Sailors

European overseas expansion and the processes of early modern globalization depended on the labor of sailors. It is therefore not surprising that they are among the most thoroughly studied occupational groups of the early modern world, especially as their historical importance is reflected in a relative abundance of archival source material. Legal records of various kinds have proven an especially rich source that has allowed historians to recover in remarkable detail the lives of early modern sailors as they crisscrossed oceans and imperial jurisdictions, moving back and forth between ship and shore, switching from the fisheries to the merchant marine, and on to naval service and back again. As one of the first predominantly wage-dependent groups of workers in the emerging capitalist world-economy, sailors were subject to an unusually complex constellation of forces that together provided the structure of the international maritime labor market, including the interaction of the push and pull of demand and supply with the multiple and overlapping coercive recruitment systems that in wartime funneled mariners by the tens of thousands onto the gundecks of Europe’s burgeoning war-fleets. But scholarly interest has not only been stimulated by the fact that sailors sailed the ships that projected European imperial aggression overseas, and then carried people, commodities, and ideas back and forth across the oceans. Historians have also been fascinated by the peculiar culture that emerged below deck and in port cities around the world, including its characteristic cosmopolitanism, political radicalism, and sexual libertinism. The titles listed in this bibliography highlight some of the most prominent studies on these and other subjects, but interested researchers will want to consult other Oxford Bibliographies articles as well, including Oceanic History, Ships and Shipping, Piracy, Smuggling, and The Maritime Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions.

The Many Voyages of Fateh Al-Khayr: Unfurling the Gulf in the Age of Oceanic History

In this article, I make the claim that the time has come to re-situate the Gulf historically as part of the Indian Ocean world rather than the terrestrial Middle East. I explore the historical potential of thinking “transregionally” – of what it means to more fully weave the history of the Gulf into that of the Indian Ocean, and what the ramifications are for orienting it away from the terrestrially-grounded literature in which it has long been situated. The promise of an oceanic history, I argue, is both academic and political: first, it opens up the possibilities of new narratives for the Gulf’s past, suggesting new periodizations, fruitful avenues of historical inquiry, and new readings of old sources. But more than that, an oceanic history of the Gulf allows historians to push against the discourses of nativism that have pervaded the public sphere in the Gulf States.

From the Cape to Canton: The Dutch Indian Ocean World, 1600-1800 — A Littoral Census

As an exercise in trans-oceanic history, this article focuses on the Dutch IndianOcean World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from the Dutch EastIndia Company or VOC’s permanent colony at Cape Town, South Africa, inthe Far West to its seasonal trading factory at Canton (Guangzhou), in the FarEast. It argues that the ‘seismic change’ after 1760 noted by Michael Pearsonand associated with the British move inland from their Bengal ‘bridgehead’should be extended to the contemporary polycentric Dutch expansion intothe interior of, most notably, South Africa, Ceylon, Java, and Eastern Indonesia.Demographic measuring points include the number of Dutch citizens andsubjects, comprising European settlers, mixed peoples, and indigenous populations; and: the size and composition of the population of central nodal places in the Dutch Indian Ocean thalassocratic network in the late seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries. By the end of the period, both ‘John Company’(EIC) and ‘Jan Kompenie’ (VOC) effectively were, to some extent, reversingthe colonial gaze inland turning from maritime merchants into landlords andtax collectors. These seismic changes with multiple epicenters were the harbinger of tidal waves about to sweep both the littoral and interior of the modern Indian Ocean World.

World History as Oceanic History: Beyond Braudel

Until recently, most historians shared a prejudice in favour of the history of land, territory and their human inhabitants. Yet two-thirds of the world’s surface is water and much of human history has been conducted on its shores, around its seas and across its oceans. This article proposes reimagining the history of the world through its oceans and seas and examines the multiple genealogies of oceanic history, Mediterranean, Pacific and Atlantic among them. It argues that these models do not exhaust the potential for an oceanic history of the world. It takes the example of the Atlantic and its history to show how models from other oceanic arenas can help us to open up new histories, of regions within larger oceans, of the transnational connections between oceans and of the world beneath the waves.

Maritime—Aquatic; Territorial—Territoriality: Tracing Michael N. Pearson’s Work on the Sea

This essay traces Michael Pearson’s work from writing maritime history to a more inclusive oceanic history, and also his later interest in water histories. It evokes Michael’s nostalgic remembering of the littoral and his condemnation of the territorialisation of the shore and the seas from the 1990s that changed its nature radically. It argues that Michael’s notion of territoriality remains unfinished because he ignored the flows of global capital that re-ordered territoriality.