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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Programme: Hakluyt Society Symposium 2021 – Decolonising Travel Studies: Sources and Approaches
10-12 November 2021University of Warwick (online via Zoom) hakluyt-society-symposium-2021-programme-oct-2021Download (All times are GMT+0/UTC) The Hakluyt Society, the Global History and Culture Centre (GHCC) at the University of Warwick, and Medieval and Early Modern Orients (MEMOs), invite you to the Hakluyt Society Symposium 2021 - Decolonising Travel Studies: Sources and Approaches. Attendance is free and all are welcome. Day 1: Wednesday 10 November 2021 14.00-14.15: Introduction and Welcome (Natalya Din-Kariuki and Guido van Meersbergen) 14.15-15.45: Panel 1: Decolonising Travel Studies in Theory and Practice (Chair: Caitlin Vandertop) Daniel Vitkus: “Racialized Capitalism, Intersectionality, and Early Modern Travel Studies” Denise Saive Castro: “Contemplating Slavery on the African [...]
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Hakluyt Society Videos – Annual Lectures and Conference Presentations
This year the Hakluyt Society Annual Lecture 2021 was presented by Professor Janet M. Hartley, Emeritus Professor of International History, London School of Economics, on the subject of 'The Volga: the River as Frontier'. Videos of Annual Lectures can be found here. Additionally, recordings of the papers presented at this year's annual conference of the Société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 'Maps and Mapping in English-speaking countries in the 17th and 18th centuries' held at the Université Paris-Diderot and sponsored by the Hakluyt Society, are available below, separated into two days at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMCfl9xfo0E www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCKWZW7QagI
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In memoriam: Will Ryan and The Hakluyt Society
Will Ryan’s long, distinguished and affectionate relationship with the Hakluyt Society has thrived on its particular set of virtues: a love of books and of learning, respect for record made accessible through editorship, an interest in people in their historical circumstances, and the simple pleasure of knowing things and sharing them. These features made the Society a natural locus for Will and he in turn has upheld its values and character. Front cover of Festschrift for Will Ryan, published April 2021. The Hakluyt Society has maintained a core purpose since its foundation in 1846: to publish scholarly editions of primary accounts of voyages and other travels in durable volumes and [...]
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Surprises of Travel through Java in the Nineteenth Century
Judith E. Bosnak and Frans X Koot (2020), The Javanese Travels of Purwalelana. A Nobleman’s Account of his Journeys Across the Island of Java (1860-1875) When traveller Candranegara, alias Purwalelana, woke up he was startled. The guardhouse where he had just spent the night had been completely covered with a fine silken cloth and, moreover, a lavish breakfast awaited him - comprising coffee, sticky rice balls, eggs and sliced seasoned deer meat. As it turned out the village head had organized this special treat when he learned - late at night - that a nobleman had arrived near to his village, seeking refuge in a simple hut. So, replete with food and drink the traveller continued his journey through Java, at that time part of the Dutch East Indies in the Malay Archipelago. The Javanese Travels of Purwalelana (henceforth The Travels) is a remarkable travelogue in many [...]
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The Voyages and Manifesto of William Fergusson
Edited by Derek Elliott, The voyages and manifesto of William Fergusson, a surgeon of the East India Company 1731-1739. Unlike the subjects of most Hakluyt volumes, William Fergusson was not an adventurer, explorer, or a member of a famous expedition. Rather, he was an apprentice apothecary-surgeon sailing the well-plied routes of the East India Company's growing trans-national commercial network. The volume reproduces – with annotations and an introduction – the twenty-two diaries that Fergusson composed toward the end of his life in 1767, which recount four voyages he made as a young man calling at ports in the British Isles, southern Africa, Yemen, India, Malaya, China, and St Helena in [...]
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‘New Caledonia’ and mythmaking in the Darien Scheme
My project in the Spencer Collection at the University of Glasgow was largely concerned with primary print and manuscript materials relating to the ‘Darien Scheme’. The Darien Scheme was orchestrated by the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies (1695-1707) in the late seventeenth-century and involved the attempted establishment of a Scottish settlement and trade emporium dubbed ‘New Caledonia’ upon the Isthmus of Darien in Central America (1698-1700). While the effort proved abortive, the Scheme and its collapse has long been the focus of political and economic historians for its assumed role as a catalyst for the Union of Scotland and England in 1706/7. More recent scholarship on [...]
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In memoriam: Professor Roy Bridges
Roy was a leading member of the Hakluyt Society, which he joined in 1962. In 1964 he was appointed to the University of Aberdeen, where he became Professor of History, having previously taught at Makerere University in Uganda. His research and writing were mainly concerned with East Africa in the nineteenth century. He became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and of the Royal Historical Society. Roy developed a great affection for the Hakluyt Society, where he had many friends and to whose work he made many important contributions. His commitment to the Society never faded. He served several terms on Council and was President for all of six [...]
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Maps and Mapping in English-speaking Countries in the 17th and 18th Centuries
It will be the annual conference of the Société d'études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, held at the Université Paris-Diderot. The organisers have issued a call for papers (see below); offers of papers in English are welcome. DEADLINE for submissions: 20 June 2020. Paper proposals (300 words and a short CV) should be sent to colloque1718janvier2021@gmail.com by June 20, 2020. ˜˜˜˜˜˜˜ Maps and Mapping in English-speaking Countries in the 17th and 18th Centuries Annual Conference of the SEAA 17-18 Dates: 15-16 January 2021 Venue: Université Paris-Diderot Keynote Speaker: Max Edelson (University of Virginia) Maps are multidimensional objects of study that entail scientific, artistic, political, diplomatic, military and economic stakes. [...]
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Encounters with the Querina
My first encounter with the Querina was entirely serendipitous. At the time, I was completing a research project on the Italian translation of the Book of John Mandeville, the account of the infamous fourteenth-century ‘English knight’ who claimed to have travelled to Jerusalem and throughout the exotic East. Working in a small, regional Italian library, I called up an early fifteenth-century manuscript of the Book. When the volume arrived, I was surprised to find that it also contained another text, written in the same neat hand. It told the incredible story of the Querina, a Venetian merchant ship which was sailing from Crete to Flanders in 1431 when it was [...]
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