ABSTRACT
Maritime historians might have ambivalent feelings concerning the assertion of two leading Atlantic historians that ‘we need historical studies of all things maritime, from weather patterns to port cities, from sailors to winds and currents’ (Greene and Morgan 2009: 12). On the one hand, they might be grati ed to read that their specialist subject area is deemed to be of relevance to researchers in another eld of enquiry. At the same time, they might be dismayed that their contributions to knowledge and understanding have seemingly made little impact, for Greene and Morgan’s call for more work on ‘the most obvious leading edge of the Atlantic world: the maritime sector’ (Greene and Morgan 2009: 12) infers that research into the maritime dimension of the historical process is underdeveloped. This might well have been true in the early 1970s, when maritime history was generally regarded as a topic for ‘hobbyists’ (Broeze 1989). Since then, however, it has not only developed steadily as a recognizable sub-discipline, but also generated a substantial body of literature, elements of which bear directly on the human engagement with the ocean that gives Atlantic history its name (Broeze 1995).
