Lincoln Paine

This article explores different approaches that maritime museums might consider to enlarge their audience and enhance their mission. In particular, it focuses on how we can incorporate the innovative research into ancient and contemporary structures of maritime trading networks by historians, archaeologists and others to broaden our geographic and thematic focus, and take on a more expansive, global vision of maritime history in ways that benefit the museum public, individual institutions, and the wider community of maritime museums worldwide.

Key words: , maritime history, geography, chronology, thematic focus, globalization, human ecology, maritime technology

This article explores different approaches that maritime museums might consider to enlarge their audience and enhance their mission. In particular, it focuses on how we can incorporate the innovative research into ancient and contemporary structures of maritime trading networks by historians, archaeologists and others to broaden our geographic and thematic focus, and take on a more expansive, global vision of maritime history in ways that benefit the museum public, individual institutions, and the wider community of maritime museums worldwide.

The study of Eurasia in the seventh century is dominated by the history of the origins of the Muslim caliphate and the Tang Dynasty. The first Tang emperor, Gaozu, ascended the throne in 618 AD, and the hegira took place in 622 AD, year one of the Muslim calendar. That these two developments should be so central is understandable. Within little more than a hundred years of its establishment, Islam was the dominant religion across an arc of Asia and Africa from Portugal to Kazakhstan, where it butted up against the armies of the Tang Dynasty, which had simultaneously pushed China’s borders west across two thousand miles of desert and steppe. Yet at the very moment of immediate contact, a series of domestic crises within the Dar al-Islam and in China directed merchants’ attention away from the Silk Road across Central Asia to the ‘Silk Road of the Sea’. Bustling maritime markets at either end of this sea route from southwest to northeast Asia drew merchants and mendicants from around the Monsoon Seas and helped give their respective empires a cosmopolitan flourish. Of greater significance, however, rulers of nascent states lying along this primary sea route were able to tap the wealth generated by this trade to consolidate power and forge durable and influential states. Chief among these were the Chola and Srivijayan kingdoms, through whose waters virtually all shipping sailing around the Indian subcontinent or through the Strait of Melaka, respectively, had to pass. Merchants from both kingdoms became active participants in long-distance trade, sharing their
experience and institutions with other seafaring communities to create a hybrid and, to all appearances, seamless commercial system dominated by no one group or state.

The United States’ invasion of Iraq has given rise to a long overdue debate about whether the Republic has become an empire and, if so, of what kind. Those who view the United States as an imperial power usually point to the Roman or British empires as relevant or even appropriate models, but their comparisons raise a number of objections.

This paper argues that historians have all but ignored the study of rivers and their impact on the development of human society. Apart from a somewhat terse acknowledgment of the importance of rivers in the development of ancient civilizations, from the Huang He to the Ganges, the Nile, and the Amazon, historians have by and large limited themselves to studying individual rivers, while ignoring the potential of comparative analysis of rivers. I call for a broader engagement by historians of all aspects of rivers, including their role in transportation, fishing, agriculture, industry, recreation, and the environment, people’s cultural response to rivers, and the legal regimes that have grown up around them, with special reference to the role of rivers as political boundaries.

Anticipating the coming needs of maritime history seems a fraught exercise. Nonetheless, I cheerfully heed Maurice Smith’s advice in Argonauta that “planning for a long-term healthy future involves all of us.” Riffing on a trio of essays published in Coriolis in 2011, Isabel Campbell and Colleen McKee ask “Is maritime history best reserved for academics, or is the participation of those who wish to promote particular policies an essential and desirable contribution?”

In recent decades, it has become increasingly common for maritime historians to question where we are, where we are going, what we do and how we fit into the historical profession generally. Such inquiries make sense in an institutional setting, and have resulted in the creation of any number of professional organizations, and maritime history has been added to the American Historical Association’s “areas of scholarly interest.”
These discussions, together with protestations of the discipline’s legitimacy or assertions about whether studying maritime history makes one a maritime historian, have become increasingly public and argumentative. Perhaps our collective hand-wringing is a reflection of the times. We moderns are skeptical at best and at worst anxious and apologetic. Living in a democratic age, we no longer accept the principle of “master under God,” but we are likewise insecure about what we are doing and why.

This article attempts to put the comments of authors Joshua Smith and Kelly Chaves regarding maritime history into perspective. In so doing, it asserts that arguments created to classify maritime history within other disciplines diverts energy from new research in a field that should be considered strong enough to stand on its own merits.

The United States had to decide what its navy is for. Does it need a navy to protect foreign trade, regardless of who carries it, or to fulfill the country’s role as the world’s “indispensible nation”? Can it function both as a war-fighting institution and also as a vehicle for national compassion? Is the navy an instrument of industrial protectionism, an engine of economic growth, or an electoral asset? At present, the answer to all these questions is yes. But no institution can shoulder such an unwieldy load of responsibilities. And if the navy suffers from such a glaring lack of clarity about its goals and priorities, what does that say about the nation it serves?

Well, despite your Spanish name, you are very English. Well, my mother-in-law, God rest her soul, travelled in Spain with me said it was like being with a werewolf. I started off being exaggeratedly English, which I suppose is a desperate attempt to make up for my Spanishness, and after ...

Among the many things we take for granted today is the ability to preserve fruit, vegetables, and meats through refrigeration and to slake our thirst with cold and iced beverages. The association of ice and food in northerly or high-altitude climates where it forms naturally is of considerable antiquity. The Chinese used ice to preserve food three millennia ago. It was also used by the Romans of Nero's day and, as Fernand Braudel relates, in the age of Philip II it was a luxury appreciated the length and breadth of the Mediterranean world, refreshing Spanish courtiers, Maltese knights and Ottomanjanissaries. While enterprising merchants could peddle small quantities of ice over short distances, the long-distance carriage of ice in bulk was pioneered in the nineteenth century by Frederic Tudor. A Boston merchant of unwavering vision and endless drive, Tudor "introduced the world to refrigeration and thus transformed the way we eat and drink and live." His rise was far from smooth. He shipped his first ice in 1806 to Martinique, but it was not until the 1820s that his business achieved stability. In the meantime, he was arrested three times for debt and jailed twice. Even after his business affairs were on an even keel, he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars speculating in coffee in the 1840s. Nevertheless, when the Tudor Ice Company was chartered in 1860, it was valued at $1.3 million and Tudor's reach was global, stretching from the ice ponds of eastern Massachusetts and Maine to southern US ports, Havana, South America, India and East Asia. The details of so complex and esoteric an enterprise would make for a fascinating biography. Instead, the authors focus mainly on Tudor's personal difficulties with his friends, relations and business associates. These three groups comprise "the circle" of the book's subtitle. The result is a farrago of vignettes, many of which would have been better left to footnotes or omitted altogether. Thus, the authors sketch the career of Tudor's great nephew Charles Steward Parnell, the Irish patriot, although thanks to the estrangement of Tudor and his sister it seems unlikely the two ever met. Yet details on the number of ships in the Tudor fleet whether, in fact, the vessels were owned or chartered are lacking. The fact that Tudor shipped ice to Singapore is mentioned only in passing two pages from the end of the book; that his ice was known in Persia and China goes unremarked. Nameless rivals in the ice trade crop up from time to time, but there is no indication of the growth, volume or value of the ice trade in Tudor's hands or generally. The authors cannot be held to account too firmly for these deficiencies. Both coauthors died more than four years before the book's publication; it was ushered into print thanks to the efforts of Alan Seaburg. The resulting work has the feel of notes cobbled together without the benefit of a unifying theme. Tudor's contribution to the technological revolution of the nineteenth century was considerable and it certainly deserves to be better known than it is. If this book does nothing more than stimulate further research into the dynamics of the ice trade, it will have been worth the effort. But a more succinct and focussed account of Tudor's career remains Henry G. Pearson's "Frederic Tudor, Ice King," published in the Proceedings ofthe Massachusetts Historical Society in 1933 not 1940 as is indicated in the notes.

walls of the grand saloon were covered with a combination of rich fabric and splendid mirrors. The mirrors greatly enhanced the visual size of the room. A noisy but essential and unique feature of the Great Britain was her aweinspiring engine. Even more remarkable was that in a day and age when virtually every steam ocean-going vessel was propelled by paddle wheels, Brunei had elected to make his ship the first large vessel to utilize a propeller. Since public confidence required that the huge ship possess a visual assurance of her ability to reach land in the face of mechanical failure, the Great Britain also was outfitted with no fewer than six masts, each named for a day of the week. On several occasions while in the trans-Atlantic trade she proved her ability to complete a crossing safely under sail. The history of the Great Britain is recounted by Nicholas Fogg with magnificent utilization of many diaries, letters, memoirs, and newspaper accounts. The stories of the travellers on the celebrated ship and of the adventurous voyages they experienced provide a rich enhancement of the early age of steam navigation. In 1852 the Great Britain began yet another remarkable and successful career as one of the largest vessels carrying immigrants to Australia, making an amazing total of thirty-two round-trip voyages (18521876). Fogg continues this part of her tale largely through the eyes of her immigrant passengers. In 1882 she was sold yet again and, with her engines removed, became a threemasted full-rigged ship. Finally, this incredible creation of Brunei became a coal hulk (1886-1933) in the Falkland Islands where, on one occasion, she refueled the British Royal Navy Squadron sent in 1914 to destroy the Imperial German Squadron under Admiral von Spee, which had wreaked havoc in the Pacific and now was attempting to get home. The subsequent British victory provided much satisfaction to the British Govermnent in the early days of World War I. Great Britain's long and celebrated career seemed to draw to a close on 12 April 1937, when the decommissioned coal hulk was beached in Sparrow's Cove, Falkland Islands, to become little more than a home to numerous seabirds. However, in 1970 a team of dedicated preservationists managed to float the hull onto a pontoon and began a remarkable tow of nine thousand miles to Bristol, England, where Great Britain had been built 127 years earlier. The ship's history therefore continues to the present day, for she is in the process of being preserved and restored as the centerpiece of the modern harbour of Bristol. This reviewer had an opportunity to inspect her in December 2004, and can therefore well appreciate the remarkable testimonial that Nicholas Fogg's book is, to the vessel and to all who ever have been involved in her long life. It is well worth reading!

Many people maintain that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. One might say that the evidence for the claim wouldn’t hold up in a court of law, except that in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court (abetted by Congress and the executive branch) has willfully misconstrued the founders’ intent.

Binary views of the age of discovery result in part from an evidentiary problem that favours European worldviews. Most assessments of the age of discovery are coloured by the fact that, in superficial terms, Europeans tend to think of themselves as explorers and the people of the places to which they sailed as the discovered, a binary that gives Europeans agency while denying it to others. The initial responses to European voyages on the part of the people of coastal Eurasia and Africa seem to have been based on the reasonable assumption that Europeans were motivated chiefly, if not exclusively, by the search for profitable trade. European merchant-adventurers were eager to promote the potential of newly encountered pockets of wealth and raw materials to satisfy existing demand and develop new markets. Despite some ideological continuities, Europeans’ motivations for expansion varied according to when and where they lived.

This article explores different approaches that maritime museums might consider to enlarge their audience and enhance their mission. In particular, it focuses on how we can incorporate the innovative research into ancient and contemporary structures of maritime trading networks by historians, archaeologists and others to broaden our geographic and thematic focus, and take on a more expansive, global vision of maritime history in ways that benefit the museum public, individual institutions, and the wider community of maritime museums worldwide.