The future course of maritime history

Alternative approaches

In recent years there have been a number of calls for maritime history to be subsumed by some ‘more fashionable’ historical sub-discipline. A number of scholars, for example, have argued that maritime history ought to become part of Atlantic world history or, depending upon the research interests of the individual, Pacific history, Indian Ocean history, the history of the northern seas, Mediterranean history, and a number of others. ¹ The problem with adopting this approach holus-bolus was highlighted in a penetrating essay by Jeffrey Bolster which pointed out that most Atlantic world history (and by extension its close relatives as well) tends to ignore the sea, the very concept that has always been the focus of maritime history. ² Alternatively, Gelina Harlaftis, undeniably one of the best (and most prolific) maritime historians, has called for maritime history to become what she refers to as the ‘new thalassology’, a concept borrowed from the ancient Greeks that was at the core of Fernand Braudel’s magisterial works that formed the basis for the Annales school. ³ The problem with this suggestion is that while Braudel as a scholar had unique intellectual gifts, the power of his work has yet to be replicated by any of his disciples. In short, while adopting a Braudelian approach has certain attractions, the prospect of actually matching the master’s skills is a daunting challenge that most of us are unlikely to meet.

Now we have Professor Heidbrink’s suggestion that the way forward involves closer cooperation with world or global history. The drive for a closer affiliation with world history was reflected in the broad theme of the Sixth International Congress of Maritime History in Ghent, Belgium, where one of the keynote addresses was given by the doyen of that field, Professor Patrick Manning, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History at the University of Pittsburgh. ⁴ While it is indisputable that the world history approach has produced some excellent studies, including some marvellous tomes by Professor Manning himself, ⁵ I think it fair to say that as a field, world history is still searching for an identity, a fact that hardly seems a panacea for maritime history. For example, the website of the World History Association claims that world history ‘is macrohistory’ and that it is ‘trans-regional, trans-national and trans-cultural’. ⁶ Yet some scholars, including Bruce Mazlish, an eminent scholar who taught for years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have difficulty with at least the ‘trans-national’ part of this construct. ⁷ And as Mazlish also has noted, a popular definition of world history is ‘the whole history of the whole world’, hardly a meaningful conceptualization that would likely constitute a step forward for maritime history. ⁸ As well, there is its cousin, global history, which remains fixated to a great extent on a single topic – the history of globalization – and at the moment is not really in a position to relate to the myriad questions that comprise the corpus of maritime history. ⁹

In short, both world and global history are still developing their own definitions and paradigms, a state of affairs that does not make either an ideal candidate for some kind of merger with maritime history, a field that by comparison has become reasonably well established. ¹⁰ In contrast to global and world history in particular, maritime historians have by and large accepted that their sub-discipline is engaged in an examination of ‘the relationship between humankind and the sea’. ¹¹ Although this is a rather broad definition, the strength of its inclusiveness is that it enables naval history to be part of maritime history. By contrast, Ingo Heidbrink sees naval history as a ‘related discipline’. I disagree: as Ralph Davis showed more than half a century ago, maritime and naval history cannot (and should not) be logically separated. ¹² While debates are the lifeblood of scholarly discourse, definitional disagreements can often impede, rather than motivate, a field. Maritime historians who wish to see themselves as world or global historians need to keep this in mind.

Closing the blue hole: The way ahead for maritime history

While I like Professor Heidbrink’s observation that it would be a mistake to conflate maritime history with either world or global history, I do not accept that they are as similar as he suggests. Cooperation is undeniably a good thing, but to tie maritime history too closely to another field of inquiry would be, in my view, a huge mistake. Maritime historians often pose questions from perspectives that are sharply different to those put forward by global or world historians. It therefore follows that I do not agree with him completely about what maritime history ought to be, or about the most desirable way forward. I have set out my ideas about what needs to be done elsewhere, but most of them bear repeating here; indeed, that I do not agree with him completely will not surprise those who have read my 2011 essay in Mariner’s Mirror or a number of editors’ notes in the International Journal of Maritime History. ¹³

For reasons of simplicity, I want here to concentrate solely on international maritime history, the spatial focus that embodies my own research and the one I know best. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that one important way in which maritime history diverges from global history (if not always from world history) is that it can have local and national foci as well as broader regional or global concerns. I have not always made this point clearly in the past, and I am grateful to Joshua Smith for pointing this out. ¹⁴

Let me begin by underscoring what Professor Heidbink and I agree on: we both believe that team and interdisciplinary research are desirable traits. Where we disagree, however, is the degree to which these strategies are useful in answering all questions and how well maritime historians, especially junior scholars, are placed to carry out such research. While I do not want to put words in his mouth, I think that I am less impressed than he is by the results of large-scale team and interdisciplinary research.

What then do I see as the problems with maritime history that need to be corrected in order for the field to continue to progress? Five years ago I identified nine stumbling blocks that we need to surmount. My list began with the general failure of maritime historians to place their studies in appropriate contexts. Second, despite the fact that maritime history can make a convincing case for being the most international of any historical sub-discipline, maritime historians for the most part remain locked into local or national paradigms. Third, I would contend that maritime historians have in general failed to ask the kinds of questions that animate practitioners in other branches of history. Fourth, although seafaring is arguably the world’s best-documented activity, maritime historians have failed to maximize this comparative advantage in sources to its fullest extent. Fifth, maritime historians have not always used the most appropriate methodology to answer the questions they pose. Sixth, as a group, maritime historians have failed to use theory to inform their questions and to generate potential answers. Seventh, too much maritime historical writing fails to meet the standards that apply in other fields of history. Eighth, the way we have trained postgraduate students has failed to provide the next generation of scholars with the tools they need to explore fully the possibilities offered by maritime history. And finally, we have failed to place our maritime journals on a solid footing and to improve their quality.

While I could discuss all of these in some detail and assess whether or not we have improved on each of these criteria since I first advanced this critique, given the nature of Professor Heidbrink’s contribution I would like to narrow my focus to the eighth point in the list: the issue of training and our failure to provide postgraduate students with the skills or even the will to work in groups or to conduct interdisciplinary research. I make this choice because team projects and interdisciplinary programmes are at the heart of Professor Heidbrink’s model to improve maritime history. While I agree that both are ways to answer some questions, I do not believe that either are especially useful tools in the short term. Instead, I see the lack of adequate training as a constraint that is not likely to be surmounted unless we make some radical changes in the way we educate (and socialize) new entrants to the profession.

What are these training barriers? In my view, there are three principal ones that stand out: the lack of postgraduate centres of excellence which by their very nature are in a position to encourage collaborative research; the failure of postgraduate supervisors (and by extension, senior university administrators) to promote team research; and the straightjacket imposed by our desire to cling to an outdated, and often antiquated, discipline-based system in postgraduate education, something I refer to as ‘disciplinary exceptionalism’.

Let me begin with the issue of centres of excellence. I focus on them because of my belief that the existence of a critical mass of scholars interested in the same subject is especially conducive to fostering team research of the kind that Professor Heidbrink discusses. Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that centres of excellence will necessarily produce young scholars who will want to engage in collaborative research. But I do believe that at the very least such centres can create an atmosphere that is conducive to team as opposed to individual research. I am less convinced, however, that scholars who work in teams but are separated by distance, even in the age of digital communication, are as good at this as those who inhabit the same institution. Although I agree with Professor Heidbrink that for many questions the most feasible way ahead is through collaboration; the real question is how best to produce scholars who work well in teams.

I speak here not only as one who has had some experience with collaborative research but also as a scholar who recognized early on that his training and skill set were not necessarily suited to the task. Like many maritime historians, I learned in graduate school that scholarly life was chiefly an individual endeavour; the picture of a dedicated researcher holed up in a dark archive surrounded by piles of musty records comes to mind. Let me be clear about this: there is nothing wrong either with the image or with the idea of historical research as an individual effort. Indeed, the questions that I asked early in my career were, I believed at the time, particularly well suited to individual research, and I know hundreds of very productive scholars who do excellent work on their own. When I began I was a devoted advocate of the creation and analysis of quantitative datasets using what in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a tool that was often scoffed at by historians: main-frame computers. Had my scholarly career followed what for many would have been considered a traditional path, I probably would have ended up as one of those scholars who worked alone. But that is not what happened. Instead, because of the particular skills I possessed I was recruited by a group of scholars at Memorial University of Newfoundland who had one of the earliest large-scale, quantitative, team-based research projects in maritime history. This was the Atlantic Canada Shipping Project (ACSP) where a group of scholars, led by the late David Alexander, attempted to collect and analyse data to explain the rise and decline of the eastern Canadian shipping industry, a growth industry until the early 1870s that collapsed rapidly thereafter. ¹⁵ The problem my colleagues and I had in the beginning, of course, was that none of us were trained to work in teams. While we surmounted this to a certain extent over the seven years of the ACSP’s existence, the fairest characterization was that for the most part we worked as individuals. This was hardly the optimal use of the team concept, but it is one which has been replicated over the past 40 years by a number of other research projects. My point, however, is that the ACSP for me was in effect an extended postgraduate course in team research. And it is why I am such an advocate of centres of excellence as places where team skills can be taught effectively.

If centres of excellence are so important, we ought to ask what they look like today. When I surveyed the state of maritime history research centres five years ago I was cautiously optimistic, especially about the situation in English-speaking countries. Unfortunately, I am less sanguine about this subject today. In the United Kingdom, for example, the Greenwich Maritime Institute, which I identified as one of the major centres in Britain, has been stripped almost entirely of its historical component and is but a shell of its former self, and no new institute has been created to take its place. In North America, Memorial University of Newfoundland, which has long promoted itself as a major centre of both research and teaching in maritime history, has allowed its programmes to wither somewhat. ¹⁶ In the United States, the interdisciplinary programme at East Carolina University continues, but suffers from not having a doctoral programme. And the failure of Old Dominion University, where Professor Heidbrink currently teaches, to launch a doctoral programme has been a major disappointment. I am slightly more optimistic about Europe, particularly due to the impressive strides made by the Global Change in the Marine Realm (GLOMAR) programme at the International Graduate School for Marine Science at the University of Bremen, which Professor Heidbrink discusses in some detail in his article. Elsewhere in Europe, the best that can be said is that the established programmes and chairs that I discussed in 2011 have managed to survive. In the rest of the world, though, there has been little progress. What this all means is that if we accept that centres of excellence are important in training a new breed of maritime historians the situation remains relatively bleak.

Moreover, I am not convinced that many of these centres have actually taken advantage of their unique existence to foster team skills. Two that clearly did were the University of Hull’s Maritime Historical Studies Centre, and the University of Exeter’s Centre for Maritime Historical Studies. The former has developed several projects since David J. Starkey became director, ¹⁷ and the latter produced a splendid study of the maritime history of the county of Devon in the southwest of England. ¹⁸ The History of Maritime Animal Populations (HMAP), the historical component of the international Census of Marine Life, based originally at the University of Southern Denmark, the University of Hull and the University of New Hampshire, was a major international project that had a major training component. ¹⁹ But beyond these examples, few centres spawned projects that involved teaching teamwork skills to postgraduates. ²⁰ Equally important as these projects may have been, I am not convinced that these projects were particularly efficient ways of either training or conducting research. An examination of the output of most of these raises the question of whether individual research projects might have delivered more and better results.

The second of the barriers I have identified stems to a degree from the first and concerns the failure to encourage team research at the postgraduate level. As I have aged I have become less convinced that the reliance on individual research and writing is the only way to certify the level of research competence considered to be necessary for entry into the academic world. Part of my scepticism is born out of experience as a teacher of both undergraduates and postgraduates. As an economic historian, I taught a number of undergraduate courses that attracted not only history majors but also those pursuing degrees in economics and business. Over time it became apparent to me that economics and business majors had skills, especially interpersonal ones, that were conducive to team research. By contrast, historians in general lacked these skills. Leaving aside the ever-present issue of free riders, I eventually concluded that team projects made a good deal of sense and tried to introduce them into my courses with mixed success. The problem was that the history students were less sanguine about this; for the most part, they were much more comfortable with the individual research model, and this reluctance also carried over into postgraduate courses. While I understand this reluctance, I concluded that the insistence on individual research projects in history, including maritime history, does not provide the complete basket of skills that maritime historians are going to need if we are to meet the kinds of challenges that Professor Heidbrink discusses. Unless we can convince ourselves and those with the power to adopt more flexible approaches to assessing graduate competence, I despair of being able to do those things that clearly need to be done. ²¹

Finally, there is the problem of disciplinary exceptionalism. There are two aspects to this issue: the insistence on training students within national frameworks and the difficulty for students in mastering secondary disciplines, something on which Professor Heidbrink is especially keen. I have dealt with the first of these topics elsewhere and still believe that it is a problem which has not been addressed adequately. ²² Briefly, I do not believe that trying to address international questions from a framework shaped by national paradigms is a satisfactory way to proceed. The second issue is also a familiar one: students tend to learn just enough about secondary disciplines to, as the cliché goes, be dangerous. Indeed, one of the three most prevalent reasons for rejecting essays when I edited the International Journal of Maritime History was unfamiliarity with a secondary discipline which an author attempted to use. ²³

Conclusion

There are of course many potential answers to the question of how maritime history ought to develop. And there are even more ways that the preferred answer might be found. One thing, however, is certain: maritime historians need to make answering these questions a top priority. Professor Heidbrink has accepted this challenge, and whether or not maritime historians agree with his diagnosis and prescription, he deserves our thanks for tackling the issue. In this article I have tried to make the case that postgraduate education is the place to start. But as I argued in an earlier essay, there are a variety of problems that need to be addressed. I would not be offended if maritime historians advocated a different set of priorities. But what is not acceptable is to do nothing. We need to have a fully-fledged dialogue on these issues, and Ingo Heidbrink has given us a place to start. I look forward to this discussion in the very near future.