On 13 November 2017, the "Prize Papers" research project led by Oldenburg historian Prof. Dr Dagmar Freist was accepted into the academy programme funded by the federal and state governments.

Ship passports, logbooks, thousands of letters, but also items of clothing and other artefacts from the early modern period - these are just some of the fascinating finds from the London Admiralty Court. Today, millions of these so-called prize papers are stored in London's National Archives and offer special insights into the everyday lives of people between 1652 and 1815. The stored documents are evidence from court proceedings relating to more than 35,000 captures of enemy ships by English privateers in 16 naval wars.

In the major "Prize Papers" project, Oldenburg researchers are working in co-operation with the National Archives in London to open up this collection and make it freely accessible to researchers and the public in digital form. By 2037, the English-language open access portal will provide around 3.5 million digitised documents in 19 languages.

The project is funded by the Lower Saxony Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Göttingen and is being realised in close collaboration with the German Historical Institute in London and IT expertise from Göttingen.