A call for papers has been announced for the following workshop entitled Free and Unfree Workers in Atlantic and Indian Ocean Port Cities (c. 1700-1850) to be held on 6-7th May 2016 at the University of Pittsburgh. Historians have long treated slave labor and free labor as mutually exclusive ideal types. Recent work has begun to challenge […]
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 […]
Such was the infamy of the English prison hulks that Napoleon Bonaparte is reported to have shouted before the battle of Waterloo: “Soldiers, let those among you who have been prisoners of the English describe to you the hulks, and detail the most frightful miseries which they endured!”[1] It is interesting that Napoleon, the person […]
So reads a famous signpost at the port town of Bluff, which is located on the south coast of New Zealand’s South Island. With little between it and the Roaring Forties, Bluff was indeed “one of the farthest corners of the British Empire.” A key inlet for British migrants from the 1860s and a key […]
Cloistered subfields predictably produce cloistered scholarship. Cloistered scholarship is, as a rule, quite dull. Why, then, does cloistering exercise such a fatal attraction for so many academics? A new article in the Journal of Transport Geography confronts this dilemma in an unusually honest way. “Port Geography at the Crossroads”—co-authored by nine academics based variously in […]
Department of Historical Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden, 9th September 2014 A recent workshop by the Universities of Gothenburg and Portsmouth brought together academics, archivists and heritage professionals to discuss the methodologies, data and potential beneficiaries of mapping port towns. Dr Tomas Nilson and Dr Brad Beaven opened proceedings and explained that the history of port […]
