Empire and Editing: Colonial Legacies in the Works of the Hakluyt Society (1846-)
Guido van Meersbergen, University of Warwick

15/9/2023
13:00 @ E21-3118

Named after the Elizabethan editor of travel accounts, Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616), the Hakluyt Society was founded in 1846 for the purpose of publishing editions of ‘rare and valuable Voyages, Travels, Naval Expeditions, and other geographical records’, including ‘the more important early narratives of British enterprise’. With over 380 volumes published to date, the Hakluyt Society has occupied a central place in the production of knowledge about historical travel and colonial expansion for nearly two centuries. However, despite long-term links to imperial institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society, India Office, and British Museum, the Hakluyt Society has thus far received little attention as an organisation of interest to the study of empire and its cultural legacies. Focusing on the centrality of early modern sources to the Society’s corpus, this talk will show how many Hakluyt Society editors approached the recuperative project of publishing historical accounts of travel and colonial expansion as an extension of their careers in the service of Britain’s global empire. Their strategic branding of Richard Hakluyt as an ‘apostle of colonisation’, and their claiming of Hakluyt’s legacy as his latter-day heirs, enabled these men to insert themselves into an imagined line of succession running from the Elizabethan age to their own times. A closer look at the Hakluyt Society’s approach to editing early modern texts provides important insights into the role played by historical memory in the intersecting worlds of gentlemanly societies, institutions of learning, and colonial enterprise. Just as importantly, such a focus reveals how colonial perspectives embedded in the primary source corpus published by the Society have left their mark on the wider historical study of travel and exploration.

Guido van Meersbergen is Associate Professor in Early Modern Global History at the University of Warwick and director of Warwick’s Global History and Culture Centre (GHCC). He is the author of Ethnography and Encounter: The Dutch and English in Seventeenth-Century South Asia (Brill: 2022) and co-editor of Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Routledge: 2022). With Birgit Tremml-Werner and Lisa Hellman he coordinates the Global Diplomacy Network. Guido is a Council Member of the Hakluyt Society, and one of the four editors of the Norris Embassy to Mughal India (1699-1702) editorial project. With Natalya Din-Kariuki, he is currently editing a volume of essays on “Travel Studies and the Decolonial Turn” based on the Hakluyt Society Symposium they co-organised in 2021.