Historical Treaties of Southeast Asia

Stefan Amirell and Maarten Manse awarded the 2024 Mattingly Award for excellent essay.
 
A recent article in the peer-reviewed journal Diplomatica by Stefan Amirell and Maarten Manse has been awarded the 2024 Mattingly Award, which is awarded annually by Brill, the editorial board of Diplomatica, and the New Diplomatic History Network "for excellence and originality in an essay on diplomatic society or culture, broadly defined." 
 
The article, entitled "Treaty-Making and Translation. European and Asian Versions and Their Paper Trails" is available with full open access on the website of Diplomatica. The article focuses on the translation and inter-cultural understanding of key concepts, such as "sovereignty" and "cession" in two treaty-making processes in maritime Southeast Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 
 
According to the prize jury, the article stands out for the "strength and originality of its thesis. The authors present a very clearly written, convincing argument rooted in rich analyses of treaties, including attention to language, political context, and diplomatic cultural context. We appreciated the global scope of the research and the authors' care to avoid Eurocentrism in their sources and approach. Above all, the article manages to offer both detailed historical analysis and contextualization of specific case studies while also considering a larger methodological problematic of interest to a broader group of scholars in their compelling call for 'decolonizing the paper trail.' In all, this article struck us as exemplary of the kind of multifaceted, interdisciplinary scholarship that Diplomatica seeks to publish."
 
 
The Mattingly Award is named for the American historian, Garrett Mattingly (1900-62), an esteemed writer, scholar, and professor at Columbia University. Best known for his history of the Spanish Armada (1959), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and his biography of Catherine of Aragon (1941), Mattingly pioneered the study of diplomatic institutions, practices, norms, and personalities, notably in his classic history of early modern Europe, Renaissance Diplomacy (1955).

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