The Syrian refugee crisis has brought forth a broad humanitarian response and also some thoughtful pieces from historians. On the “refugee or migrant” question, Le Monde interviewed Gérard Noiriel in a conversation that harked back all the way to the sixteenth century.[1] In the Guardian, Mary Beard commented on how the Roman Empire handled borders […]
Author Archive | Isaac Land
New Scholarship on the Press Gang – Part 2 of 2
In The Myth of the Press Gang, J. Ross Dancy offers a quantitative approach to the subject. He developed a sampling system and entered the details as recorded in individual ships’ muster books covering the period 1793-1801. Data entry took twenty two weeks. The end result was a database including 27,174 individuals, “roughly a 10 […]
The Coastal History Blog 30: “Maritime Heritage and Social Justice”
In May, I participated in a conference in Bordeaux, Self, other and elsewhere: Images and imaginaries of the port cities of Atlantic and Mediterranean Europe (1700-present). [1] One particularly animated panel on the second day, “The taboo of the trade,” concerned how French ports such as Nantes and Bordeaux itself were coming to terms with […]
New Scholarship on the Press Gang – Part 1 of 2
When I undertook a PhD project on sailors back in 1993, work on impressment per se was scarce. One of the more memorable works had been published in 1913. [1] The secondary literature that is available now amounts to an Aladdin’s Cave of riches compared to what I had to work with two decades ago. […]
The Coastal History Blog 29: Are islands really “natural prisons”? – the challenges of island incarceration in nineteenth century Australia
Today, I’m happy to introduce the Coastal History Blog’s second guest post, by Katy Roscoe. (The first guest post was by Julia Leikin.) Island studies have featured before in this blog, in “Are Islands Insular?” but also in “Offshore and Offshoring”. In today’s post, Roscoe explains how her work as part of the Carceral Archipelago […]
The Coastal History Blog 28: “Jews and Muslims in Twentieth-Century France: The View from a Port Town”
I’ve observed before in this blog that some of the best scholarship on port towns and urban cultures is written by people who arrive at this subject matter by a circuitous route, almost in spite of themselves. Maud Mandel’s recent book, Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict, does not present itself as […]
