On Wednesday 1 July, we were delighted to host Professor Rebecca Earle FBA to deliver this year’s Royal Historical Society Prothero Lecture: ‘The Last Voyage of the Santiago: A Ship and its World in the Age of Revolution’.
Rebecca’s lecture — held at Mary Ward House, London, and online — drew on her current research on the relationship between warfare and the circulation of goods in the early modern world.
Recordings of the lecture are now available:
Watch the lecture
Listen to the lecture
Rebecca’s focus was the Spanish treasure ship Santiago Apostol which set sail from Lima for Cadiz in 1792. Before reaching its destination, the Santiago was captured at sea, not once but twice. 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 traced 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.
As Rebecca argued, the Santiago and the fate of its cargo enables us to 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.
Our great thanks to Rebecca for her lecture and to all those who attended in person and online. The Lecture was followed with the announcement of the winners of this year’s RHS First Book and Early Career Article Prizes, and the Society’s Summer Party.
Rebecca Earle FBA is Professor of 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). A further project explores the circulation around early-modern Europe of artworks from colonial Spanish America. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2020.
Established in 1969, Royal Historical Society’s Prothero Lecture – which is named for the historian and former RHS President, George W. Prothero (1848-1924) – has been given annually since that date. Those invited to give the lecture are leading historians whose research has shaped how we think about the past.
Prothero lecturers over the past five decades include, among many others, Samuel H. Beer, Joanna Bourke, Linda Colley, Stefan Collini, Natalie Zemon Davis, Olwen Hufton, Sujit Sivasundaram, Quentin Skinner, Brenda E. Stevenson, Keith Thomas, and last year Peter Gatrell who spoke on ‘The “Refugee World”: A Twentieth-Century Retrospective’.
Many of these lectures, subsequently published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, have been opportunities for leading scholars to reflect on their work and careers in the round.