IMHA

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Graham Moore’s review of “Cultural Representations of Piracy in England, Spain and the Caribbean: Travelers, Traders, and Traitors, 1570 to 1604” by Mariana-Cecilia Velázquez

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714241306498

This book examines the concept of piracy as an instrument for the advancement of legal, economic, and political agendas associated with early modern imperial conflicts in the Caribbean.

Drawing on historical accounts, literary texts, legal treatises, and maps, the book traces the visual and narrative representations of Sir Francis Drake, who serves as a case study to understand the various usages of the terms “pirate” and “corsair.” Through a comparative analysis, the book considers the connotations of the categories related to maritime predation—pirate, corsair, buccaneer, and filibuster—and nationalistic and religious denominations—Lutheran, Catholic, heretic, Spaniard, English, and Creole—to argue that the flexible usage of these terms corresponds to unequal colonial and imperial relations and ideological struggles.

The book chronologically records the process by which piracy changed from an unregulated phenomenon to becoming legally defined after the Treaty of London (1604) and the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). The research demonstrates that as piracy grew less ambiguous through legal and linguistic standardization, the concept of piracy lost its polemical utility.

This interdisciplinary volume is ideal for researchers working in piracy studies, early modern history, and imperial history.

https://www.routledge.com/Cultural-Representations-of-Piracy-in-England-Spain-and-the-Caribbean-Travelers-Traders-and-Traitors-1570-to-1604/Velazquez/p/book/9780367693572?srsltid=AfmBOopVP4g1LdHu2hOc79-0vTskJaEDJi-d1FsMV4Fhz_pd6lz8bDhd

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Sara Caputo’s review of “The Naval Government of Newfoundland in the French Wars 1793–1815” by John Morrow

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714241307438

Exploring the professional and political ideas of Newfoundland naval governors during the French Wars, this book traces the evolution of the Naval Governorship and administration of the region, shedding a light on a critical period of its early modern history.

Contextualising Newfoundland as part of Britain’s broader Atlantic Empire, Morrow focuses on the years 1793-1815 as it transitioned from a largely migratory fishery and ‘nursery of seaman’ to a colonial settlement with a resident British and Irish population. With a diversifying economy and growing demography amidst the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the governors of Newfoundland faced a unique set of challenges. Drawing upon various primary and secondary sources, Morrow provides a comprehensive account of their responses to the perceived needs of those they governed – both settler and indigenous – and reveals the professional attitudes and attributes they brought to bear on both their civil and military responsibilities.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/naval-government-of-newfoundland-in-the-french-wars-9781350383197/

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Dan Swanbeck’s review of “Phoenicians among Others: Why Migrants Mattered in the Ancient Mediterranean” by Denise Demetriou

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714241306490

Phoenicians among Others provides the first history of Phoenician immigrants in the ancient Mediterranean from the fourth to the first centuries bce. Through an examination of inscriptions, many bilingual in Phoenician and Greek or Egyptian, Phoenicians among Others demonstrates how mobility and migration challenged migrants and states alike. Far from being excluded, and despite facing prejudices, immigrants mobilized adaptive strategies to mediate their experiences and encourage a sense of membership and belonging, constructed new identities, and transformed the societies they joined. By integrating the voices and histories of immigrants with those of the states in which they lived, the book demonstrates the diverse ways migrants influenced the development of societies, introduced new institutions, shaped the policies of their home and host states, made notions of citizenship more fluid, and changed the course of local, regional, and Mediterranean histories.

https://academic.oup.com/book/46470

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Cory Davis’ review of “On the Waves of Empire: U.S. Imperialism and Merchant Sailors, 1872–1924” by William D. Riddell

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714241309507

This book explores how class conflict shaped U.S. imperial expansion between the 1870s and 1920s. It shows how class struggle between white merchant sailors and shipping capital powerfully informed an emerging U.S. imperial system, and how that struggle shaped and reshaped the system’s internal and external boundaries. Sailors were among a handful of workers who crisscrossed these boundaries every time they went to work. More conceptually, this book examines where citizenship ends and subjecthood begins or, more precisely, where it overlaps. It is about whom citizenship and subjecthood overlapped within and where they overlapped–where the metropole or nation became the empire or the colony, what that meant, and why it mattered. The struggle between white merchant sailors and U.S. shipping companies demonstrates that the lines between nation and empire and foreign and domestic were contested spaces of racially inflected class conflict centered around extending the country’s racialized immigration regime to both U.S. colonial possessions and U.S. flagged merchant ships. The conflict over these imperial boundaries illustrated the real-life consequences they held for working people. These were not just abstractions. These lines often determined the type of labor systems within which workers toiled. An analytical focus on sailors also helps us see empire and imperial boundary formation as a process in motion.

https://academic.oup.com/illinois-scholarship-online/book/55632

Read in open access the “Roundtable on Seth Stein LeJacq’s Sexual and Gender Difference in the British Navy, 1690–1900, organized by Jo Stanley, with a response by LeJacq”

Based on: LeJacq Seth Stein, ed., Sexual and Gender Difference in the British Navy, 1690–1900. Abingdon: Routledge, 2024. 420pp., appendix, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-1-0324-0990-0, £115 (hbk).

https://journals.sagepub.com/…/10.1177/08438714241303796

This review contributes to the roundtable from a perspective informed by social psychology and recent queer sexology at a time when mobility and transport studies have taken a turn to emotions. It sees the Royal Navy in Britain’s most thalassocratic period, struggling to insist on shipboard regimes based on heteronormative and cisgender values. Intimate human relations and individual agency were thus positioned as secondary to institutional macro-success in imperial enterprise. The regulatory attempt to maintain such a binary order was legitimated by Christian moral values about ‘abominable crimes’ and ‘unnatural practices’, including bestiality with ships’ animals. Simply put, an optimal unit of labour was a virtuous chap who only did it with his loyal wife, and to procreate. Sodomites were hanged.

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Mollie Carlyle’s review of “Lost at Sea in Mysterious Circumstances: Vanishings and Undiscovered Shipwrecks” by M. Richard

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714241306495

When you think of something being lost at sea, you imagine a ship sinking gracefully, the survivors being rescued or a tragedy being caught on camera. But what if a ship is lost at sea without trace? What if an aircraft takes off on a routine flight and is never seen again? This book details over fifty of the most mysterious vanishings, ships that have made headlines but have never been found, both famous and forgotten cases that have left an outward ripple of tragedy and mystique.

Most people have heard of the Mary Celeste crew vanishing, but how many knew that this was not the last case of an entire crew going missing? What about the three Scottish lighthouse keepers who were never seen again? Or the world famous aviation pioneers who took flight to never return?
This book will tell you that MH370 was not the first airliner to disappear over the sea, nor was the Bermuda Triangle actually the cause of so many disappearing ships. How could six airplanes disappear in one day? Why did a ship with over 300 people on board not send a single distress call? Which ships vanished and then later messages in a bottle suddenly turn up, not just once but two separate shipwrecks?
Lost at Sea in Mysterious Circumstances will cover all these and more as we reveal the stories of some of the most fascinating incidents above and below the waves.

https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Lost-at-Sea-in-Mysterious-Circumstances-Hardback/p/23687

Read “From the oceans, via Antarctica and the Moon, to deep space: Maritime history and its relevance for outer space exploration,” a research note by Ingo Heidbrink” at the link below (requires subscription)

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714241305600

Abstract

Space exploration is often compared with the historical exploration of the globe, and especially maritime and polar exploration. This exploration converted unknown spaces into known spaces, and with this knowledge came the question of ownership and control over the newly explored spaces and the development of regulatory mechanisms for access to these spaces. This research note examines the historical development of regulatory mechanisms for newly explored spaces such as the oceans, Antarctica and outer space, and analyses the conditions required for establishing international regulatory frameworks rather than simply assigning nation-state-based sovereignty to these areas. In addition, it aims to propose a new line of inquiry and interdisciplinary cooperation for maritime historians.

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Lila O’Leary Chambers’s review of “Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic” by Matthew Francis Rarey

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714241306493

In Insignificant Things Matthew Francis Rarey traces the history of the African-associated amulets that enslaved and other marginalized people carried as tools of survival in the Black Atlantic world from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Often considered visually benign by white Europeans, these amulet pouches, commonly known as “mandingas,” were used across Africa, Brazil, and Portugal and contained myriad objects, from herbs and Islamic prayers to shells and coins. Drawing on Arabic-language narratives from the West African Sahel, the archives of the Portuguese Inquisition, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European travel and merchant accounts of the West African Coast, and early nineteenth-century Brazilian police records, Rarey shows how mandingas functioned as portable archives of their makers’ experiences of enslavement, displacement, and diaspora. He presents them as examples of the visual culture of enslavement and critical to conceptualizing Black Atlantic art history. Ultimately, Rarey looks to the archives of transatlantic slavery, which were meant to erase Black life, for objects like the mandingas that were created to protect it.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/insignificant-things

Chi Chi Huang and Alison Bashford write in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH about “Maritime geographies and the borders of disease: Three historical precedents of quarantined vessels”

Read it in open access at this link

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08438714241306832

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, vessels were suspended across the oceans, unable to dock and with passengers and crew denied local permission to disembark. These scenarios were another way in which the effects of this virus were understood to be ‘unprecedented’, seemingly disrupting existing protocols, regulations and lines of authority. However, this article historicizes the stranded cruise ship in examples from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries along Australia’s coastline. By focusing on the finer processes of maritime quarantine that have shaped this nation, the authors argue that maritime quarantine routinely worked across and between multiple authorities, almost always crossing jurisdictional boundaries. Furthermore, these processes engaged with rapidly changing information between domestic and international ports to effectively manage outbreaks of infectious diseases, frequently using the vessel’s mobility as part of the quarantine strategy.

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Vineeta Sinha’s review of “Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942–1962” by Kalyani Ramnath

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714241306479

For more than century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading goods, supplying credit, and seeking work. This all changed with the war and as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya wrested independence from the British empire. Set against the tumult of the postwar period, Boats in a Storm centers on the legal struggles of migrants to retain their traditional rhythms and patterns of life, illustrating how they experienced citizenship and decolonization. Even as nascent citizenship regimes and divergent political trajectories of decolonization papered over migrations between South and Southeast Asia, migrants continued to recount cross-border histories in encounters with the law. These accounts, often obscured by national and international political developments, unsettle the notion that static national identities and loyalties had emerged, fully formed and unblemished by migrant pasts, in the aftermath of empires.

Drawing on archival materials from India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, London, and Singapore, Kalyani Ramnath narrates how former migrants battled legal requirements to revive prewar circulations of credit, capital, and labor, in a postwar context of rising ethno-nationalisms that accused migrants of stealing jobs and hoarding land. Ultimately, Ramnath shows how decolonization was marked not only by shipwrecked empires and nation-states assembled and ordered from the debris of imperial collapse, but also by these forgotten stories of wartime displacements, their unintended consequences, and long afterlives.

https://www.sup.org/books/asian-studies/boats-storm