Histories

Abstract

The last two decades have transformed British maritime history. Concerns central to non-maritime scholarship have colonised this field, which has then allowed oceanic history to influence other areas of study in its turn. Economics, trading and business once dominated the history of the sea, but the sub-discipline has been transformed under the pressure of globalisation. At least six new areas of study are noticeable in this respect, and they constitute themes that will then be pursued through the rest of the book. The first is the manner in which oceanic traders’ contacts and routes increasingly came to resemble those ‘networks’ that, contemporary social scientists and philosophers are convinced, characterise late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century societies in the developed world. The second major development is a renewed interest in the nature of oceanic regions, appropriate perhaps in a world grouping itself into political and trading blocs. Third, the ‘new’ maritime history is critically concerned with divisions of labour and social histories of those ‘below decks’, an understandable development in a globalising world often criticised for deepening international class divides through the free movement of capital without any concomitant liberalisation of migration laws.