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 […]
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The Naval History Blog: No. 6
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 […]
The Naval History Blog: No. 5
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
