The interdisciplinarity of maritime history from an Australian perspective

Maritime history as an interdisciplinary field

Interdisciplinary researchers have argued that disciplines and sub-disciplines are characterised by five attributes: ‘a certain subject matter; a preference for certain theories; an emphasis on certain methods; a “worldview”; and a set of rules of the game, including guidelines for publication and career progress’. ² I will briefly apply each attribute to maritime history in turn.

First, until at least the 1960s, maritime history tended to focus mainly on ships and navigation and as a result had a rather narrow, antiquarian image and subject matter. ³ Since then it has evolved into a broader discipline dealing with all aspects of mankind’s relationship with the sea. ⁴ Frank Broeze’s widely cited 1989 definition of maritime history classifies it into six broad categories: using the resources of the sea and its subsoil; transportation; political power projection; scientific exploration; leisure; and the sea as an influence on culture and ideology. ⁵ Thus maritime history has a clear subject matter. Second, depending on the questions being addressed, maritime history can draw on insights from both science and social science disciplines, including cartography, engineering, oceanography, archaeology, economics, politics, psychology and sociology. Researchers into interdisciplinarity have observed that ‘many of the topics pursued by researchers cannot be addressed adequately from within a single branch of knowledge or through the segmented approach engendered by disciplinarity; they require an interdisciplinary approach’. ⁶ Thus while maritime historians may not have a preference for particular theories (or explicit theories), because of its subject matter maritime history has the potential to be truly interdisciplinary in scope. Third, maritime history is characterised by methodological flexibility. The skills of the narrative historian dominate, but, depending on the questions being investigated, are complemented by analytical methods from other disciplines. ⁷ So, unlike some disciplines, such as economics, the focus is more on the subject matter than the methods. Fourth, while there is probably a diversity of views among maritime historians on the disciplinary ‘worldview’ – this could perhaps be the subject of another round table – I would tentatively suggest that what unites most practitioners is their ‘love’ and enthusiasm for teaching and writing maritime history. Finally, for academic historians, the rules of the game are probably similar to other disciplines, that is, ‘publish or perish’.

Therefore, maritime history, like most disciplines, has evolved over time, and is clearly now an established historical sub-discipline. ⁸ Its practitioners include specialists from a diverse range of backgrounds including archaeologists, archivists, economic historians, economists and professional mariners, not all of whom would necessarily primarily label themselves as ‘maritime historians’. Maritime history’s broad appeal is demonstrated by publication in general historical journals, as well as a suite of specialised journals including the International Journal of Maritime History, Mariners Mirror, The Great Circle, The Northern Mariner and the Journal for Maritime Research. It is also a popular subject in both fiction and non-fiction literature aimed at the general public.

Maritime history offers great potential for interdisciplinary research on ‘transnational’ topics that span nation states and require multiple disciplines and teams, such as globalisation, understanding and managing the world’s oceans, climate change, tsunamis and other natural disasters. But historians are sometimes reluctant to cross the interdisciplinary divide; it has been claimed that mobility history suffers from institutional silos and a reluctance to ‘look over the fence into adjacent subfields’. ⁹ Traditional historians are more concerned with ‘past centred’ than ‘present centred’ history and have little interest in lessons for policy-making. However, in a tight job market, interdisciplinary projects can offer employment opportunities, especially for early career researchers.

My first introduction to interdisciplinary research was in the 1970s in Australia as a junior member of the Botany Bay Project. This project, led by Noel Butlin, an economic historian at the Australian National University, investigated the economic, social and environmental impact of the development of Port Botany, Sydney’s second port, on its hinterland. Dan Coward, a historian, later reflected on his experience of working with scholars from half a dozen disciplines:

Not only were we all trying to get to know more about each other – warts and all – but we were struggling to give coherence and meaning to ‘inter-disciplinary’ academic studies. Personality and age differences were inevitably tangled up with differences of viewpoint between disciplines and between natural and social scientists. We had to learn to put our egos aside: in the ‘in-house’ seminars criticism was of the work, not of the person. This took a lot of painful effort and considerable time … I suppose we all thought we knew what to do when we applied for our jobs. In practice it turned out to be a difficult task to steer our different disciplines in the same direction. ¹⁰

Despite the ‘steering’ difficulties, the academic output from the project was substantial. An ex-post analysis over 40 years later found that while some policy recommendations were accepted, others were stymied by federal and state politics and, to this day, key issues identified by the project remain unresolved. ¹¹

More recently, there have been projects that have demonstrated the potential contribution of historical research in the marine sciences. The History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) Project, which ran from 2000 to 2010, was a successful collaboration between archaeologists, biologists, climatologists, ecologists, historians and social scientists. ¹² Its success has led to the establishment of the Oceans Past Initiative, a global network for marine historical research. ¹³ An Australian interdisciplinary project, which included scientists and social scientists, on the impact of climate change on fishing communities, led to the development of an analytical framework that can be applied in an historical context. ¹⁴ An international historical team has recently published path-breaking research on the impact of natural disasters on the Indian Ocean World and how societies adapt to and manage such risks. ¹⁵ Unlike the first International Indian Ocean Expedition over half a century ago, the second one (IIOE–2: 2015–2020) aims to include human impacts and societal drivers of change, which potentially opens up the research programme to social scientists and historians. ¹⁶

These (admittedly limited examples) highlight several points. First, interdisciplinary teams that include historians can make important contributions to understanding and improving societal adaptation to major transnational challenges, such as climate change, natural disasters and overfishing. Second, natural scientists have become more aware of the importance of social, economic and political drivers of change. Greater emphasis is being given to translating scientific research into policy advice, an area where social scientists have a comparative advantage. Finally, where historians are involved in interdisciplinary projects they can, of course, come from many sub-disciplines, but environmental historians, world historians and maritime historians are amongst the most active.

Figure 1 shows that according to Google’s Ngram viewer, in the last two decades both environmental history and global history have been on a rising trajectory, while maritime history has languished. While not a precise indicator, it suggests that although maritime history is a ‘well established’ sub-discipline, it is clearly not a ‘fashionable’ one. This has implications for obtaining research funding, which is essential to career progression in academia.

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Figure 1.

Printed books on environmental, global and maritime history, 1960–2008.

Individual scholars need to be willing and flexible enough to make contributions beyond narrow silos such as national or local maritime history. Over a quarter of a century ago, Lewis Fischer and Helge Nordvik created the International Journal of Maritime History, partly to encourage maritime historians to extend their focus beyond regional or national boundaries and to adopt a more international perspective in their work. ¹⁷ Since then, the digitisation of archives and the creation of ‘big data’ sets have created exciting new opportunities for international and comparative research. Many of these general trends can be illustrated by a brief survey of Australian maritime historiography.

Australian maritime historiography

Although Australia is the world’s largest island, Australians have traditionally focused on the development of land-based industries and lacked a strong tradition of maritime enterprise. So historians have written more about the history of the outback and cities than the oceans, and until the 1970s Australia lacked a major stream of maritime historiography. ¹⁸

Geoffrey Blainey’s pioneering work, The Tyranny of Distance (1966), highlighted for the first time how distance and isolation from the global centre of economic activity in the northern hemisphere, and especially Britain (the ‘Mother Country’), shaped Australia’s development. ¹⁹ The Tyranny of Distance was well written and became a ‘best seller’; to this day, it remains in print with about 180,000 copies sold. ²⁰ Blainey began his career as a mining historian, but developed into an eminent generalist historian, resisting the trend towards specialised sub-disciplines. John Bach’s A Maritime History of Australia (1976) provided the first comprehensive narrative history of Australia’s maritime history and helped maritime history to shed its antiquarian image. ²¹ Figure 2 shows that in the two decades following the publication of Bach’s book there was a leap in publications on Australian maritime history, although output has plateaued since the 1990s. By contrast, since the late 1980s, Australian environmental history has surged in popularity.

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Figure 2.

Printed books on Australian environmental and maritime history, 1960–2008.

The new maritime history publications covered the traditional topics of exploration, trade and shipping, ports and port cities, navies and maritime workers and their unions, but also previously neglected areas such as the history of the fishing industries and leisure activities, including yachting and surfing. Frank Broeze’s Island Nation: A History of Australians and the Sea (1998) drew on the newer maritime literature to provide a broad and masterful survey of the interaction of land, cities and the sea. ²² Frank Broeze was Australia’s leading maritime historian until his career was tragically cut short by illness in 2001.

Turning to the Australian university sector, many individual scholars are undertaking and publishing research on various aspects of maritime history, but the picture regarding teaching is bleak as currently there is no dedicated course on maritime history. The related discipline of maritime archaeology is, however, taught at Flinders University, the University of New England, and the University of Western Australia. The Australian Maritime College (AMC) at the University of Tasmania continues to focus on specialised training for the dwindling numbers of young persons wishing to pursue a career in the merchant navy.

At a community level, there is, however, strong interest in Australia’s maritime past. According to the Sydney Heritage Fleet’s website, there are about 400 institutions, special interest groups and historic sites, mainly lighthouses, with maritime links. ²³ The total includes over 70 specialised maritime museums and well over 100 museums with maritime collections. In May 1978, Frank Broeze, John Bach and Vaughan Evans formed the Australian Association for Maritime History (AAMH) which publishes a scholarly journal, The Great Circle, and a quarterly newsletter. The 7th IMEHA International Congress was held at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia, in mid-2016 and attracted 144 delegates, over 80% of whom came from overseas. But while maritime history in Australia is progressing reasonably well, has moved from ‘the periphery’ towards ‘the mainstream’, ²⁴ and continues to attract interest from the general public, it has not succeeded in matching the success of other sub-disciplines, such as environmental and world history.

A blue hole but not a sink hole for maritime history?

There is no doubt that Ingo Heidbrink has correctly identified the existence of a ‘blue hole’ in historiography. In the introduction to the four-volume Oxford Encyclopaedia of Maritime History, John Hattendorf observed that ‘maritime history has, in some respects, been an ignored dimension of global history’. ²⁵ According to Maria Fusaro, maritime history ‘has just become a very large umbrella under which many disciplines are learning to co-exist’. ²⁶

The ‘blue hole’ exists despite maritime history’s strengths which include: methodological flexibility that makes it well suited to tackling topics that require an interdisciplinary approach; a suite of specialised academic journals; active international and national associations, especially the International Maritime History Association (the International Maritime Economic History Association before 2016); and regular national and international conferences. However, maritime history faces a number of disadvantages. First, there is the reluctance of many historians to work in teams, which is not helped by the fact that the training of postgraduate students is very traditional, with ‘no instruction in the dynamics of group research’. ²⁷ Yet arguably the best chance for the survival of sub-disciplines is through research collaborations and the expansion of coverage to under-researched (at least in English) geographic areas in Asia and South America. ²⁸ Second, the preference of many historians for researching only national and local issues (this, of course, is not to deny the value of more narrowly geographically focussed research). Third, the traditional preference of historians to study the past for its own sake, rather than for lessons of interest to policy-makers and, importantly, some funding agencies. Finally, the fact there are few specialised academic positions and institutional homes for maritime historians. Yet, as Amélia Polónia has argued, maritime history can provide ‘a gateway to global history’:

… world history requires maritime history as a research field in order to understand global dynamics. Indeed, one of the most significant advantages of maritime history is its ability to connect the local and national with the global. ²⁹

A splendid example is Lincoln Paine’s The Sea and Civilization (2013), which explores the long-run interactions between the ‘sea and civilisation’ and successfully considers maritime history as part of world history. ³⁰ Currently, maritime history is not fashionable. But it is a well-established sub-discipline and, while there is no room for complacency, it will endure; there may be a ‘blue hole’, but there is no ‘sink hole’ for maritime history.