In Mediterranean studies, does the cosmopolitan port town rank alongside “sun and sea… olives and myrtle… the commonplaces pervading the literature, all description and repetition”?[1] Articles with titles like “Cosmopolitanism Reconsidered” and “The Cosmopolitan Mediterranean: Myth and Reality” have raised doubts about the whole project.[2] It’s one thing to state that that two or more […]
Book Review by James H. Thomas: Viveka Hansen, The Textile History of Whitby 1700-1914 (The IK Foundation & Company: London and Whitby, 2015), 454 pp. £80 www.ikfoundation.org Limited to a run of 350 copies, and weighing 1.8 kilograms (4 lbs), this detailed volume will cost the reader £80. Given that it is a work at the […]
To kick off 2016 on the best possible note, here is the Coastal History blog’s fourth guest post, grounded firmly in the Southern Hemisphere. I was in Sydney for a conference a few years back and left very impressed with the nearly ubiquitous signposting and commemoration of the Aboriginal past (and present) in diverse and […]
I started this blog in October 2013. I would like to thank the Port Towns and Urban Cultures group for continuing to host it! It might be a good time to look back and consider the range of themes and topics that have come across these pages so far. There wasn’t a single, convenient web […]
The Syrian refugee crisis has brought forth a broad humanitarian response and also some thoughtful pieces from historians. On the “refugee or migrant” question, Le Monde interviewed Gérard Noiriel in a conversation that harked back all the way to the sixteenth century.[1] In the Guardian, Mary Beard commented on how the Roman Empire handled borders […]
In The Myth of the Press Gang, J. Ross Dancy offers a quantitative approach to the subject. He developed a sampling system and entered the details as recorded in individual ships’ muster books covering the period 1793-1801. Data entry took twenty two weeks. The end result was a database including 27,174 individuals, “roughly a 10 […]
