“I have zero interest in maritime history”…

…and the implications of that…

I promise that this piece is not going to be about the rest of this sentence, but it’s a good place to start: My second book, A Boston Schooner in the Royal Navy, received an Honorable Mention from the North American Society for Oceanic History in its annual John Lyman Book Awards decisions—in the category of “North American naval history.” An irony of this is expressed in the actual Preface to the book, which is that I do not consider myself a naval historian, and I did not set out to write a naval history book. I accept that I did write one; given the subject of the book, it was unavoidable. I also wouldn’t want to imply that naval history doesn’t usually make room for the range of subjects and themes that the book treats—good naval history certainly does. Good naval history is good history indeed.

What I want to lay out here, and then push back on as hard as I can, is the perception that this is not just niche history—it’s also quaint, and antiquated, and the dwindling hobby of a group of men whose hair is the color of mine; in the big picture, it’s irrelevant. In that sense, naval history only has it a little worse than maritime history as a much broader subject—a subject that has been relegated to the margins of academic scholarship for a long time, perhaps especially in the United States. I won’t spend any more space presenting that fact here, except to point out that the current President of the International Maritime History Association recently wrote that he now cautions students interested in the field that, if they intend to pursue it seriously, it would be best if they were either independently wealthy or supported by someone else, as their chances of a permanent academic appointment, or any other professional position that paid a living salary, were slim indeed. He is merely being responsible by doing that.

So the rest of this will be about why that is unfortunate.

Someone I dearly love told me not long ago: “I have zero interest in maritime history.” I don’t think she realized how much was packed into that statement. Maybe she did, but I’m going to write the rest of this under the assumption that she didn’t, because it serves my purpose.

If you don’t care about maritime history, here is a partial list of other histories you don’t care about, working backward in time:

·         The “global economy”

·         Overfishing and the oceanic ecological crisis

·         The development and use of nuclear power

·         The development and deployment of internal combustion power

·         Middle-class Victorian moral reform campaigns

·         Mass emigration and immigration

·         The rise of capitalism and its transoceanic patterns of exploitation and trade

·         The rise of organized labor in response to the above

·         The role of fertilizer in avoiding a Malthusian crisis in Europe in the late nineteenth century

·         The transatlantic African slave trade and its core importance to the rise of capitalism and the European global empires

·         The creation of the “spinoff states” of those empires

·         The professionalization of the military

·         The rise of Western social-welfare programs (public and private)

·         The culture of ritual and superstition in dangerous jobs

·         The cross-influence of Mediterranean and northern European polities and cultures

·         The history of engineering, physics, fluid mechanics, hydrodynamics, and aerodynamics

·         The practice and transmission of sophisticated artisanal craft

·         The settlement and human alteration of every habitable place on Earth only accessible by water

·         The prominent role of navies in state power struggles and in states’ ability to spend vast amounts of money and human resources on centrally-directed technological projects

·         The centrality of navigable water in human settlement patterns

That’s enough; that could go on and on. I made my point. Histories that ignore the central importance of the human relationship to bodies of water—which constitute most of the surface of the planet—are histories with big holes in them—big blue holes, as essayists before me have written.

I sat down to write this after listening to a political podcast this morning and hearing the expression “all hands on deck” used (appropriately); it occurred to me for the umpteenth time that we use expressions like that all the time and for the most part we do not know what they literally mean. That doesn’t prevent us from using them appropriately as figures of speech. And some people roll their eyes when their attention is called to the prominence of nautical terminology in our everyday speech, or when people use nautical metaphors. The thing is: to the extent that it’s cliché, it’s cliché for a good reason: it’s ubiquitous because of its core place in our culture and history over centuries, not over the past week. And it’s not old-white-man history. It’s everybody’s history. Regardless of whether they know it, or pay any attention to it, or not. Right now, good scholars are writing good books and articles about the maritime history of every other place in the world, and every other time, besides “the West” in the early modern and modern periods—though more good work on that is certainly called-for.

I’ve done some of that work. But right now, I’m tired of it. I’ve thought about it, and realized that I’m not tired of it because I’m not interested in it any more. At first I thought it was just ordinary standard-issue burnout; I’ve been working on this stuff full-time for twelve years, and putting out as much scholarship as I have in that period is a lot of sustained hard work. I think that may be part of it, but I think at least as much of it has to do with the subject of this piece: just the general lack of interest out there. I know this analogy only goes so far, but no matter how fired-up she is about her own music, if a performer goes out on stage for several nights and plays to a half-empty hall and only a few people clap, her motivation will quickly flag. This is not a pity party. But the reality is that the lack of interest in this field translates directly into a lack of support for it—funding support, that is. I wrote Boston Schooner on a shoestring and through the generosity of friends and family. I’m proud of that but have no interest in doing it again, even if I were lucky enough to hit upon a topic that lent itself to such a limited research window as that one did. And much of the research that underpinned that book was paid for by Memorial University when I was a graduate student on a stipend.

So, these days, I’m exploring other subjects in the history of technology. And that’s fine; I wanted to do that. But, if I truly no longer cared about maritime history, I wouldn’t be writing this. My absence from it is temporary, I feel sure. I also feel sure that if I were suddenly able to engage meaningfully, and dialogically, with some sort of interested audience, or with other scholars at any level with a common interest, that absence would be much shorter. Obviously I can’t conjure support for the field out of thin air. I don’t sit on boards of foundations and I don’t know any millionaires. But I can write stuff like this, as others have, and I can hope that the way it is now won’t be the way it is forever. There are signs; the U.S. has a new maritime culture journal for the first time in over twenty years, and for now, the other journals are hanging on. Good books continue to appear, some written by well-supported professors, others by marginal people like me. But even the near future is by no means clear. I’m an ardent supporter of hope, but I like to do my bit, even a little bit, to help hope along.