I started this blog in October 2013. I would like to thank the Port Towns and Urban Cultures group for continuing to host it! It might be a good time to look back and consider the range of themes and topics that have come across these pages so far. There wasn’t a single, convenient web […]
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The Coastal History Blog 31: “The Intolerant Coast”
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 […]
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 […]
The Coastal History Blog 28: New Scholarship on the Press Gang
In the first of a two part series, this month Isaac offers a web-essay exploring ‘New Scholarship on the Press Gang.’ “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. The secondary literature that is available […]
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 […]
