Wind and Sail
At the beginning of our period, world travellers were vulnerable to the vagaries of wind and ocean currents. In this session, we will explore what it was like to sail the seas in the nineteenth century. We will discuss the opportunities which the nineteenth-century maritime world afforded, as well as the ways in which sea power was used to coerce and control. In the process, we will dip our toes into the burgeoning field of maritime history and reflect on how our view of history changes through the adoption of an oceanic perspective.
Seminar Questions
- How were states able to project their power overseas and sustain global empires?
- What problems did they encounter?
- How did imperial subjects resist or re-appropriate these maritime networks?
- To what extent were oceanic spaces highways for intercontinental exchange, or arenas of conflict?
- Should we see the ocean as a barrier, or a connector?
- What makes maritime spaces, like ships, so distinctive?
Essential Reading
- Frykman, Niklas et. al., ed. ‘Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism in the Age of Revolution: A Global Survey’. International Review of Social History 58, no. 1 s.21 (2013).
- Bolster, W. Jeffrey. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Introduction and Chapter 3 ‘The Way of a Ship’.
- Taylor, Miles, ed. The Victorian Empire and Britain’s Maritime World, 1837-1901: The Sea and Global History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Introduction, p. 1-18.
Primary Source
- Equiano, Olaudah. The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, the African. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999. Chapters 6 and 7.
Further Reading
- Bentley, Jerry H., Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen, eds. Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007.
- Cannadine, David, ed., Empire, the Sea and Global History: Britain’s Maritime World, c. 1763-1840. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
- Dening, Greg. Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
- Lemire, Beverly. ‘“Men of the World”: British Mariners, Consumer Practice, and Material Culture in an Era of Global Trade, c. 1660-1800’. Journal of British Studies 54, no. 2 (2015): 288-319.
- Pietsch, Tamson. ‘Bodies at Sea: Travelling to Australia in the Age of Sail’. Journal of Global History 11, no. 2 (2016): 209-228.
- Poovey, Mary. ‘The Limits of the Universal Knowledge Project: British India and the East Indiamen’. Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (2004): 183-202.
- Rediker, Marcus and Peter Linebaugh. Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
- Rodger, N. A. M. The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain. London: Allen Lane, 2004.
- Russell, Lynette. Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790-1870. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012.
