An interview with Peter Neill
WERU Community Radio, December 3, 2012More
All history is maritime history
An interview with Peter Neill
WERU Community Radio, December 3, 2012More
Vasant J. Sheth Memorial Lecture
England’s efforts to colonize North America and India were born from the same impulse and at the same time. As early as the 1580s, the great apostle of English colonization Richard Hakluyt, Sr., thought of them in tandem, while the East India Company and the Virginia Company (whose employees established the first permanent English settlement in North America) were founded only six years apart, in 1600 and 1606, respectively.
Considered in imperial perspective, then, India and the United States have been linked for more than four hundred years, though for almost the first two centuries only indirectly. Ships of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could certainly sail between North America and the subcontinent, and the will was there. Direct trade between the two regions was prevented not by technology or indifference, but by policy.More
Sea History 172 (2020): 5.
In June, the Maine Maritime Museum announced its plan “to consider how an institution such as ours can contribute to the dialogue about equity, inclusion, and justice, particularly by raising awareness of how Maine’s maritime enterprise has shaped and been shaped by issues of race, ethnicity, and gender.” Skeptics abound, of course. What can a maritime museum in the whitest state in the country possibly have to say about race in what many incorrectly perceive to be a “white” profession?More
USNI Blog, Oct. 1, 2019.
Few subjects are more hotly debated by naval officers, policy makers, and historians than the strategic implications and definition of sea power, a concept first developed by the U.S. naval officer and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan in his pioneering work The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783.
Sea History 167 (2019): 61–62.
The four-volume The Sea in History is the product of the Paris-based Association Océanides, which bills itself as a multidisciplinary project with three objectives: “to provide scientific proof that the oceans are at the heart of political, economic and social issues, to enhance the overall policy of the seas, and to train future generations.” Conceived in 2010 and published only seven years later, the set includes English and French essays by some 260 different scholars from forty countries.
In The World’s Ocean: Culture, History, and the Environment, edited by Lance Nolde and Rainer F. Buschmann, 90–108. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio 2018.
Culture comprises many elements, including beliefs, social norms, traditional customs, the arts, civic institutions, and collective achievements of people or societies, and people both shape culture and are shaped by it. In considering why oceans and seas matter in world culture, it is essential to realize that before mechanical ground transportation and aviation in the 19th and 20th centuries, ships and boats were usually the most efficient means of transportation—when they were not the only ones. Thus, the opening of sea routes invariably resulted in cultural transformation, sometimes immediate, other times only in the long term.More