Local and global: Seafaring communities in the North Sea area,c. 1600–2000

A seafaring community is a village, a small town or a neighbourhood where a substantial part of the population earns its livelihood wholly or partly by work at sea or is directly dependent on seafaring. A seafaring community can arise because an established population at a particular locality increasingly takes up seafaring, or it can be created by the settlement of a sizeable number of seafaring immigrants. The former type of community might be called ‘endogenous’, the latter one ‘exogenous’. This essay analyses in what respect seafaring communities of these two types (or mixtures between them) in the North Sea area changed over time and in what ways these changes were connected to larger, transnational processes or to local conditions. It examines three periods of great transformation: the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; the period between about 1850 and the First World War; and the last decades of the twentieth century.

The story of endogenous seafaring communities in the North Sea area differed from the story of exogenous communities in many ways. While seafaring communities in villages and small towns vanished in one region and emerged in another, social differentiation within communities increased as well, with shipmasters organising separately from common seamen; eventually, this type of seafaring community disappeared in the late twentieth century. Seafaring communities in big port cities, by contrast, thanks to immigration, continued to exist, although this category, too, has seen shifts in geography in the last 150 years, notably from Amsterdam and London to Rotterdam and Hamburg; moreover, the origin of immigrant seamen vastly changed. This article offers several explanations for these changes and variations.