitate the Lebanese environment. Owain Lawson (right) receiving the inaugural edition of the Hakluyt Society [...]
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2015 Hakluyt Society Essay Prize runner-up Amy Bowles on “Sir Henry Mainwaring’s ‘A Brief Abstract’”
The manuscript circulation of Sir Henry Mainwaring’s "A Brief Abstract, Exposition and Demonstration of all Parts and Things belonging to a Ship and Practique of Navigation". By Amy Bowles In the early 1620s, the naval officer and reformed pirate Sir Henry Mainwaring composed what is now thought to be the earliest extant dictionary of nautical terms. The Brief Abstract, Exposition and Demonstration of all Parts and Things belonging to a Ship and Practique of Navigation contains around 600 entries, alphabetically ordered with a preface, table of contents, and often a decorative title-page. Mainwaring explained the necessity of this work, writing that ‘very few Gentlemen (though they be called Sea-men) doe [...]
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