Programme: Hakluyt Society Symposium 2019 – Rethinking Maritime Encounters

Hakluyt Society Symposium 2019: “Rethinking Power in Maritime Encounters”, Leiden, 5-6 September 2019

Organised by the Hakluyt Society in collaboration with Leiden University’s Institute of History, the Linschoten-Vereeniging, and Itinerario

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Thursday 5 September

08:00 – 8:30 registration / welcome

08:30 – 10:20 panel 1 [Labour Relations]

  1. Pepijn Brandon – ‘Varieties of Force: Experiments in Coerced Labour on Naval Shipyards During the Industrial Revolution’
  2. Maria Vann – ‘“The Bloomer Controlled the Whole of Us:” The Dichotomy of Female Slave Ship Owners and Maritime Women as Agents of Power’
  3. Richard Blakemore – ‘The Meanings of Mutiny in Early Modern Seafaring’
  4. Leonardo Moreno Alvarez – ‘Fraudsters, Grifters, and Divers: The Logistics of Labor and Silver Transportation in the Spanish Caribbean, late 1650s’

10:20 – 10:50 coffee/tea break

10:50 – 12:40 panel 2 [Emancipation and Mobility]

  1. Kevin Dawson – ‘Free and Enslaved Ship Pilots in the Age of Revolutions’
  2. Gina G. Bennett – ‘“Service for Me and Mine in Another Land”: Scotland’s Women and Maritime Strategies of the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World’
  3. Rafaël Thiébaut – ‘The Role of Pirates, Women and the Slave Trade in the Creation of the Betsimisaraka Kingdom (1685-1809)’
  4. Timothy D. Walker – ‘Sailing to Freedom in the Antebellum USA: Enslaved Seaport/ Coastal Laborers, the Whaling Industry, and Rethinking the Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad’

12:40 – 13:40 lunch

13:40 – 15:30 panel 3 [Indigenous Knowledge and Agency]

  1. Mariana Françozo – ‘Negotiating Power and Knowledge: Natural History Practices in Dutch Brazil’
  2. Nathaniel Holly – ‘The Power of “Patrick Cherryman”: Cherokees on the Waves of the Atlantic’
  3. Esther Baakman – ‘Formidable Allies, Dangerous Foes: Native Americans in the European Press’
  4. Sebastian Hepburn-Roper – ‘Taonga Trading Posts: Coastal Settlements and Firearms Trade in early Nineteenth-Century New Zealand’

15:30 – 15:50 coffee/tea break

15:50-16:00 Hakluyt Society Essay Prize presentation – James Taylor

16:00 – 17:00 keynote: Josh Reid – ‘Indigenous Explorers & the Making of Pacific Worlds, 1786-1890’

17:00 drinks (sponsored by Itinerario)

19:00 dinner (speakers; registered participants at own expense)


Friday 6 September

08:30 – 10:20 panel 4 [Global Empires and Trans-Oceanic Connections]

  1. Sujit Sivasundaram – ‘Explorers, Monarchs and Empire in the Pacific’s Age of Revolutions’
  2. Kevin P. McDonald – ‘Babbo and the Breadfruit: Pacific Islanders and the Anglo-Imperial Imaginary, ca. 1789’
  3. Marília Arantes Silva Moreira – ‘Antoine Larcher’s ‘Project of Expedition to Salvador (Brazil) 1797’ and the Global Competition for the South Atlantic during the Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802)’
  4. Amarendra Kumar – ‘Negotiating ‘Territoriality of the Sea’: The Maratha Navy in the Era of Global Maritime Empires’

10:20 – 10:40 coffee/tea break

10:40 – 12:30 panel 5 [Piracy in the Atlantic World]

  1. Claire Jowitt – ‘Pirate Marts: Economic Warfare, Price Cuts, and Popular Politics’
  2. Tim Soriano – ‘Buccaneers into Baymen: British Rule in British Honduras 1570–1765’
  3. Elizabeth Montañez Sanabria – ‘Privateers, Pirates, and Local Alliances in the Opening of the South Sea (1570-1700)’
  4. David Wilson – ‘A War Against Piracy? Local Agency and the Limits of Imperial Authority in Oceanic Spaces throughout the British Atlantic, 1716-1726’

12:40 – 13:30 lunch

13:30 – 15:20 panel 6 [Material Culture and Epistemology]

  1. Elsje van Kessel – ‘Power and Privateering: On the Illicit Movement of Asian Material Culture to Europe, circa 1600’
  2. Djoeke van Netten – ‘Borderlines: Straddling Land and Sea in Early Modern Atlases’
  3. Subah Dayal – ‘Elegies to the Port: Surat and Vengurla in the Persianate Imaginary’ (Skype)

15:20 – 15:40 coffee/tea break

15:40 – 17:00 panel 7 [Maritime Actors and Environments]

  1. John McAleer – ‘Crossing the Line? Ceremonies, Rituals, and Rites of Passage on Atlantic Voyages in the Age of Sail’
  2. Nathalia Brichet – ‘In the Wake – Liveability and Colonial Ecologies around the Harbour of St Thomas’
  3. Simon Mølholm Olesen – ‘They tricked the Dutch: Inuit Management of the Colonial Encounter in West Greenland, ca. 1720-50’
  4. Eva Johanna Holmberg – ‘Youth at Sea: a Mobile and Fragile Seafaring Youth in Richard Norwood’s Journal (1639-40)’

17:00 closing drinks


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