This weekend, I broke out the French dictionary and made my way—slowly—through an impressive article that belongs alongside Michael Pearson’s “Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems,” and Danny Vickers’ book Young Men and the Sea. [1] At the Port Towns and Urban Cultures conference this past July, Oliver Le Gouic wrote down a name […]
Taverns and other drinking establishments occupy a privileged place in the iconography of ports and sailortowns. Who could forget the free-and-easy multicultural egalitarianism of ALL-MAX, the East End dive immortalized by Pierce Egan? [1] In The Many-Headed Hydra, Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh speculated about what sorts of conversations sailors, slaves, sex workers, and assorted […]
This will be the first of several posts about a promising new volume edited by Douglas Catterall and Jodi Campbell entitled Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500-1800. [1] Catterall and Campbell point out a familiar problem: “The iconic Atlantic-world figure is a traveler, explorer, or merchant, certainly […]
Sunil Amrith’s impressive new book, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants, captures the strengths of oceanic history, with its bold comparative and border-crossing sweep, but also remains attentive to the fine textures and variations of locality that I’ve argued should be a key feature of coastal history. […]
Middle-England seemingly went into shock when it was announced that David Dimbleby, broadcaster and establishment figure par excellence had succumbed to having a tattoo. Although some time has now elapsed since Dimbleby’s tattoo made headline news, getting the tattoo whilst filming a documentary about ‘Britain and the Seas’ taps into something that time has not weakened. […]
This posting follows close on the heels of the last one, which summarized an interdisciplinary conference I attended on “Rivers of the Anthropocene.” The conference left me with a lot to consider. There has been some informal discussion on Twitter about what an equivalent conference organized around coasts would look like. What is the anthropocene […]
