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The Naval History Blog: No. 4

Going with the Flow: How Maritime History Informs Civilisation In an increasingly globalized society, where much of the world’s goods travel to market along a few principal trade routes, the study of maritime history is essential to understanding various social, economic, and political trends and dynamics. For example, the pursuit of new trade routes to […]

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The Naval History Blog: No. 3

Why Does Naval History Matter? From the early sixteenth-century to the middle of the twentieth; England, then Great Britain, became a superpower.[1]  Lambert explains “. . . one critical advantage: naval power”.[2] Contemporary writers put forward two arguments about British Naval history; the first is that Britain and especially its Navy founded the modern global system;[3] the second […]

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Figure 1: Anon., Neptune Supporting his Favorite Son Admiral Lord Nelson, 1806, Royal Museums Greenwich

The Naval History Blog: No. 2

Why Does Naval History Matter? As a student of history, I have often met with the question ‘but why does history matter?’ Naval history, a specialised and unique branch of academic study, is met with a stronger question about its relevance, even amongst historians, being dismissed as simply ships, scurvy and sea dogs. Naval history […]

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The Naval History Blog: No. 1

Why Does Naval History Matter? The first question to consider before approaching a response to why naval history matters is: why does any history matter? Before the professionalization of the field in the nineteenth century, the answer to this question seemed fairly obvious; historians “took it for granted that history furnished the basis for a […]

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The Coastal History Blog 39: ‘Beneath the Pavement—the Beach!’: An Account of the Urban Beaches Workshop at the University of London

I’m delighted to introduce the Coastal History blog’s fifth guest post (and the third guest post in the last twelve months!).  Elsa Devienne is a Fellow at the Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. She also holds a position as ‘maîtresse de conferences’ in the department of American studies at Université Paris […]

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