Book Reviews

The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du Nord 25:4 (2015): 464–65.

A book entitled China on the Sea: How the Maritime World Shaped China might reasonably be expected to focus on maritime affairs, especially the activities of Chinese mariners, merchants, and officials. As Zheng writes in her introduction, she wants to reassess Qing China by “putting the seas at the center of the narrative and using the oceans to elucidate the complexity of Chinese history.” While the book is full of fascinating vignettes about how an increasingly open-door policy towards foreign trade exposed the Chinese to a variety of imports, Chinese mariners and maritime trade-related institutions are all but absent from most of the book; the index contains no entries for “crew,” “port,” or “ships.”More

International Journal of Maritime History, 25:2 (2013): 299–300.

It is hard to overstate John Howgego’s achievement as the author of the five-volume Encyclopedia of Exploration. The first four volumes are masterpieces of research and clear writing. However monumental the effort to bring them to press, it is easy to imagine the monumental but straightforward ambition to create a catalogue raisonée of the literature of exploration.More

International Journal of Maritime History 25:1 (2013): 401–402.

In the acknowledgements of this well-researched study, Earl Mulderink quotes the remarks of an antebellum historian of the country’s once premier whaling port: “I am aware that much of the material of this history is wanting in arrangement, but it should be remembered that I have been obliged to collect my information from a great variety of sources … during a period of many years.” It is clear from the seventy-four dense pages of notes that Mulderink, a professor of history at Southern Utah University, has documented his subject thoroughly, and he draws on a stunning array of sources, including soldiers’ letters and diaries, affidavits for pensions, newspapers, published sermons, censuses, R.G. Dun & Company credit reports, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century secondary sources.More

The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du Nord 21 (2011): 300–301.

The preservation of medieval documents owes much to chance. For works whose authors did not belong to an institution with an interest in corporate memory, like a house of worship or a government, the odds were long indeed. When the documents in question constitute little more than the commercial ephemera of a minority community, the survival of several thousand paper and vellum fragments verges on the miraculous. It is thus fitting that just such a collection of records—most written in Judaeo-Arabic with a Hebrew alphabet— should have been preserved in the storeroom (geniza) of Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue, where they were deposited by observant merchants who regarded the destruction of papers containing the name of God—in salutations, for instance—a sacrilege.More

International Journal of Maritime History 21:2 (2009): 438–39.

Raymond John Howgego’s reputation as a master of the genre and authority on his chosen subject was assured with the publication of the Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800, the first volume of the quartet, only six years ago. The previous volume, on exploration of “The Oceans, Islands and Polar Regions” in the same period, has a more traditional maritime orientation, to be sure, yet this fourth and final volume is of particular interest for its coverage of what we might call fresh-water maritime history.More