Abstract
Readers with any knowledge and understanding of academic maritime history will join me in mourning the passing of Professor Peter N. Davies in March 2020 at the age of 92. Peter was not only a fine scholar of the maritime dimension of economic history, but also one of the key architects of maritime history during its emergence as a sub-discipline in the final third of the twentieth century. Specialising in shipping and commercial history, initially of shipowning in Liverpool and that port’s trade with West Africa, and then Japanese shipping and shipbuilding, Peter served the University of Liverpool with distinction as researcher, teacher and academic manager over many decades before and after his retirement in the 1990s. One of Peter’s great assets was his skill in dealing with people; as countless colleagues will concur, he was invariably friendly and engaging in conversation, and especially supportive of the work and careers of young and new researchers. For further insights into Peter’s career and contributions, see the obituaries by Robert Lee and Stig Tenold published in the May 2020 issue of the IMHA Newsletter (https://imha.info/newsletter/).
I am sure Peter Davies would have been pleased to read the articles and notes that comprise this issue of the International Journal of Maritime History for two main reasons. First, the majority of the papers that follow were authored by ‘early career’ researchers, a constituency that established maritime historians have been notably adept at encouraging through mentorship, publication advice, and conference and seminar opportunities. In this category we have the ‘blue humanities’ work of Amanda Bosworth, who reflects on the records generated by a cooper on an American whaler that provide an account of the oil returned in the barrels he created, as well as an archive that has the potential to inform the appraisals that historians seek to create. Likewise, Kristof Loockx’s article, which offers a quantitative analysis of the geographical origins of seafarers in Belgium’s nineteenth-century merchant fleet, Lif Jacobsen’s study of state entrepreneurship in the trawl fisheries of New South Wales, and Pablo Ortega-del-Cerro’s examination of the professionalisation of Portugal’s eighteenth-century naval officer corps, are all drawn from recently completed doctoral theses. Second, Peter Davies would have been delighted by the Forum on ‘Piracy and Occasional State Power’ that appears in this volume, for this five-paper themed collection had its origins in a conference on ‘The Problem of Piracy’ held at Strathclyde University in July 2019. In turn, this highly successful meeting had its genesis in the work of the International Postgraduate Port and Maritime Studies Group, an initiative largely sponsored by Liverpool’s Port and Maritime History Centre, which Peter was instrumental in establishing in the late 1990s. While organising groups and conferences is an important part of academic work – a fact highlighted by the cessation of such activity due to the Covid-19 pandemic – the quality and originality of the research outputs they yield remains a critical measure of their success. In this regard, the conference papers transformed into journal articles by the editors of the Forum – John Coakley, Nathan Kwan and David Wilson – indicate that the event they carefully convened and managed was highly effective in contributing to our understanding of the generally problematical relationship between pirates and states in maritime theatres across the globe and through time.