Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has newly acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, sociology, and related fields.
They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These newly available items will be on the TU Library shelves for the benefit of our students and ajarns. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.
Among them is a newly acquired book that should be useful to TU students who are interested in history, geography, Imperialism studies, sociology, and related subjects.
The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589–1600) is by Richard Hakluyt, an English writer known for promoting the English colonization of North America through his works.
The TU Library collection includes other books by and about Richard Hakluyt.
Richard Hakluyt was an editor, geographer, and Anglican minister.
In later years, Hakluyt advised the East India Company.
On the 400th anniversary of the death of Richard Hakluyt in 1616, he was described in an article posted on the History Today website as
England’s greatest promoter of overseas expansion. Hakluyt has always been an elusive and shadowy figure: there is no known surviving portrait of him. Likewise, there are no written accounts of his physical appearance. Like his contemporary, the poet John Donne, Hakluyt was successful in his profession, securing important clerical positions. On his death he was a priest at Westminster Cathedral, a position he took up in 1602 and, from 1590, rector of Wetheringsett and Brockford. He was, as Peter Mancall neatly sums up in his biography, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (2007), ‘famous enough to be buried in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, but not famous enough to merit a plaque telling of his bones being buried there’.
Hakluyt’s monument remains his work, capped by his editing of The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, which first appeared in one large volume in 1589 and then in an expanded, updated edition in three volumes between 1598 and 1600. These publications created a rationale and plan for English commercial activity (hence the focus on ‘Traffiques’) in places such as Muscovy, Persia and the Levant, along with maritime exploration in search of a North-east or North-west Passage to China and colonial expansion in the New World, emulating and counteracting the achievements of Catholic rivals, notably Spain. The works of Hakluyt’s fellow quadricentennials, Shakespeare, Cervantes and even Ben Jonson (if we count the appearance of his first folio of 1616) may have transformed the literary landscape forever, but Hakluyt changed the geopolitical landscape through his tireless advocacy of English exploits in a world of increasingly global competition.
The Principal Navigations was a popular and influential book in Hakluyt’s lifetime and beyond. There are over 220 surviving copies, which suggests an eager readership and an extensive circulation of Hakluyt’s work. Christ Church, for instance, has the heavily annotated copy of The Principal Navigations owned by Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), graphically illustrating some of the ways one of his earliest readers actively used his work. […]
Hakluyt devoted much of his work to editing, compiling and translating material for his volumes, prestigious and elite activities in his day, but less valued now, in a post-Romantic era which privileges originality. This accounts for his relative obscurity as a literary figure. In his lifetime, Hakluyt did produce one original piece that remained in manuscript. In 1584, he composed a treatise advocating English colonial expansion, ‘A particular discourse concerning the greate necessitie and manifold commodyties that are like to growe to this Realme of Englande by the westerne discoveries lately attempted’ (also known as the ‘Discourse of Western Planting’). He was sufficiently well connected to present a copy of it to Elizabeth I, probably accompanied by Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State, and also, perhaps, by Ralegh, his patron. This document advocated an aggressive imperialist and expansionist policy in North America providing what has been termed a kind of ‘grammar of colonisation’: in other words, it provided a manual or blueprint that the queen might use to enhance England’s international territory notwithstanding Iberian domination in these regions, based on Papal bulls following Columbus’ ‘discovery’ of the New World in 1492. We do not know what Elizabeth thought of this manuscript, or of Hakluyt, but clearly he had access to the most powerful in the land. […]
A UK edition of Hayluyt’s The Principal Navigations from a century ago observed:
The taste for romantic adventure, ever strong in the Anglo-Saxon temperament, found ample aliment for all its needs in the new craving for that untraveled world whose margin was forever fading before the eyes of the explorer. The newfangled globes proved more than half the round world to be a real terra incognita, full of chances of hard fighting and good services, beauteous damsels, and gold and precious stones. And the way to these enchanting scenes lay not, as of old, through a long and footsore pilgrimage, but across the free and boundless ocean, the natural heritage of Englishmen since the sea-rovers first came into the channel, but one to which the Spaniard and the Portuguese had laid so unwarrantable and — as the event showed — so insupportable a claim.
Yet — and it is Hakluyt’s greatest service to keep us constantly in mind of the fact — there was ever mingled with the thirst for gold a large share of the true adventurous spirit which makes our men dare and die for the need of fame and not illusive honour. Our seamen went forth to fight the Spaniard and outface the Kings of wizard isles, the “anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders,” partly in the hope of temporal gain, but at least as much in Hakluyt’s own hope of doing good service to the Queen and the Commonwealth.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)