Naval History Blog
Why Naval History Matters First, we should establish what, in fact, is history. Is it the recitation of strings of dates, glorious military and naval victories, lists of kings and queens: or is it, as has been said, simply ‘one f…..g thing after another’?[1] E H Carr asked the question ‘What is history?’ He defined […]
Why maritime history matters: Maritime highways – A personal journey. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book aptly titled The Prize, Daniel Yergin quotes Admiral ‘Jacky’ Fisher as telling Winston Churchill, on the latter’s appointment to First Lord of the Admiralty in September 1911, ‘east of Suez oil is cheaper than coal.’[1] It later became clear […]
Why Maritime History Matters Maritime history can be broadly defined as the study of humanity and its relationship to the seas and oceans of the world in the past. It is a huge topic with tendrils creeping into many nooks and crannies of other, seemingly far removed, branches of the historian’s craft. Its gambit includes […]
The tide creeps in: why maritime history matters Can we even imagine a world without the sea and its influence? Trying to define maritime history in his introduction to ‘The Sea and Civilization’, Lincoln Paine asks the opposite question: what exactly is ‘terrestrial history’? He tries to re-imagine the story of mankind as a land-bound […]
Why Naval History Matters Have you ever wondered why English is the world’s most widely spoken language; reflected on why a small island nation on the fringe of northern Europe could come to control roughly both a quarter of the world’s population and its land mass at the height of a racially and socially diverse […]
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 […]
