The Society’s 2026 Prothero Lecture will be given by Rebecca Earle FBA, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Warwick. Rebecca’s lecture, which takes place at 6.00pm on Wednesday 1 July, is entitled: ‘The Last Voyage of the Santiago: A Ship and its World in the Age of Revolution’.

Rebecca’s lecture offers a study of the Spanish treasure ship, Santiago Apostol, which set sail from Lima in 1792.

The Santiago was heading for Cadiz but was captured at sea, not once but twice, before it reached its destination. The double capture altered the lives of Filipino sailors, Lancashire handloom-weavers, and Sephardic notaries. It precipitated war between Britain and Spain and shaped European ideas about distant Peru and its peoples. It also injected nearly a million pounds into the British economy.

​By following the story of the Santiago, and listening to some of its voices, Rebecca’s lecture will trace the processes linking people — a Peruvian merchant, an Admiralty judge, a landlady on the Isle of Wight — who themselves never met, lives both entangled and disconnected. We also better appreciate the role of imperial warfare in circulating global goods to new consumers; war was both an obstacle and a stimulus to the era’s growing consumption. The Santiago’s eventful last voyage opens a window into the turbulent world of the 1790s, offering a sideways view of the Age of Revolution.

The 2026 Prothero Lecture takes place, in-person, at Mary Ward House, Tavistock Place, London, WC1H 9SN and online. Booking for in-person and online attendance is now available. The lecture is open to all.

The Lecture will be followed by the Society’s annual summer party, at Mary Ward House, to which all are very welcome. The party is an excellent opportunity to meet with fellow historians and members of the Society.

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About the 2026 Prothero Lecturer

Rebecca Earle teaches history at the University of Warwick. Her books include Spain and the Independence of Colombia (2000), The Return of the Native: Indians and Mythmaking in Spanish America, 1810-1930 (2008), The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700 (2012), and, most recently, Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato (2020), which uses the history of the potato to trace out some of the key features of modernity.

Rebecca is currently writing about what we can learn from cookbooks (other than how to cook), as well as researching the surprising and consequential last voyage of the Santiago Apostol, a Spanish ship captured (twice) in 1793. A further project explores the circulation around early-modern Europe of artworks from colonial Spanish America.

Rebecca was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2020.

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About the Society’s Prothero Lecture

First held in 1969, the Royal Historical Society’s Prothero Lecture is named for the historian and RHS President, George W. Prothero (1848-1924).

The lecture is given by leading historians whose research has shaped how we think about the past. Previous Prothero lecturers include: Samuel H. Beer, Joanna Bourke, Linda Colley, Stefan Collini, Natalie Zemon Davis, Olwen Hufton, Sujit Sivasundaram, Quentin Skinner, Brenda E. Stevenson, and Keith Thomas.

The 2025 RHS Prothero Lecture was given by Professor Peter Gatrell FBA (University of Manchester). An article version of Peter’s lecture — ‘The “Refugee World”: a Twentieth-Century Retrospective’ — is now available in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.

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HEADER IMAGE: Four frigates capturing Spanish treasure ships, 5 October 1804, by Francis Sartorius (1807),  National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Greenwich Hospital Collection, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.