11 September 2017
09.30 – 09.40: Welcome and Introduction
09.40 – 11.10: Session 1 – Production of Travel Literature
- Dr Eva Johanna Holmberg (Queen Mary, London), ‘Passages Recollected by Memory’: Remembering the Levant Company in Seventeenth-Century Merchant Life Writing
- Byapti Sur (Leiden University), Pandemonium in Pomp: A Dutch account of Festivals and Festivities in Seventeenth-Century Mughal India
- Dr Liam Haydon (University of Kent), Merchants Making History
11.10 – 11.30: Coffee break
11.30 – 13.00: Session 2 – Uses of Travel Literature
- Prof Michiel van Groesen (Leiden University), From Secrecy to Openness: Dierick Ruiters’ Manuscript Maps and the Birth of the Dutch Atlantic World
- Dr Adrien Delmas (l’Institut français d’Afrique du Sud, Paris), The Forgotten Function of Writing: Travel Literature, International law and the European Share of the World at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century
- Dr Haig Smith (University of Liverpool), “Assemblies of their own Nations”: Perceptions of South Asian Religious Diversity in Seventeenth-Century English East India Company Correspondence
13.00 – 14.00: Lunch
14.00 – 15.15: Hakluyt Society Editorial Workshop
- Prof Will Ryan (Hakluyt Society)
- Dr Katherine Parker (Hakluyt Society)
15.15 – 15.30: Coffee break
15.30 – 17.00: Session 3 – Promoting Trading Companies
- Prof Anne Goldgar (King’s College London), Marketing Arctic Knowledge
- Dr Stefan Halikowski Smith (Swansea University), Venice and the Danish East India Company: Reading Nicola Cima’s ‘Relatione Distinta delli Regni di Siam, China, Tunchino e Cocincina’ (c. 1707)
- Giorgio Tosco (European University Institute), Travel Writing and the Promotion of Trans-Oceanic Trade in Tuscany and Genoa in the Seventeenth Century
18.00: Keynote Address
- Prof Jyotsna Singh (Michigan State University), The East India Company and English Encounters with Islam in Mughal India
19.00: Reception
Conference Dinner
12 September 2017
9.00 – 10.30: Session 4 – Planning Empire through Travel Literature
- John Carrigy (National University of Ireland, Galway), John Dee and Elizabethan Empire: Defining Empire within Contemporary Historiographical Culture
- Marina Bezzi (University College London), Richard Hakluyt and Lancelot Voisin de la Popeliniere: Other-than-European Environments in European Travel Literature Collections
- Alasdair Macfarlane (Durham University), Creating ‘New Caledonia’: Rumour, News and the Company of Scotland
10.30 – 10.50: Coffee break
10.50 – 12.20: Session 5 – Approaches to Non-European Voices
- Prof Margaret Hunt (Uppsala University), Dervish Mehmed Edib’s Pilgrimage to Mecca: Gender and Spirituality in an Eighteenth-Century Islamic Travel Narrative
- Samuel Ellis (University of Leeds), Reading Early English East India Company Travel Narratives in the Himalayas: Difficulties, Limitations and Opportunities
- Renu Elizabeth Abraham (University of Kent), Collectors of History: The Case of John William Wye and the English East India Company
12.20 – 13.20: Lunch
13.20 – Session 6 – 14.50: Materiality of Information
- Dr Djoeke van Netten (University of Amsterdam), Ships on Maps and Maps on Ships
- Dr Souvik Mukherjee (Presidency University, Kolkata), “Unburying” Company History: Reconstructing European Company Narratives through Digital Archives
- Frank Birkenholz (University of Groningen), Paper that Travels: The Materiality of the Dutch East India Company’s Travel Writing, Information Gathering and Knowledge Production
14.50 – 15.10: Coffee break
15.10 – 16.40: Session 7 – Companies and Colonialism
- Prof Nandini Das (University of Liverpool), Thomas Roe’s Companies
- Dr Amrita Sen (Presidency University, Kolkata), Decoding Company Rule: Travel, Taxation and the Bengal Famine of 1770
- Alison Bennett (University College London/British Museum), Exploration, Treaty-Making and Trade: Sources of the Imperial British East Africa Company
16.40 – 17.00: Closing Remarks and End of Conference