As the Hakluyt Society launches its Early Career Essay Prize competition for 2024, as Chair of this year’s judging panel I wanted to share information about our procedures both for reasons of transparency and in order to encourage entries. This information aims to complement, but not replace, the details about the essay’s scope and submission process available in the Information Sheet on the Hakluyt Society website: 20150610 Hakluyt Society Essay Prize
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, especially as we can and do award joint prizes and honourable mentions to mark particularly distinguished work. My experience is that while we might receive small numbers of essays, in general their quality tends to be high.
This year we have moved the entry deadline from the autumn to the spring – to 1 March 2024 – hoping that this later date in the academic year will give entrants better opportunity to develop an essay with support from their tutors, supervisors, and mentors.
So, what is the judging process for 2024? In recent years, a two-stage process has been employed, and this is what we expect to use this year too. In the first stage, the entries are divided into batches which are assigned to a pair of judges. Working in their pair, the two judges read all essays in their batch – which are anonymised − and agree a ranking according to these criteria:
contribution to the history of travel, exploration, and cultural encounter or their effects
quality and originality of research
clarity and eloquence
thoroughness and accuracy in documentation
methodological skill and/or innovation.
The top two (or three, if there are lots of entries) essays are short-listed and they go forward to stage two of the judging process where the prizes are decided. Here judges work individually but follow the same judging criteria as at stage one. Each judge reads all shortlisted essays and ranks them independently. Then their ranking and deliberations are shared with the full panel of judges. Lastly, from there, a Judges’ Meeting is convened to discuss and agree the final overall ranking.
Judges take their responsibilities seriously, and there is sometimes passionate debate about the relative merits of entries. At no stage in our process do we know the identity of authors – this is only revealed after a final decision is confirmed. To manage expectations, it’s also worth saying that judges can’t provide individual feedback to entrants, but the Hakluyt Society does inform all applicants of the result. Winners are celebrated at the AGM, where they can pick up their prizes if they wish.
I look forward immensely each year to this Essay Prize competition as I always learn a lot from it. A final word to those that have previously entered but who haven’t won a prize: please don’t be put off – repeat entrants are very welcome though please submit a different essay. I know (because they have told me so) that some of our ‘winners’ were repeat entrants. But also, even if you never win this prize, do keep entering this or similar competitions. It’s absolutely true that you need to be ‘in it to win it’, and refining and honing an essay is great preparation for future publication in a journal or book, whether you ‘win’ the prize or not. Roll on 1 March!
Professor Claire Jowitt, Chair of the Hakluyt Society Essay Prize Judging Panel 2024
Francis Bacon, Insuratio magna (1620). Courtesy: The Newberry Library, Chicago, VAULT Case folio B 49 .059
The Hakluyt Society awards an annual essay prize (or more than one, if the judges so decide) of up to a total of £1,000. The competition is open to any registered graduate student at a higher education institution (a university or equivalent) or to anyone who has been awarded a graduate degree in the past three years. If possible, the prize will be presented at the Hakluyt Society’s Annual General Meeting in London.
Submissions for the 2023 prize are now invited, the deadline for which will be 30 November 2022. For further details, and instructions on how to submit your essay, please download the information sheet.
The Essay Prize Judging Panel for 2023 is:
Dr Katie Bank, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Department of History, University of Birmingham, UK. Dr Derek L. Elliott, Assistant Professor in History, School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. Dr Eva Johanna Holmberg, Academy Research Fellow, Department of Philosophy, History and Art Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland. Professor Claire Jowitt, Associate Dean for Research, Arts and Humanities, University of East Anglia, UK (Chair of Judging Panel). Professor Joyce Lorimer, Professor Emerita, Department of History, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. Dr Catherine Scheybeler, Rare Book and Manuscript Consultant.
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 how true this was for them, and how they might have contributed to changing the narrative at home. I realised that a great way into the information they might have received was to look at periodical news, that is, newspapers. The seventeenth century was time when regular newspapers started to take off in Britain, and these publications were positively devoured by British audiences – more than 30,000 individual issues were published before 1700, and each issue could be hundreds or thousands of copies. While literate, male, middle-class Londoners like my expatriates were a key audience, newspapers were passed between acquaintances and read aloud in public, so the news and views they contained reached a much larger proportion of the British population.
A copy of the London Gazette, dated 4-8 June 1668, containing several stories relating to the Maghreb.
Coming from foreign news based on eyewitness accounts, and often backed by government authority, the major newspapers gained a reputation for up-to-date and reliable information to the extent that they were used in court cases and historical research. Looking at these papers, I found thousands of items that together presented to British audiences a view of Maghrebi ethnic, political, and religious diversity, and diplomatic relations with Europe and Britain, that was robust, detailed, and largely free of the anti-Maghrebi rhetoric that appeared in other publications.1 I’ll talk more about the content of this material in future posts, but for now, I want to talk about how newspapers got their information in the first place, which will help us understand why it was such high-quality. Official government papers, like the London Gazette, got their foreign news mainly from consuls living in foreign countries, so we can match up some letters sent directly to London from the Maghreb to articles that got printed there. But there were plenty of non-government papers, who drew their information from other places, and lots of articles in the Gazette talk about the Maghreb but don’t come straight from there. So how did they get the news? To answer this, we need to use the letters that I’ve been working with, which describe how news was part of the daily life for expatriates.2
A North African sandal fishing boat, available here.
News stories naturally always begin with what happened, and how the first recorder learns about it. Sometimes expats in the Maghreb would be eyewitnesses, like Francis Barrington in 1683 Tunis: ‘The ffrench are still riding att the Goletta3; going Inn & out to amuse these people; but meeting with an Algiers [corsair] they contrary to all rules of Civillity & good manners burnt her’.4 Given the consulate’s position on the harbour, Barrington could have seen the action from his bedroom window. But more often local news came from Maghrebi colleagues and informants, as merchant James Chetwood was told by Muslim colleagues in 1697, ‘that there was a hot report in towne & Country that 30 or 40 french Galleys were coming on this Coast, and that the french Consull was fled away from Tunis’.5 Once they had news, expatriates would send it to each other around the Maghreb. Often, they wrote things down in letters, but writing was often a challenge: they needed good supplies of pens and ink and paper, and the time and physical fitness to write. They also needed a reliable way to get the letters where they needed to go: this could be by hamalls (porters for hire), sandalls (local fishing ships), caffaloes (camel caravans), or by larger merchant, corsair or navy ships, and each of these could be diverted or disrupted. Local officials intercepted European correspondence, roads were rendered impassable by rain, stormy seas delayed or sunk ships, and hamalls might charge more money to travel as fast as required. Another option was to tell news to a friend who was travelling and have them pass it on by word of mouth, but it was really important to have someone both the writer and the recipient trusted on board: ‘This you’l receive god willing from the hands of our very deservingly esteemed freind Mr James Chetwood whome haveing discours’d amply about ye affairs tending to the Trades of your & this place leaves not matter for further adition referring you wholy to him’.6
Richard William Seale, A correct Chart of the Mediterranean Sea, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Levant: From the latest and best Observations: for Mr. Tindal’s Continuation of Mr. Rapin’s History, 1745, ink on paper, 35.56 × 72.39 cm.
From here, expats would send news to their friends and business partners in Europe, usually in writing on merchant ships. British letters from Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli went all over the Mediterranean – to Livorno, Marseilles, Genoa, Alicante, Cadiz, Venice and elsewhere. Sometimes these letters were lost as well, particularly in times of war. Once they got the letters, Europeans would forward letters on, take out bits of news for their own letters, and pass information on to Italian, French, or Spanish newspapers, so that expatriate information also came to Britain (sometimes in garbled form) by way of European connections. Expatriates also corresponded directly with partners, friends and family in Britain, sending very specific news – sometimes as part of their letters, and sometimes as stand-alone pieces. During the 1680s, the consul in Tunis prepared a manuscript newsletter which he called the ‘Tunis Gazette’, and his colleagues in London esteemed it as ‘the most Methodicall way of writing occurences that can be invested & pray Continue to favour us in the same manner’.7
Front-page news from Algiers, based on a letter from consul Samuel Martin. London Gazette 22-26 July 1675 based on Samuel Martin to Joseph Williamson, 30 June 1675, TNA SP 71/2, f. 74.
Consuls, because of their official role, were also expected to provide news to their superiors in government, but often sent these reports to their merchant colleagues to be checked before sending them on. These letters were designed to convey facts without personal comment, which served the objectives both of merchants and politicians, but sometimes consuls didn’t cooperate: ‘Wee are resolved to carry up your letter to the secretary but are sorry to finde in itt so many satyracall axpressions upon the french nation; which pray for the future leeve out and advise onely plaine matters of fact’.8 The Secretary then checked the material before passing selections onto newspaper editors to be printed; but expatriates also sometimes wrote directly to newspaper editors, giving them the information they wanted and bypassing official channels. In general, editorial changes before printing were small, and geared towards enhancing the freshness, detail and polemic-free factuality that already characterised the letters they received. Because of this, and the good material they already contained, expatriate letters and government papers were the gold standard for reliability.
A letter of news from Tripoli to London. Thomas Baker to Henry Coventry, 2 July 1680, TNA SP 71/22 Part 2, f. 18, author’s photograph.
News stories about the Maghreb were popular in Britain – everyday people were interested in the exotic places, exciting battles and brutal captivity stories, and merchants and government officials needed to know about new trade opportunities and diplomatic relationships to do their jobs well. We can find news stories about the Maghreb copied down in people’s diaries, reprinted multiple times in different London papers, and then printed again in Irish, Scottish and regional English papers (more about this coming soon!) But it wasn’t only to Britain that news travelled; people in the Maghreb wanted news about Britain as well. So, expats were constantly asking for newsletters and newspapers from Britain and passed them around to each other. They were mainly interested in politics and trade, rather than more social and cultural information that filled some papers: ‘That you professe your selfe incurious about Newes, Gazetts and those sort of Peepers I rather esteeme a vertue, then object as a defect in humour, since such kind of inquiries are meerly superficiall and really concerne us not, Whether such a day Mr Lord Mayor went a hunting or not’.9 Expatriates used their privileged access to European news carefully, competing with other Europeans in the Maghreb to present their country as the most trustworthy, honourable and admirable, and so attract personal and national advantage. This sometimes went well, as in 1692 the consul in Tripoli reported after an English victory against France, ‘we have Celebrated here in the most publique manner we could; the Turks & moores allso rejoyceing with us’, and sometimes not so well, as after the Popish Plot in 1680: ‘The Late conspiracie in England against his Majesties Royall Person and Government, hath been represented, by the French and Jewes, residing here, to this People, with soe much falsity, and disadvantage to his Majesties affaires’.10
These information flows help us to understand how new kinds of information started coming to Britain in the second half of the seventeenth century, contributing to a shift in public perceptions away from the kind of fear and admiration we see in Shakespeare’s time towards increasing pragmatic cooperation. Expats and governments wanted to work with Maghrebi peoples, rather than fight wars with them, and so their letters and the news they published reflected this to the people. There were still plenty of other documents that were negative towards the Maghreb, but the large quantity and regular flow of information that came out this way makes it really important to include when we try to evaluate the overall British views of the Maghreb, and Maghrebi views of Britain too.
This blog post is based on the essay Nat Cutter wrote on ‘Grateful Fresh Advices and Random Dark Relations; Maghrebi News and Experiences in British Expatriate Letters, 1660-1710’ that won the 2021 Hakluyt Society Essay Prize.
[1] See Nat Cutter, ‘Turks, Moors, Deys and Kingdoms: North African Diversity in English Periodical News before 1700’, Melbourne Historical Journal 46 (2018): 61-84, available at http://go.unimelb.edu.au/x85r; ‘Peace with Pirates? Maghrebi Maritime Combat, Diplomacy, and Trade in English Periodical News, 1622-1714’, Humanities 8, 4 (2019), article no. 179, available at http://go.unimelb.edu.au/j85r.
[2] For a significantly larger account of these information flows, see my forthcoming ‘Grateful Fresh Advices and Random Dark Relations: Maghrebi News and Experiences in British Expatriate Letters, 1660-1710’, in special issue of Cultural and Social History, edited by Giada Pizzoni.
[3] That is, the harbour at Tunis.
[4] Francis Barrington to Thomas Goodwyn, 15 October 1683, TNA FO 335/3/9.
[5] James Chetwood to Thomas Goodwyn, 24 May 1697, FO 335/12/3.
[6] Messrs Nash, Packer and Spencer to Thomas Goodwyn, 4 April 1694, FO 335/10/12.
[7] Francis Barrington and Benjamin Steele to Thomas Goodwyn, 4-13 May 1685, FO 335/5/6.
[8] Francis Barrington and Benjamin Steele to Thomas Goodwyn, 4 November 1686, FO 335/5/16.
[9] Thomas Baker to Thomas Goodwyn, 15-22 October 1681, FO 335/2/11.
[10] Nathaniel Lodington to Thomas Goodwyn, 15 July 1692, FO 335/9/10; Thomas Baker to Henry Coventry, 2 July 1680, TNA SP 71/22 Part 2, ff. 18-18v.
For the fifth year running, submissions are invited for the annual Hakluyt Society Essay Prize. The award (or more than one, if the judges so decide) has this year seen an increase in value to a maximum total of £1,000. The prize or prizes for 2019 will be presented, if possible, at the Hakluyt Society’s Annual General Meeting in London in June 2019. Winners will also receive a one-year membership of the Hakluyt Society. The Society hopes that the winning essay will be published, either in the Society’s online journal or in a recognised academic journal.
Joint winners of the 2018 Essay Prize were Darren Smith (University of Sydney) and Whitney Robles (Harvard University). Previous winners include Owain Lawson (2015), Nailya Shamgunova (2016), and Annemarie Mclaren (2017). You can read about their winning essays here; here and here.
The competition is open to any registered graduate student at a higher education institution (a university or equivalent) or to anyone who has been awarded a graduate degree in the past three years. Proof of student status or of the date of a degree must accompany any submission. Allowance can be made for maternity leave.
Scope and subject matter
Before considering the submission of an essay, entrants should visit the Hakluyt Society’s web-site (www.hakluyt.com) to make themselves aware of the object of the Society and the scope and nature of its publications. Essays should be based on original research in any discipline in the humanities or social sciences, and on an aspect of the history of travel, exploration and cultural encounter or their effects, in the tradition of the work of the Society.
Essays should be in English (except for such citations in languages other than English as may appear in footnotes or endnotes) and between 6,000 and 8,000 words in length (including notes, excluding bibliography). Illustrations, diagrams and tables essential to the text fall outside the word count. Submissions should be unpublished, and not currently in press, in production or under review elsewhere.
Submission procedures and deadline
Essays should be submitted as email attachments in Word.doc format to The Administrator at office@hakluyt.com by 30 November 2018. The entrant’s name, address (including preferred email address), institutional affiliation (if any, with date of admission), and degrees (if any, with dates of conferment) should appear within the body of the email, together with a note of the title of the submitted essay. The subject line of the email should include the words ‘HAKLUYT SOCIETY ESSAY PRIZE’ and the author’s name. By submitting an essay, an entrant certifies that it is the entrant’s own original work.
Selection procedure
The Judging Panel encourages innovative submissions that make an important contribution to knowledge, or a critical or methodological contribution to scholarship. The panel and selected reviewers will pay attention to the analytical rigour, originality, wider significance, depth and scope of the work, as well as to style and presentation. The panel comprises selected academic faculty from among past and present members of the Hakluyt Society’s Council, including the editorial board of The Journal of the Hakluyt Society.
The Prize Committee reserves the right not to award a prize, if no submission is judged to be of sufficient merit. The Committee’s decision will be announced in April 2019.
NOTE: Prize winners agree to acknowledge the receipt of their award in any future publication of the prize essay. In addition, they will be expected to contribute to the Society’s public dissemination as appropriate. This may include, but is not limited to, presenting a paper at a Hakluyt Society symposium (in which case travel expenses within the UK will be reimbursed) and contributing to the Hakluyt Society blog.
For the fourth year in succession, the Hakluyt Society awards its annual Essay Prize of £750. The prize will be presented, if possible, at the Society’s Annual General Meeting in London in June 2018, and winners will be invited to present their research at the Hakluyt Society Symposium in 2019. Winners will also receive a one-year membership of the Hakluyt Society. The Society hopes that the winning essay will be published, either in the Society’s online journal or in a recognised academic journal.
Prize winners agree to acknowledge the receipt of their award in any future publication of the Prize essay. In addition, they will be expected to contribute to the Society’s public dissemination as appropriate. This may include, but is not limited to, presenting a paper at the Hakluyt Society Symposium and contributing to the Hakluyt Society blog. Previous winners were Owain Lawson (2015), Nailya Shamgunova (2016), and Annemarie Mclaren (2017). You can read about their winning essays here; here and here.
The competition is open to any registered graduate student at a higher education institution (a university or equivalent) or to anyone who has been awarded a (post-)graduate degree in the past three years. Proof of student status or of the date of a degree must accompany any submission. Allowance can be made for parental leave.
Scope and subject matter
Before considering the submission of an essay, entrants should visit the Hakluyt Society’s website to make themselves aware of the objectives of the Society and the scope and nature of its publications. Essays should be based on original research in any discipline in the humanities or social sciences, and on an aspect of the history of travel, exploration and cultural encounter or their effects, in the tradition of the work of the Society.
Essays should be in English (except for such citations in languages other than English as may appear in footnotes or endnotes) and between 6,000 and 8,000 words in length (including notes, excluding bibliography). Illustrations, diagrams and tables essential to the text fall outside the word count. Submissions should be unpublished, and not currently in press, in production or under review elsewhere.
Submission procedures and deadline
Essays should be submitted as email attachments in Word (.doc) format to the Administrator of the Hakluyt Society, at office@hakluyt.com by 30 November 2017. The entrant’s name, address (including preferred email address), institutional affiliation (if any, with date of admission), and degrees (if any, with dates of conferment) should appear within the body of the email, together with a note of the title of the submitted essay. The subject line of the email should include the words ‘HAKLUYT SOCIETY ESSAY PRIZE’ and the author’s name. By submitting an essay, an entrant certifies that it is the entrant’s own original work.
Selection procedure
The Judging Panel encourages innovative submissions that make an important contribution to knowledge, or a critical or methodological contribution to scholarship. The Panel and selected reviewers will pay attention to the analytical rigour, originality, wider significance, depth and scope of the work, as well as to style and presentation. The Panel comprises selected academic faculty from among the Hakluyt Society’s Council, including the Editorial Board of The Journal of the Hakluyt Society.
The Prize Committee reserves the right not to award a prize, if no submission is judged to be of sufficient merit. The Committee’s decision will be announced in April 2018.
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, an Aboriginal Man on the Fringes of Early Colonial Sydney”.
When so many Aboriginal lives slipped through the cracks of colonial records in the early decades of Sydney, the fact that one Dharawal man’s life could be traced in fragments offered exciting opportunities. From 1802 to 1836 ― a period closely following on from the arrival of the colonists in 1788 ― Goggey could be traced in journals, letters, newspapers, diaries and petitions. So his life offered an opportunity to consider how one Aboriginal man negotiated a rapidly changing world.
Yet his archival traces also offered considerable conundrums, and Goggey, the subject of my essay for the 2017 Hakluyt Society Essay Prize, has proved to be a bubbling, provocative current throughout my doctoral candidacy, part of a process of considering and re-considering, of stumbling upon and searching for sources, and of dialogue with different colleagues at the Australian National University and beyond.
‘A native family of New South Wales sitting down on English settlers farm’, depicts an Aboriginal man, his wife and a child, near a settler’s farm in early colonial Sydney’s immediate hinterland. Scenes like this would have been common near some of the farms of the Nepean districts, places in which Goggey was found. Augustus Earle, c.1826 – National Library of Australia, NK12/45.
Goggey was a husband to several wives, a father, and a clan leader. He was an enforcer of laws, and he was also a man who broke them. He fostered relationships with colonists as well as various Aboriginal people, and he harboured with black and white equally.
Goggey could speak some English and use a gun; was the lead guide on an expedition in the difficult country of the Blue Mountains in 1802; welcomed Governor Macquarie to ‘his’ country in 1810; was asked to attend court in 1814 to give information about the murder of Aboriginal women and children by colonists; was listed as a ‘wanted’ and possibly dangerous man in 1816; and was then awarded an inscribed brass plate denoting him as an Aboriginal ‘chief’ in 1817 – just to name a few of the episodes my essays considers.
But Goggey was also an enigmatic, mercurial figure, one who could be violent as well as charming, one who could be found enraged as well as dancing by fires in the moonlight.
I have been thinking about Goggey for several years now, and he has become key to my exploration of the ongoing cultural negotiations and the processes shaping Aboriginal-colonial relations in early colonial New South Wales; including the performance of authority, the continuing ways in which material culture mediated the changing social fabric, and the diffuse processes by which guiding relationships developed. As my knowledge of the shifts in Aboriginal-Colonial relations deepened, my mind would flick back to Goggey, trying to integrate whatever new understanding I had reached with what was known about his life.
With a life embroiled in so many of the key inter-cultural developments in the colony, considering Goggey’s life, the archives in which he could be found, and the negotiations they record or suggest, has richly shaped my understanding of the ways in which cross-cultural interactions unfolded in the colony as well as the ways in which power could operate.
It has prompted me to consider ‘models’ of interaction and the theoretical underpinnings of inter-cultural power in colonial contexts, and to examine ideas surrounding “Middle Grounds” and “Native Grounds” in the context of early colonial New South Wales.
‘Parramatta, New South Wales’, illustrates a growing urban centre surrounded by pastoral land. This place, 15 miles west of port town at Sydney Cove, was the home of the ‘Annual General Assembly of the Natives’, where Goggey is said to have sat at the head of his ‘tribe’. Joseph Lycett, 1824 – State Library of Victoria, 30328102131561/12
Curiously, I never intended to write about Goggey. Yet as a key figure in an expeditionary account I was considering, and having come across more sources in which he appeared in intriguing ways, I did look for more. This was a useful task, but not as useful as repeated stumbling upon him while searching through archival material. This was a lesson in the fickleness of the archive (as well as in poorly catalogued items), but also suggested something about the nature of entanglement in this colonial context, and that some historical investigations demand ambitious, wide-ranging, even peripheral reading ― or perhaps some degree of serendipity.
Reading Goggey’s life has also been a lesson in the value of collegiality. It was over coffee with a later-stage doctoral candidate that I received reading suggestions of more contemporary anthropology, while I had focused on reading ‘classics’ from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
These readings helped shaped the conceptual and imaginative tool-kit necessary in confronting evidence of a strong-willed, emotive and sometimes violent man, as well as the capacity to consider the ways in which relational economies ― and in fact what was considered of ‘value’ at all ― had many different configurations in the cultural complexities of early colonial New South Wales.
I am grateful to the Hakluyt Society for awarding this piece the 2017 Essay Prize. I am also grateful to those who read this essays in various drafts, and for their words of encouragement and advice along the way.
Annemarie McLaren is a third-year doctoral candidate in history at the Australian National University. Her research considers the ongoing cultural negotiations between Aboriginal people and Europeans in early colonial New South Wales in a project titled ‘Negotiating Entanglement’. Annemarie has been participating in a three-year post-graduate training scheme of the Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is co-editing a book (tentatively) titled Indigeneity: Claims, Relationships, and Concepts Between the Disciplines (expected 2018). She is also the Associate Review Editor of the Aboriginal History Journal.
For the third year in succession, the Hakluyt Society awards its annual Essay Prize of £750. The prize will be presented, if possible, at the Society’s Annual General Meeting in London in June 2017, and winners will be invited to present their research at the next Hakluyt Society Symposium. Winners will also receive a one-year membership of the Hakluyt Society. The Society hopes that the winning essay will be published, either in the Society’s online journal or in a recognised academic journal.
Prize winners agree to acknowledge the receipt of their award in any future publication of the Prize essay. In addition, they will be expected to contribute to the Society’s public dissemination as appropriate. This may include, but is not limited to, presenting a paper at the Hakluyt Society Symposium (in which case travel expenses within the UK will be reimbursed) and contributing to the Hakluyt Society blog (for previous winners, see here and here).
The competition is open to any registered graduate student at a higher education institution (a university or equivalent) or to anyone who has been awarded a graduate degree in the past three years. Proof of student status or of the date of a degree must accompany any submission. Allowance can be made for parental leave.
Scope and subject matter
Before considering the submission of an essay, entrants should visit the Hakluyt Society’s website (www.hakluyt.com) to make themselves aware of the object of the Society and the scope and nature of its publications. Essays should be based on original research in any discipline in the humanities or social sciences, and on an aspect of the history of travel, exploration and cultural encounter or their effects, in the tradition of the work of the Society.
Essays should be in English (except for such citations in languages other than English as may appear in footnotes or endnotes) and between 6,000 and 8,000 words in length (including notes, excluding bibliography). Illustrations, diagrams and tables essential to the text fall outside the word count. Submissions should be unpublished, and not currently in press, in production or under review elsewhere.
Submission procedures and deadline
Essays should be submitted as email attachments in Word.doc format to Richard Bateman, Administrator of the Hakluyt Society, at office@hakluyt.com by 30 November 2016. The entrant’s name, address (including preferred email address), institutional affiliation (if any, with date of admission), and degrees (if any, with dates of conferment) should appear within the body of the email, together with a note of the title of the submitted essay. The subject line of the email should include the words ‘HAKLUYT SOCIETY ESSAY PRIZE’ and the author’s name. By submitting an essay, an entrant certifies that it is the entrant’s own original work. A copy of these instructions can be downloaded here: Essay Prize 2017.
Selection procedure
The Judging Panel encourages innovative submissions that make an important contribution to knowledge, or a critical or methodological contribution to scholarship. The Panel and selected reviewers will pay attention to the analytical rigour, originality, wider significance, depth and scope of the work, as well as to style and presentation. The Panel comprises selected academic faculty from among the Hakluyt Society’s Council, including the Editorial Board of The Journal of the Hakluyt Society.
The Prize Committee reserves the right not to award a prize, if no submission is judged to be of sufficient merit. The Committee’s decision will be announced in April 2017.
The 2016 edition of the Hakluyt Society Essay Prize competition attracted submissions from the UK, US, Australia, Russia, and Luxembourg. The academic committee, consisting of Professors Daniel Carey, Felipe Fernández Armesto, Peter Hulme, Claire Jowitt, Joyce Lorimer, and Sebastian Sobecki, has selected Nailya Shamgunova‘s essay European Conceptualisations of Southeast Asian Sexual Diversity, c. 1590–1640 as this year’s winning entry. Ms Shamgunova will receive the award worth £750 at the Hakluyt Society’s 2016 Annual General Meeting, held in London on 22 June. Ahead of this event, she is glad to share the main conclusions of her prize-winning research on this platform, focusing on the contested issue of “sodomy” in seventeenth-century Anglophone travel writing.
** Missed this year’s competition? Watch the Hakluyt Society’s website and social media channels, as the call for submissions for the 2017 Hakluyt Society Essay Prize will be announced shortly **
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’ societies and how European understandings of those ‘non-European’ societies were constructed. Although its definition goes beyond Edward Said’s original thesis, the term ‘Orientalism‘ has been used to label the argument that European observers constructed an image of a non-European society to deliberately present it in a negative light. I would like to counter and nuance these arguments in relation to the supposed ‘exoticising’ of non-European bodies (see Schmidt: 2015).
This study of Anglophone views on Southeast Asian sexual diversity offers the hypothesis that Anglophone observers of the region did not use ‘sodomy’ as a tool to represent local societies as inferior nearly as much as they could have done in the context of the realities of regional sexual diversity. Placing their works in the context of the wider Anglophone discourse on the connection between sodomy and nature in discussions of both the human body and political authority shows that that discourse possessed the necessary tools to read local sexual practices in a more negative light. Rather, a process of cultural translation of local practices into notions and anxieties about sodomy in wider Anglophone discourse took place.
My argument can be demonstrated using a case study of Anglophone explanations of practices of genital modification among men in Pegu and Siam. A large number of travel accounts pay special attention to ‘penis bells’, which the local men supposedly wore. The chief way of conceptualising penis bells was as a measure of prevention of sodomy, sanctioned by the local authorities. Both Ralph Fitch [See: Hakluyt Society Extra Series, 1-12] and Jan Huygen van Linschoten [See: Hakluyt Society First Series, 71-72) stated that the custom was ‘ordained’, and Francis Pretty elaborated, saying that ‘this custome was granted at the request of the women of the Countrey, who finding their men to be giuen to the fovvle sinne of Sodomie, desired some remedie against that mischiefe, and obtained this before named of the Magistrates’. A later account by Thomas Herbert explained that ‘they haue beene (in foregoing times) wicked Sodomites; which filthy sinne was since corrected by a Queene Rectrix’, who, ‘vpon paine of death’, commanded her subjects to wear the bells.
The inhabitant from Pegu is the seated figure on the far left. Source: Linschoten, Itinerario, voyage ofte schipvaert van Jan Huygen van Linschoten, naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien (Amsterdam: 1596)
These accounts share the idea that some form of legislation was implemented by local authorities and rulers to prevent sodomy, and that it was effective, rather than the fact that Southeast Asian people were simply ‘sodomites’ and thus somehow inferior. Elsewhere in European discourse, such legislation was associated with ‘civilization’. As Richard C. Trexler argues, Garcilaso de la Vega [See: Hakluyt Society 1st Series, 41 and 45] and Antonio de Calancha presented the Incas as a civilizing imperial force, which stamped out previously prevalent sodomy in the Andes. By representing a local authority as opposed to sodomy, Europeans could both emphasise that the role of civilization is to eradicate vice and that eradicating vice validated a society’s claim to be civilized. A similar process was happening in the descriptions of Southeast Asia. As there are no known indigenous sources that confirm the role of bells as measures for preventing sodomy, it remains unclear whether Anglophone authors were trying to translate local sexualities into their own terms or simply provide a rationale behind an unfamiliar practice.
However, the emphasis on the role of authority in eradicating sodomy, rather than on sodomy itself, is significant. It is a way of presenting the society in question in a less negative light. A different explanation behind the practice, such presenting it as a marker of social identity, would have been more damaging to Pegu in Anglophone eyes. Prevention of sodomy allowed Anglophone authors to rationalise the practice in a way which was sensitive towards the local people.
One of the most interesting things to come out of my research was that when it comes to ‘sodomy’, it is very difficult to establish the boundaries of ‘Europe’ vs ‘non-Europe’ in the first place – for example, the most ‘sodomitical’ nations in Anglophone discourse were the Italians and the Ottomans. However, the role of religion in the process of formation of these stereotypes is ambiguous. Establishing the cultural boundaries of ‘sodomitical nations’ offers an alternative view of the notion of Europeans necessarily exoticising ‘non-European’ bodies and sexual practices. Exploring these notions further is the main purpose of my future research.
Nailya Shamgunova (University of Cambridge) did her B.A. in History and M.Phil in Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge, where she is due to start a PhD on Anglophone concepts of Ottoman sexual diversity this October. She is interested in various aspects of the early modern period in a transcultural context and has presented her work at a variety of academic venues. Nailya has volunteered for a Russian LGBT organisation and enjoys reading contemporary world literature in her spare time.
The Hakluyt Society is pleased to announce the award of its 2016 Essay Prize. From a range of impressive submissions, the committee selected European Conceptualisations of Southeast Asian Sexual Diversity, c. 1590–1640 by Nailya Shamgunova (University of Cambridge) as the prize-winning essay. The Prize will be awarded to Ms. Shamgunova at the Society’s Annual General Meeting on 22 June 2016. Last year, Owain Lawson(Columbia University) received the first ever Hakluyt Society Essay Prize for his essay Constructing a Green Museum: French Environmental Imaginaries of Syria and Lebanon. Mr. Lawson reflects on the research leading to his prize-winning essay below.
Owain Lawson (right) receiving the inaugural edition of the Hakluyt Society Essay Prize from the Society’s President, Michael Barritt. June 2015, London
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.
My essay, which to my great surprise and deep gratitude won the Hakluyt Society’s essay prize, inquires into what forces shaped Wetterlé’s expectations. It investigates the diverse intellectual, scientific, and cultural sources of his belief in a degraded Arab environment and traces its trajectory through nineteenth-century scientific and travel writing to its influence in legitimating French Mandatory rule in Syria and Lebanon following World War I. I originally prepared this essay as part of my MA thesis at the American University in Cairo. It owes a great debt to the work of Richard Grove and Ussama Makdisi, but most importantly to Diana K. Davis and her concept of the “environmental imaginary.” This term is useful to capture the confluence of scientific, economic, religious, intellectual, emotional, and ideological forces at work in descriptions of nature.
Nineteenth-century visitors such as Ernest Renan, the Comte de Volney, and Alphonse de Lamartine, and later Mandatory officials such as Wetterlé and General Gouraud, had access to a great variety of textual and artistic representations of Greater Syria. These included classical and Arabic geographies, biblical accounts, and contemporary archaeological, climatological, and ethnographic science. They mobilized these sources to not only describe the Lebanese environment but to imagine its ancient natural state and prescribe methods to return Lebanon to that idealized condition. Biblical Lebanon’s dense cedar groves epitomized that ideal. Through a century of travel, writing, painting, and research, rehabilitating Mount Lebanon’s forests became part of France’s mission civilisatrice in the Levant and contributed to justifying their occupation and Mandatory rule. Syrian-Lebanese intellectuals did not passively receive this narrative, but rather contributed to its production and actively contested, negotiated, and reaffirmed it for their own purposes.
My interest in this subject emerged from my own work in reforestation, which provided a unique window into the relationship between efforts to extract natural resources and to preserve natural landscapes. Profound technological, economic, and scientific transformations over the last centuries have rearranged how most humans engage with the natural world. Indeed, many of us, myself included, can now only imagine nature as diminishing and fragile. In this light, environmental conservation efforts appear to be unambiguously positive practices. How then can we understand the discrepancy between these apparently noble intentions towards nature and the ease with which colonial officials translated them into a justification for colonial domination and violence? My intention with this essay was not to simply expose colonial conservation efforts as hypocritical, or debunk the nineteenth-century science that informed them, but to think about the longer trajectories of this relationship between nature and power.
Owain Lawson is a PhD student at Columbia University’s Department of History. His research focuses on the history of science, technology, and the environment in Lebanon and Greater Syria during the early twentieth century. He is in the early stages of developing a dissertation that explores the history of Lebanese hydroelectricity. Born in Ottawa, Canada, Owain received a B.A. from Concordia University in Montréal and an M.A. in Middle East Studies from the American University in Cairo.
Tancrede R. Dumas, “Beirut Port”, Beirut, 1860-1870, Nawaf Salam Collection, Arab Image Foundation, Beirut.
In this second part of our mini-series on the Hakluyt Society Essay Prize, runner-up in last year’s competition Amy Bowles (Girton College, Cambridge) shares with us her innovative research on 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. The earlier blog by fellow runner-up Katherine Parker can be found here and the CFP for the 2015-2016 competition (deadline: 1 November) here.
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 fully and wholy understand what belongs to their Profession: having onely some Scrambling Termes & Names belonging to some parts of a Ship’.[1]
Though the dictionary was composed between 1620 and 1623, it was printed for the first time in 1644, and enjoyed around twenty years of circulation in manuscript amongst seafaring noblemen. In one case, a manuscript’s weathered state attests to its regular use; BL Additional MS 21571 – the only copy produced in a pocket-friendly octavo format – retains significant water damage, perhaps acquired during its direct consultation at sea. However, the dictionary was also regarded as more than a reference work, and was catalogued and read alongside fashionable travel narratives like Richard Hakluyt‘sPrincipal Navigations(1598-1600) and Samuel Purchas‘ Purchas his Pilgrims (1625).
My submission to the Hakluyt Society Essay Prize competition examined the twenty-one surviving copies of the Brief Abstract, eight of which were written by a single scribe, Ralph Crane.The dictionary’s manuscript circulation began with Crane’s early production of copies: his manuscripts include the five presentation copies dedicated – and in one case subscribed – by Mainwaring. It is my argument that Crane not only participated in the circulation of this text during its early stages, but that he was the sole scribe hired by Mainwaring to complete this project, taking on the role of a commissioned copyist. Crane’s early “official” copies of the dictionary were soon outnumbered by a proliferation of less authorised versions, which contained new entries, circulated under new titles, and no longer bore Mainwaring’s name.
I reconstructed the text’s original transmission through the different scribal styles and habits of the dictionary’s early copyists, and considered the manuscript transmission of the Brief Abstract in light of that of other naval works such as William Monson‘s tracts on seamanship, Nathaniel Boteler‘s Dialogues, and John Montgomery‘s sixteenth-century A treatice concerninge the navie, all of which also involved repeated copying by single scribes. By reconstructing the Brief Abstract‘s early circulation, my essay demonstrated the lasting effects which scribal transmitters have had upon the content of this important seventeenth-century naval text.
[1] Henry Mainwaring, A Breife Abstract, Exposition, & Demonstration of parts & things belonging to a SHIP, & ye practique of NAVIGATION, National Maritime Museum Caird Library MS LEC/9, f. 11v.
Amy Bowles is a PhD student at Girton College, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the scribal circulation of early modern texts, with particular focus on the copyist Ralph Crane. She is also interested in scribal imitation of print, and the construction of early modern manuscripts more generally, especially bindings, bookmarks, and marbled paper. She can be found on Twitter as @amy_ab2126
Henry Mainwaring, ‘A Breife Abstract, Exposition, & Demonstration of parts & things belonging to a SHIP, & ye practique of NAVIGATION’. Lambeth Palace Library Sion College MS L.40.2/E48, fol. 1r.
cultural negotiations between Aboriginal people and Europeans in early colonial New South Wales in a project titled ‘Negotiating Entanglement’. Annemarie has been participating in a three-year post-graduate training scheme of the Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is co-editing a book (tentatively) titled Indigeneity: Claims, Relationships, and Concepts Between the Disciplines (expected 2018). She is also the Associate Review Editor of the Aboriginal History Journal.
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