The Masters Degree in Naval History was established in 2016 and offers a unique opportunity to study the history of the Royal Navy at postgraduate level. It is an online course which offers flexible distance learning. However, as it is located at the home of the Royal Navy, Portsmouth, and we have established a strong partnership with […]
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 […]
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. [1] The secondary literature that is available now amounts to an Aladdin’s Cave of riches compared to what I had to work with two decades ago. […]
Review: Daniel Owen Spence, Colonial Naval Culture and British Imperialism, 1922-67. Manchester University Press, Studies in Imperialism, 2015 – full details here. This is not your traditional naval history. Aligning himself with those whom he describes as ‘cultural-naval historians’ (2), Spence aims – as he puts it in the book’s final sentence – to understand […]
Studentship title: ‘Nipcheese’ the Bean Counter: The Implications of Royal Naval Pursery in the Development of Accounting Closing date: Tuesday 21st April 2015 Preliminary explorations of maritime and accounting archives and historical literature in the Royal Navy [RN] Dockyard Library, Portsmouth, have considered the role and significance of pursers on RN ships (1600 to 1850) […]
Following on in similar vein to my recent article on sailors in the Royal Navy during the First World War, this article will expand upon sailors’ attitudes to killing and death in the Great War by considering their diaries. At this juncture it is worth revisiting Joanna Bourke’s interesting study: An Intimate History of Killing.[i] […]
