Graydon Henning’s passing leaves the international scholarly community in the field of maritime history not only with the loss of an important scholar, academic instructor, and for many a friend to be missed dearly but also with the loss of an important co-architect of today’s landscape of international scholarly maritime history organizations. As the last President of the International Commission of Maritime History (ICMH) his work was critical for the amalgamation of ICMH and the former International Maritime Economic History Association (IMEHA) into today’s International Maritime History Association (IMHA).

I met Graydon first time at the 19^th International Congress of Historical Sciences in Oslo in the year 2000. ICMH, at this time an affiliate of the International Congress of Historical Sciences (CISH/ICHS) had organized a conference to be held as part of the main congress and I was lucky enough to be invited to present a paper on the subject of my PhD thesis. Over 2000 historians gathered at one conference was overwhelming but meeting Graydon and other senior maritime history scholars felt immediately like coming to a group of welcoming mentors. Not sure how it happened, but despite of being a very junior scholar I became part of an informal meeting where Graydon together with the late Skip Fischer and some other silverbacks were chatting about potential publication venues for the maritime history papers presented at the congress. While I had expected a certain sort of parish-pump politics between the different maritime history associations, I needed immediately to realize that Graydon always strongly advocated for the best option for the respective paper/author regardless of if directly in the interest of the organization or not.

A couple of years later Graydon had become President of ICMH, and I had the honor of serving as Secretary General of this organization which was in fact an international umbrella organization for the various national umbrella organizations in the field of maritime history. IMEHA on the other hand was an organization always based on individual membership of maritime historians but de-facto the members being active in both organizations were a small group often simply changing hats to decide if they were representing one or the other group. Wearing many hats might be attractive to some but Graydon was definitely not interested in such a fashion but in the best organizational structure to achieve a certain goal. Consequently, he realized at a certain moment that the parallel structure of having one international maritime history organization that was an international umbrella of national umbrella organizations and another one that was based on individual membership made no real sense or was a structure that was overly complex for a comparable small academic discipline. Thus, Graydon developed the idea of an amalgamation of the two organizations into one. As always, such an idea was not easy to accept for everybody, especially as IMEHA was dealing exclusively with maritime economic history while ICMH was dealing with maritime history at large. As this was taking place before the advent of zoom, teams or any other easily available teleconferencing system, it is hard to believe how Graydon successfully managed to bring everybody on the ICMH side of the equation on board and that he was able doing so is just another witness for me on his qualities as an academic and organizational leader who always put achieving the best result for the discipline above everything else. When in 2016 the International Congress of Maritime History came to his home country Australia, the time was ripe for him to achieve his major goal and at the same time to personally give up all international offices without any hesitation. In Perth the General Assembly of IMEHA and representatives of ICMH decided not only for the amalgamation of the two institutions into one unified global organization for all maritime history scholars but also to drop the E(conomics) from the name of the organization and make the new organization the International Maritime History Association. Persistent organizational work had finally come to a conclusion that substantially simplified the landscape of international organizations within the field of international maritime history with Graydon being to a large extent being responsible for this development. Despite of him being the co-architect of the new organizational landscape and thus being a clear candidate for a leadership position in the new amalgamated organization, he decided that leadership should be handed over to a new generation and did not put in a candidacy for any of the new leadership positions. Malcolm Tull became the first president of IMHA and I was elected as secretary after having held the position of secretary of ICMH already since 2009.

Again, Graydon clearly showed that humbleness was a main part of his character and the legacy for Malcolm and me was clearly set as never putting an organizational structure or an association per se above the aims and goals of such an organization.

Having worked with Graydon for many years in the context of international scholarly associations and having co-organized with him a variety of international conferences organized by ICMH within the complex framework of CISH/ICHS I need to admit today that I am mourning the loss of a senior colleague, mentor and friend and am thankful for his leadership and showing by living example how to lead an international association. Many of today’s colleagues in the field of maritime history never had the opportunity to meet Graydon and might not even have heard his name but today’s landscape of international scholarly organizations with only one organization representing all maritime history research instead of a variety of organizations with doubled responsibilities goes clearly back to his efforts. I mentioned humbleness as one of Graydon’s main character traits and thinking that he had finally set sail for his last journey to the unknown makes me humble when remembering him and all the projects he had worked on in the context of restructuring international organizations in the field of maritime history. Let us hope that we can follow his example of always adjusting the structures of international organizations to contemporary and future needs and in understanding that such organizations are never an end in itself but a tool to support research in maritime history and to help a younger generation of maritime historians with their research and international scholarly cooperation.

Ingo Heidbrink

President

International Maritime

History Association (IMHA)