400 years ago today: the death of Richard Cocks, head of the EIC trading post in Japan

On the 27th of March, 1624, a man died aboard a ship crossing the Indian Ocean, and was buried in the sea. The ship was the English East India Company (EIC) ship Anne Royal, which had left Batavia on Java a month earlier, and was heading for England. The man was Richard Cocks, late head […]

The British East India Company in Southeast Asia, 1600–1800

I have a new publication out today! “The British East India Company in Southeast Asia”, in the new Oxford Handbook of Southeast Asian Englishes, ed. by Andrew Moody (OUP site; Google Books). In brief, my article has two parts. First, it is a country-by-country account of the places in Southeast Asia that the East India […]

What were English East India Company merchants drinking in Japan?

A note on terminology, and an addendum (and correction) to my PhD thesis 1. How did I miss that? Doing research, it’s easy to find yourself going down rabbit holes, chasing answers that seem to always elude your grasp. You do your best, but still have to resign yourself to unsatisfactory results. In my case, […]

An addendum on the history of the word “linguist” in the sense ‘interpreter’

One of my first publications was an article titled “Jurebassos and Linguists: The East India Company and Early Modern English words for ‘interpreter’” (abstract; full paper as a pdf). The article is a fairly straightforward and I admit rather light-weight investigation of the Early Modern English semantic field of ‘interpreter’, in which I note that […]

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean?

To be honest, I’m really quite proud of my newest publication, “Early East India Company merchants and a rare word for sex” (forthcoming June 2011 in Words in Dictionaries and History. Essays in honour of R.W. McConchie). It’s an investigation of cultural history through looking at a bawdy word that comes up a single time […]