Abstract
It is difficult to comprehend that just three months after I encouraged readers to register early for the Eighth International Congress of Maritime History (Editorial, IJMH, February 2020) I now have to advise you that the Congress has been postponed due to the rapid spread of coronavirus. The postponement is for one year, with the Congress now scheduled to convene in Porto in late June 2021. The Editorial Office of the International Journal of Maritime History very much hopes that all the Journal’s readers remain safe and well during the pandemic, and extends its thanks to the SAGE publishing, production and distribution teams for their effective business continuation efforts in these exceptionally challenging circumstances.
There is a distinct Eastern Mediterranean flavour to this issue of the IJMH. The region is central to the 12-paper Forum that derives from papers presented at a symposium held in Rethymno, Crete, to celebrate the inauguration of the Centre of Maritime History, a unit of the Institute of Mediterranean Studies, in April 2018. As Gelina Harlaftis, director of both the Centre and the Institute, explains in the Introduction, the Symposium assumed a further commemorative role as participants also celebrated the contribution made to the development of maritime history by Lewis R. ‘Skip’ Fischer, who had passed away two months previously. The contents of the Forum reflect the dual purpose of the Symposium. A number of articles describe the aims, methods and findings of recently completed and current projects undertaken by the new Centre’s researchers under the leadership of Professor Harlaftis. Including appraisals of the maritime communities of the Mediterranean and Black seas, the business history of the Onassis shipping empire, and the impact of the transition from sail to steam on the seafaring lives of Mediterranean maritime communities, this corpus of maritime scholarship – outlined by Katerina Galani, Alexandra Papadopoulou and Apostolos Delis – demonstrates the richness of the subject matter and primary sources, as well as the wealth of academic talent, in this part of the world. The other papers in the Forum relate in various ways to the oft-posed question: what is maritime history? As well as reflecting on how the sub-discipline has developed since the 1970s, why it has proved popular, and the ways it has, and might further, contribute to the work of museums, the authors consider the potential of, and limits to, the interplay of history with economics, marine biology, oceanography and other disciplines. Frank Broeze’s analytical framework for the systematic study of the maritime past, devised in 1989, is recognised as a seminal contribution throughout the Forum, with a number of authors describing how the sub-discipline has since developed on that foundation. Gelina Harlaftis goes a step further and proposes that Broeze’s framework should be re-configured so that maritime historians focus on the history of the sea from five societal perspectives; that is, human activities that took place on, around, within, because of, and about the sea.
According to this framework, four of this issue’s seven research articles and notes concern activities that occurred on the sea – more precisely, they focus on the use made of the surface of the sea for the shipment of cargoes between areas of production and consumption. The shipping engaged in Europe’s longstanding, long-distance and lucrative trade with Asia is discussed in two articles, with Johan de Jong re-considering the time taken by VOC vessels to sail to and from the Dutch East Indies, and Huw Bowen quantifying how many English East Indiamen were lost, and due to what cause, on their passages between London and the East during the 1750–1813 period. The statistics generated by the taxation of trading vessels passing through the Sound between the North and Baltic seas are tested by Pavel Demchenko, while Effie Dorovitsa reveals that natural ice shipped from Norway was an important resource for the fishing industry of Boulogne-sur-Mer in the late nineteenth century, despite doubts being expressed about its hygienic quality by France’s medical establishment.
Two further articles examine the economic and social ramifications of human activities that occurred in and about the sea – more precisely, they focus on the extraction of living marine resources by human inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean. Maïa Fourt, Daniel Faget and Thierry Pérez examine the impact of technological change on the sponge fishery of the Dodecanese Archipelago in the Aegean Sea. Largely unchanged for centuries, the practice of ‘skin diving’, and the social structure in which it was embedded, were rocked by an increase in demand for sponges that triggered the introduction of ‘hard-hat’ diving suits into the fishery in the mid-nineteenth century. The suits not only rendered fishing more efficient and productive, but also more dangerous, more capital-intensive and more socially contentious – a mix of causes and effects that offers an unusual case study of the disruptive qualities of the industrialisation process. Shai Srougo provides another perspective on the fisheries of the Eastern Mediterranean in his analysis of Jewish maritime communities in Ottoman and post-Ottoman Thessaloniki, and then Acre in Palestine, over a 400-year period. Again, this study offers a microcosm of a much broader theme, the extent to which ethnicity drives social and economic change in the maritime communities of a politically fragmented and sometimes volatile region.
T. Kurt Knoerl’s article completes the volume by challenging the parameters of maritime history. In contending that the water-based system of belief of the Ojibwa nation of North America – epitomised by the birch-bark canoe – was a maritime cultural landscape, as defined by Christer Westerdahl in 1992, Knoerl poses a significant question: how far inland does the influence of the sea permeate?