The stories of early interpreters
In loving memory of Adrian Adams (1945-2000) When Pierre de Brazza started to explore the coast of Gabon and the Ogooué River in 1874, he relied on soldiers and sailors recruited by the French Navy – laptots – to act as his interpreters. These were the latest iteration of a system that relied on Senegalese intermediaries from the late seventeenth …
Bombay and Mabruki. H M Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, Scribner’s 1913. p. 69
Dr Robert Morrison, Sir George Thomas Staunton and the Amherst Embassy of 1816 The failure of the 1816 Amherst embassy to the Chinese court can be seen as a step toward worsening relations between the United Kingdom and China. The tensions between the two nations were clear in the embassy’s dealings with the officials who accompanied them to the emperor’s …
Li Zibiao, George Thomas Staunton and the Macartney Embassy In 1787, The British government decided to send an embassy to the Chinese imperial court to negotiate more favourable trading conditions than those afforded by the Canton system. Their goals included access to ports other than Canton (Guangzhou), an embassy in Beijing, and an island reserved for British traders’ use. While …
Recent histories of exploration and colonisation have acknowledged that early accounts tended to privilege intrepid outsiders grappling single-handedly with the unknown; scholars now recognise that these were often complex undertakings involving different kinds of intermediaries. It is interesting to consider interpreters as one of several kinds of go-betweens as a way of understanding the role they played. The British Raj provides us …