{"id":52587,"date":"2026-05-11T05:23:55","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T04:23:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/royalhistsoc.org\/?p=52587"},"modified":"2026-05-11T07:03:24","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T06:03:24","slug":"2026-rhs-prothero-lecture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/royalhistsoc.org\/2026-rhs-prothero-lecture\/","title":{"rendered":"Rebecca Earle to give the the Society’s 2026 RHS Prothero Lecture"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Society\u2019s 2026 Prothero Lecture will be given by Rebecca Earle FBA<\/strong>, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Warwick. Rebecca’s lecture, which takes place at 6.00pm on Wednesday 1 July<\/strong>, is entitled: ‘The Last Voyage of the Santiago<\/em>: A Ship and its World in the Age of Revolution’.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Rebecca’s lecture offers a study of the Spanish treasure ship, Santiago Apostol, <\/em>which set sail from Lima in 1792.<\/p>\n

The Santiago<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

\u200bBy following the story of the\u00a0Santiago<\/em>, and listening to some of its voices, Rebecca’s lecture will trace the processes linking people \u2014 a Peruvian merchant, an Admiralty judge, a landlady on the Isle of Wight \u2014 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\u2019s growing consumption. The Santiago<\/em>\u2019s eventful last voyage opens a window into the turbulent world of the 1790s, offering a sideways view of the Age of Revolution.<\/p>\n

The 2026 Prothero Lecture takes place, in-person<\/a>, at Mary Ward House, Tavistock Place, London, WC1H 9SN and online<\/a>.<\/strong>\u00a0Booking for\u00a0in-person<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0online attendance<\/a>\u00a0is now available. The lecture is open to all.<\/p>\n

The Lecture will be followed by the Society\u2019s annual summer party<\/strong>, 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.<\/p>\n

\n

About the 2026 Prothero Lecturer<\/span><\/h4>\n

Rebecca Earle<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0teaches history at the University of Warwick. Her books include\u00a0Spain and the Independence of Colombia<\/em>\u00a0(2000),\u00a0The Return of the Native: Indians and Mythmaking in Spanish America, 1810-1930<\/em>\u00a0(2008),\u00a0The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700<\/em>\u00a0(2012), and, most recently,\u00a0Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato<\/em>\u00a0(2020), which uses the history of the potato to trace out some of the key features of modernity.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Santiago Apostol<\/em>, a Spanish ship captured (twice) in 1793. A further project explores the circulation around early-modern Europe of artworks from colonial Spanish America.<\/p>\n

Rebecca was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2020.<\/p>\n

\n

About the Society’s Prothero Lecture<\/span><\/h4>\n

First held in 1969, the Royal Historical Society\u2019s Prothero Lecture is named for the historian and RHS President, George W. Prothero (1848-1924).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The 2025 RHS Prothero Lecture was given by Professor Peter Gatrell FBA<\/strong> (University of Manchester). An article version of Peter’s lecture — ‘The “Refugee World”: a Twentieth-Century Retrospective\u2019 <\/strong><\/a>— is now available in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

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HEADER IMAGE: Four frigates capturing Spanish treasure ships, 5 October 1804<\/i>, by Francis Sartorius (1807),\u00a0 National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Greenwich Hospital Collection, Wikimedia Commons<\/a>, public domain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Society\u2019s 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 …Continue reading »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20210,"featured_media":52590,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,113],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-home"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/royalhistsoc.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/royalhistsoc.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/royalhistsoc.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royalhistsoc.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20210"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royalhistsoc.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52587"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/royalhistsoc.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52627,"href":"https:\/\/royalhistsoc.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52587\/revisions\/52627"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royalhistsoc.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/royalhistsoc.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royalhistsoc.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royalhistsoc.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}