Category: Uncategorized

Jimmy Packham writes a review of “Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling” by Jamie L. Jones

Read it at this link (requires subscription):

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714251332120

Through the mid-nineteenth century, the US whaling industry helped drive industrialization and urbanization, providing whale oil to lubricate and illuminate the country. The Pennsylvania petroleum boom of the 1860s brought cheap and plentiful petroleum into the market, decimating whale oil’s popularity. Here, from our modern age of fossil fuels, Jamie L. Jones uses literary and cultural history to show how the whaling industry held firm in US popular culture even as it slid into obsolescence. Jones shows just how instrumental whaling was to the very idea of “energy” in American culture and how it came to mean a fusion of labor, production, and the circulation of power. She argues that dying industries exert real force on environmental perceptions and cultural imaginations.

Analyzing a vast archive that includes novels, periodicals, artifacts from whaling ships, tourist attractions, and even whale carcasses, Jones explores the histories of race, labor, and energy consumption in the nineteenth-century United States through the lens of the whaling industry’s legacy. In terms of how they view power, Americans are, she argues, still living in the shadow of the whale.

Book Details

Read the recent article by Jaco Koehler in the IJMH (requires subscription): “The Batavia disaster: A new scenario to explain the massacre after the shipwreck”

https://doi.org/10.1177/08438714251326015

Abstract

On 4 June 1629, the Batavia was wrecked at the Houtman Abrolhos. After the shipwreck, more than 100 survivors were murdered. The senior merchant Francisco Pelsaert prosecuted the murderers and presented evidence that the murders were planned before the shipwreck. In this article, the trial against the murderers is re-examined using a scenario approach, which provides a framework for rational thinking about evidence and proof in a criminal case. Based on insights from this approach and findings on the impact of waterboarding, the reader learns that another scenario provides a better explanation for what happened. In that scenario, there was no premeditated mutiny. Instead, famine and water scarcity served as catalysts for mass murder. The collapse of existing forms of authority and social organization allowed a group of survivors to seize power and start a massacre. In the final section of the article, the potential of the scenario approach for analysing historical trial records is discussed.

Read a review by Joyce P. Kaufman of the recent book “A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China” by Dale C. Copeland.

The text is available at this link (requires subscription):

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714251332121

When the Cold War ended, many believed that expanding trade would usher in an era of peace. Yet today the United States finds itself confronting not just Russia in Europe but China in the Indo-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America. Shedding new light on how trade both reduces and increases the risks of international crisis, A World Safe for Commerce traces how, since the nation’s founding, the United States has consistently moved from peace to conflict when the commerce needed for national security is under threat.

Dale Copeland shows how commerce pushes the United States and its rivals to expand their spheres of influence for access to goods even as they worry about provoking a breakdown in trade relations that could spiral into military conflict. Taking readers from the wars with Britain in 1776 and 1812 to World War II and the Cold War, he describes how America’s leaders have grappled with this inherent tension, and why they have shifted, sometimes dramatically, from peaceful, mutually beneficial policies to coercion and force in order to increase control over vital trade and prevent economic decline.

A World Safe for Commerce reveals how trade competition could lead the United States and China into full-scale confrontation. But it also offers hope that both sides can work to improve their overall trade expectations and foster the confidence needed for long-term peace and stability.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172552/a-world-safe-for-commerce?srsltid=AfmBOoo5ZqbatsQByYifF6hwPNLEHz39VoEUQO5eyXw_l-4mFIr8XHEG

Daria Dahpon Ho publishes a review of the recent book by Melissa Macauley, Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China’s Maritime Frontier

Read it online (requires subscription) at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714251332122

China has conventionally been considered a land empire whose lack of maritime and colonial reach contributed to its economic decline after the mid-eighteenth century. Distant Shores challenges this view, showing that the economic expansion of southeastern Chinese rivaled the colonial ambitions of Europeans overseas.

In a story that dawns with the Industrial Revolution and culminates in the Great Depression, Melissa Macauley explains how sojourners from an ungovernable corner of China emerged among the commercial masters of the South China Sea. She focuses on Chaozhou, a region in the great maritime province of Guangdong, whose people shared a repertoire of ritual, cultural, and economic practices. Macauley traces how Chaozhouese at home and abroad reaped many of the benefits of an overseas colonial system without establishing formal governing authority. Their power was sustained instead through a mosaic of familial, fraternal, and commercial relationships spread across the ports of Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Swatow. The picture that emerges is not one of Chinese divergence from European modernity but rather of a convergence in colonial sites that were critical to modern development and accelerating levels of capital accumulation.

A magisterial work of scholarship, Distant Shores reveals how the transoceanic migration of Chaozhouese laborers and merchants across a far-flung maritime world linked the Chinese homeland to an ever-expanding frontier of settlement and economic extraction.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691213484/distant-shores?srsltid=AfmBOopbeEdklKyWemrKfssI4TZBSw8JZpuuNkvydrSD-aP3rhGcIgjQ

Ilias Bissias publishes in the forthcoming issue of the IJMH an article titled “Why do professional associations change their strategies? Transformation and adaptability in Greek shipowners’ collective representation after the fall of the Greek military dictatorship”

Read it in OnlineFirst at

https://doi.org/10.1177/08438714251330704

The 1970s was a decade when societies, especially in Europe, demanded more extroversion, transparency and social responsibility from state and private organisations. In this context, the Greek shipowning community’s strategic shift and willingness to cooperate with the state and trade unions in Greece reflected the collaborative spirit that prevailed globally at that time. This study aims to examine the reasons behind this negative sentiment expressed by the post-dictatorship Greek political system and the Athenian press, its impact on the collective representation bodies of Greek shipowners and the strategy the Union of Greek Shipowners chose to adopt in order to turn the tide.

https://journals.sagepub.com/…/10.1177/08438714251330704

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Robert Winstanley-Chesters’s review of “Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape” by Satsuki Takahashi

Book Review: Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape by Satsuki Takahashi – Robert Winstanley-Chesters, 2025

A probe of the environmental and sociocultural effects of industrialization and nuclear disaster on coastal livelihoods

Both before and after the 2011 “Triple Disaster” of earthquake, tidal wave, and consequent meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, anthropologist Satsuki Takahashi visited nearby communities, collecting accounts of life and livelihoods along the industrialized seascape. The resulting environmental ethnography examines the complex relationship between commercial fishing families and the Joban Sea—once known for premium-quality fish and now notorious as the location of the world’s worst nuclear catastrophe. Fukushima Futures follows postwar Japan’s maritime modernization from the perspectives of those most entangled with its successes and failures. In response to unrelenting setbacks, including an earlier nuclear accident at neighboring Tokaimura and the oil spills of stranded tankers during typhoons, these communities have developed survival strategies shaped by the precarity they share with their marine ecosystem. The collaborative resilience that emerges against this backdrop of vulnerability and uncertainty challenges the progress-bound logic of futurism, bringing more hopeful possibilities for the future into sharper focus.

Fukushima Futures

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Kalliopi Vasilaki’s review of “Atlas de la navigation en France à la veille de la Révolution: Une effervescence portuaire” by Silvia Marzagalli

Book Review: Atlas de la navigation en France à la veille de la Révolution: Une effervescence portuaire by Silvia Marzagalli – Kalliopi Vasilaki, 2025

Based on several tens of thousands of historical records of ship departures and arrivals of all sizes, this book offers, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of the bustling activity along the French coastlines on the eve of the Revolution. Drawing on 90 previously unpublished maps and a rich collection of illustrations, it sheds new light on lesser-known aspects of navigation and challenges a number of commonly held assumptions.

As the pages unfold, the reader will discover the unique journey of a vessel, the extent of trade from a particular port or province, the flags under which this commerce was conducted, and the various types of navigation that defined maritime traffic in France at the end of a century marked by strong commercial growth in an increasingly interconnected world. From smuggling to fishing, from colonial and slave trade to salt expeditions, from voyages beyond the Cape of Good Hope to passenger transport in the Mediterranean, the text offers a clear and educational account of the extraordinary variety of activities that animated French ports, and of the wide diversity that characterized them—while also illustrating how the historian works, confronted with the gaps and uncertainties inherent in the sources.

Marzagalli Silvia – Atlas de la navigation en France à la veille de la Révolution

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Erica Heinsen-Roach’s review of “Merchants on the Mediterranean: Ottoman–Dutch Trade in the Eighteenth Century” by Despina Vlami

https://journals.sagepub.com/…/10.1177/08438714241307850

How easy and uncomplicated was it for an 18th-century, medium-sized, Ottoman trade company to expand its business in the West? Which kind of resources, in terms of knowledge, information, experience, contacts and capital, could guarantee its successful passage from the business environment of a precapitalist oriental market to that of a major commercial and financial center of western Europe?

Following the venture of the Ottoman Greek merchants Bartholo and Raphael Cardamici, who in the 1760s traded goods between Smyrna, Constantinople and Amsterdam, Despina Vlami investigates various aspects of the organization and strategy necessary for such an important transition. To expand their wholesale trade business to Amsterdam, the Cardamicis chose as their local correspondent an experienced and strong-minded Dutch merchant, Thomas De Vogel. De Vogel’s letters addressed to his Ottoman clients reveal the course of their business transactions and the making of their personal relationship. At the same time, they are comprehensive and efficient tutorials on trade business and strategy guiding the Ottoman Greek merchants through the unpredictable and unfamiliar 18th-century international business universe.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/…/merchants-on-the…/

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Marta García Garralón’s review of “Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World” by Carrie L. Ruiz and Elena Rodríguez-Guridi, eds.

Book Review: Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World by Carrie L. Ruiz and Elena Rodríguez-Guridi, eds. – Marta García Garralón, 2025

Seafaring activity for trade and travel was dominant throughout the Spanish Empire, and in the worldview and imagination of its inhabitants, the specter of shipwreck loomed large. Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World probes this preoccupation by examining portrayals of nautical disasters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish literature and culture. The essays collected here showcase shipwreck’s symbolic deployment to question colonial expansion and transoceanic trade; to critique the Christian enterprise overseas; to signal the collapse of dominant social order; and to relay moral messages and represent socio-political debates. The contributors find examples in poetry, theater, narrative fiction, and other print artifacts, and approach the topic variously through the lens of historical, literary, and cultural studies. Ultimately demonstrating how shipwrecks both shaped and destabilized perceptions of the Spanish Empire worldwide, this analytically rich volume is the first in Hispanic studies to investigate the darker side of mercantile and imperial expansion through maritime disaster.

Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World – Bucknell University Press