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 […]
The MA in Naval History is able to utilise the links created through the Port Towns and Urban Cultures research group to organise some pretty special field trips. These have included curator-led tours on the Mary Rose, HMS Victory, the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, as well as a lecture aboard HMS Warrior by Prof. Andrew […]
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 […]
