'The Sea is Swinging Into View': Modern British Maritime History in a Globalised World

Abstract

DAVID CANNADINE has recently argued that ‘one of the key themes’ of modern British history had become ‘the sea; for both the British world, and Britain's relations with the world beyond its own dominions, were defined in maritime terms, and should be understood in such terms’. Such a statement would have been very unlikely even a few years ago.1 British maritime history has recently been enjoying something of a renaissance, to judge from the proliferation of essay collections and special journal editions on the subject. The William and Mary Quarterly published a special issue in July 2005 on ‘the Atlantic economy in an era of revolutions’, as well as a forum entitled ‘beyond the Atlantic’ in October 2006. No longer, the journal declared, were great upheavals and revolutions to be seen only as ‘internal independence movements’: they were now part of many nations’ ‘deeply entwined’ histories, created in part by ‘the communication of merchants and sailors, exchange of commodities, extension of credit, and enriched consumer cultures of island and mainland settlements in the Western Hemisphere’.2

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.