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

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]

5. Kevin Dawson – ‘Free and Enslaved Ship Pilots in the Age of Revolutions’
6. Gina G. Bennett – ‘“Service for Me and Mine in Another Land”: Scotland’s Women and Maritime Strategies of the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World’
7. Rafaël Thiébaut – ‘The Role of Pirates, Women and the Slave Trade in the Creation of the Betsimisaraka Kingdom (1685-1809)’
8. 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]

9. Mariana Françozo – ‘Negotiating Power and Knowledge: Natural History Practices in Dutch Brazil’
10. Nathaniel Holly – ‘The Power of “Patrick Cherryman”: Cherokees on the Waves of the Atlantic’
11. Esther Baakman – ‘Formidable Allies, Dangerous Foes: Native Americans in the European Press’
12. 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)

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Friday 6 September

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

13. Sujit Sivasundaram – ‘Explorers, Monarchs and Empire in the Pacific’s Age of Revolutions’
14. Kevin P. McDonald – ‘Babbo and the Breadfruit: Pacific Islanders and the Anglo-Imperial Imaginary, ca. 1789’
15. 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)’
16. 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]

17. Claire Jowitt – ‘Pirate Marts: Economic Warfare, Price Cuts, and Popular Politics’
18. Tim Soriano – ‘Buccaneers into Baymen: British Rule in British Honduras 1570–1765’
19. Elizabeth Montañez Sanabria – ‘Privateers, Pirates, and Local Alliances in the Opening of the South Sea (1570-1700)’
20. 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]

25. Elsje van Kessel – ‘Power and Privateering: On the Illicit Movement of Asian Material Culture to Europe, circa 1600’
26. Djoeke van Netten – ‘Borderlines: Straddling Land and Sea in Early Modern Atlases’
27. 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]

21. John McAleer – ‘Crossing the Line? Ceremonies, Rituals, and Rites of Passage on Atlantic Voyages in the Age of Sail’
22. Nathalia Brichet – ‘In the Wake – Liveability and Colonial Ecologies around the Harbour of St Thomas’
23. Simon Mølholm Olesen – ‘They tricked the Dutch: Inuit Management of the Colonial Encounter in West Greenland, ca. 1720-50’
24. 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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CFP: Hakluyt Society Symposium 2019: Rethinking Power in Maritime Encounters

Call for Papers

The Hakluyt Society Symposium 2019

Rethinking Power in Maritime Encounters (1400-1900)

5-6 September 2019

Leiden University, the Netherlands

Organised in collaboration with the Linschoten-Vereeniging, Itinerario, and Leiden University’s Institute for History

Deadline: 1 March 2019

Keynote: Joshua Reid (UW Seattle).

Speakers confirmed: Pepijn Brandon (VU), Nathalia Brichet (Aarhus), Kevin Dawson (UC Merced), Mariana de Campos Françozo (Leiden), John McAleer (Southampton), Elsje van Kessel (St. Andrews), Sujit Sivasundaram (Cambridge).

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Maritime histories have always told stories about power. Whether in the form of narratives about mastery of the seas, conquest of lands, or enslavement of peoples, traditional accounts of enterprising explorers and hardy mariners have located power and agency with a limited groups of actors: almost always male, and predominantly European. In doing so, histories of maritime encounters have mostly reproduced the perspectives contained in their sources, foregrounding the actions of European men and casting other actors as largely passive, peripheral, or powerless. These histories are in need of revision.

This conference seeks to explore new narratives of maritime power, to investigate the ways in which power was constituted and contested, how it was gendered and racialised, and through what strategies it was subverted or resisted. It aims to bring together historians working on (the limits of) state and non-state power, multiple actors and traditions of seafaring and exploration, and the agency of women, enslaved people, and other historically marginalised groups. Moreover, by expanding the focus to include environmental histories, this conference seeks to reconsider interrelations between humans and their marine surroundings.

This two-day conference will host senior experts and early career researchers in a cross-disciplinary conversation aimed at critically rethinking the role of power in maritime history. Topics for discussion include, but are not limited to:

• Asymmetrical power relations
• Global actors and agency
• Writing and discursive power
• Gender and sexuality
• Maritime power and the environment
• Materiality and maritime encounters
• Maritime encounters and spatiality
• Resistance, mutinies, rebellions
• Slavery and maritime labour

Held in the historic city of Leiden, Rethinking Power in Maritime Encounters is organised by the Hakluyt Society in collaboration with the Linschoten-Vereeniging. Prospective speakers are invited to submit proposals of no more than 300 words for 20-minute papers along with a brief bio statement to hakluytleiden2019@gmail.com by 1 March 2019. Contributions from postgraduate researchers are particularly encouraged.

The Hakluyt Society will make available five travel bursaries (up to £200 each) to postgraduate and early career applicants with limited access to funding – if you would like to apply for a bursary, please indicate this when sending your abstract and explain your reasons for applying. Reduced registration fees apply for members of the Hakluyt Society and Linschoten-Vereeniging.

Organising committee: Michiel van Groesen, Carolien Stolte, Suze Zijlstra (Universiteit Leiden), and Guido van Meersbergen (University of Warwick)

Download CFP and poster.

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