The first book to weave Eurasia together through the perspective of the oceans and seas "A detailed account of the growing importance of the Chinese, Indian, and Russian navies and how this competition is playing out in waters stretching from the Indo-Pacific area to the Arctic and the Mediterranean."-Lawrence D. Freedman, Foreign Affairs "It is a must-read for scholars, policymakers, and anyone interested in the great power competition."-Yongzheng Parker Li, Pacific Affairs "[E]xtremely thought-provoking and well researched."-Bruce A. Elleman, Russian Review Eurasia's emerging powers-India, China, and Russia-have increasingly embraced their maritime geographies as they have expanded and strengthened their economies, military capabilities, and global influence. Maritime Eurasia, a region that facilitates international commerce and contains some of the world's most strategic maritime chokepoints, has already caused a shift in the global political economy and challenged the dominance of the Atlantic world and the United States. Climate change is set to further affect global politics. With meticulous and comprehensive field research, Geoffrey Gresh considers how the melting of the Arctic ice cap will create new shipping lanes and exacerbate a contest for the control of Arctic natural resources. He explores as well the strategic maritime shifts under way from Europe to the Indian Ocean and Pacific Asia. The race for great power status and the earth's changing landscape, Gresh shows, are rapidly transforming Eurasia and thus creating a new world order.

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures, and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. The Aesthetics of Island Space discusses islands as central figures in the modern experience of space. It examines the spatial poetics of islands in literary texts, from Shakespeare's The Tempest to Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, in the journals of explorers and scientists such as James Cook and Charles Darwin, and in Hollywood cinema. It traces the ways in which literary and cinematic islands have functioned as malleable spatial figures that offer vivid perceptual experiences as well as a geopoetic oscillation between the material energies of words and images and the energies of the physical world. The chapters focus on America's island gateways (Roanoke and Ellis Island), visions of tropical islands (Tahiti and imagined South Sea islands), the islands of the US-Canadian border region in the Pacific Northwest, and the imaginative appeal of mutable islands. It argues that modern voyages of discovery posed considerable perceptual and cognitive challenges to the experience of space, and that these challenges were negotiated in complex and contradictory ways via poetic engagement with islands. Discussions of island narratives in postcolonial theory have broadened understanding of how islands have been imagined as geometrical abstractions, bounded spaces easily subjected to the colonial gaze. There is, however, a second story of islands in the Western imagination which runs parallel to this colonial story. In this alternative account, the modern experience of islands in the age of discovery went hand in hand with a disintegration of received models of understanding global space. Drawing on and rethinking (post-)phenomenological, geocritical, and geopoetic theories, The Aesthetics of Island Space argues that the modern experience of islands as mobile and shifting territories implied a dispersal, fragmentation, and diversification of spatial experience, and it explores how this disruption is registered and negotiated by both non-fictional and fictional responses.

The year 1588 marked a turning point in our national story. Victory over the Spanish Armada transformed us into a seafaring nation and it sparked a myth that one day would become a reality - that the nation's new destiny, the source of her future wealth and power lay out on the oceans. This book tells the story of how the navy expanded from a tiny force to become the most complex industrial enterprise on earth; how the need to organise it laid the foundations of our civil service and our economy; and how it transformed our culture, our sense of national identity and our democracy.

Brian Lavery's narrative explores the navy's rise over four centuries; a key factor in propelling Britain to its status as the most powerful nation on earth, and assesses the turning point of Jutland and the First World War. He creates a compelling read that is every bit as engaging as the TV series itself.

" Arms control remains a major international issue as the twentieth century closes, but it is hardly a new concern. The effort to limit military power has enjoyed recurring support since shortly after World War I, when the United States, Britain, and Japan sought naval arms control as a means to insure stability in the Far East, contain naval expenditure, and prevent another world cataclysm. Richard Fanning examines the efforts of American, British, and Japanese leaders -- political, military, and social -- to reach agreement on naval limitation between 1922 and the mid-1930s, with focus on the years 1927-30, when political leaders, statesmen, naval officers, and various civilian pressure groups were especially active in considering naval limits. The civilian and even some military actors believed the Great War had been an aberration and that international stability would reign in the near future. But the coming of the Great Depression brought a dramatic drop in concern for disarmament. This study, based on a wide variety of unpublished sources, compares the cultural underpinnings of the disarmament movement in the three countries, especially the effects of public opinion, through examination of the many peace groups that played an important role in the disarmament process. The decision to strive for arms control, he finds, usually resulted from peace group pressure and political expediency. For anyone interested in naval history, this book illuminates the beginnings of the arms limitation effort and the growth of the peace movement.

The voyages of Captain Cook are endlessly fascinating to a wide audience, and no aspect of them has been more controversial than Cook's death. This book reprints one of the classic accounts of this episode, the vivid and lively narrative by one of the voyage surgeons, David Samwell. This book not only makes Samwell's "Narrative of the Death of Captain James Cook" readily available for the first time, but presents it with Samwell's previously unpublished letters relating to Cook's third voyage, and his poetry. The introductory essays discuss Samwell's contribution to our understanding of this dramatic period in Pacific and maritime history, and examine the personality and career of Samwell himself.

Beyond Trawlertown takes a journey through the British distant-water fishery and its port-city connections in an era of disruption. In 1976, defeat in the Anglo-Icelandic Cod Wars saw the British trawling fleet excluded from their traditional hunting grounds. Combining with wider global factors, the move brought an end to long-established trawling practices, with profound social, economic and cultural repercussions. Through a case study of the port of Hull, oral history and archival research explore the challenges, responses and legacy of rapid change. Although the emphasis is on Hull, this is far from a local history. Hull's position among the world leading distant-water pioneers gives the story international significance. Focusing on memory, lived experience and place, the book goes beyond established narratives. Personal acts of remembering offer cultural perspectives on how global events and marine policy impact upon the seafaring communities that live with the consequences. The Cod Wars signaled an end, yet amid the disruption there were also new beginnings. And in the wake of an active fishery, the rhythms of the past continue to resonate in the negotiation of fishing heritage within the contemporary city. Through the convergence of time, place and memory, this holistic narrative of interweaving stories reveals the intricacies of our human interaction with the marine environment and the aftermath when its threads are broken.

That seafaring was fundamental to Roman prosperity in the eastern Mediterranean is beyond doubt, but a tendency by scholars to focus on the grandest long-distance movements between major cities has obscured the finer and varied contours of maritime interaction. This book offers a nuanced archaeological analysis of maritime economy and connectivity in the Roman east. Drawing together maritime landscape studies and network analysis, Roman Seas takes a bottom-up view of the diverse socioeconomic conditions and seafaring logistics that generated multiple structures and scales of interaction. The material record of shipwrecks and ports along a vital corridor from the southeast Aegean across the northeast Mediterranean provides a case study of regional exchange and communication based on routine sails between simple coastal harbors. Rather than a single well-integrated and persistent Mediterranean network, multiple discrete and evolving regional and interregional systems emerge. This analysis sheds light on the cadence of economic life along the coast, the development of market institutions, and the regional continuities that underpinned integration-despite imperial fragmentation-between the second century BCE and the seventh century CE. Roman Seas advances a new approach to the synthesis of shipwreck and other maritime archaeological and historical economic data, as well as a path through the stark dichotomies-either big commercial voyages or small-scale cabotage-that inform most paradigms of Roman connectivity and trade. The result is a unique perspective on ancient Mediterranean trade, seafaring, cultural interaction, and coastal life.

On 14th April 1912 the Titanic struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage and sank. Fifteen hundred passengers and crew lost their lives. As the order to abandon ship was given, the orchestra took their instruments on deck and continued to play. They were still playing when the ship went down. The violinist, 21 year-old Jock Hume, knew that his fiancee, Mary, was expecting their first child, the author's mother. One hundred years later, Christopher Ward reveals a dramatic story of love, loss and betrayal, and the catastrophic impact of Jock's death on two very different Scottish families. He paints a vivid portrait of an age in which class determined the way you lived - and died. An outstanding piece of historical detective work, AND THE BAND PLAYED ON is also a moving account of how the author's quest to learn more about his grandfather revealed the shocking truth about a family he thought he knew, a truth that had been hidden for nearly a hundred years.

A collection of the 40 worst mercantile disasters in history--revealing that, despite popular belief, the "Titanic" tragedy was far from being the worst disaster at sea

While the victims of the "Titanic" disaster at 1,507 persons accounted for a huge loss of life, each of the ships described in this book had a greater number of casualties, in some cases more than five times as many. In total, these 27 merchant ship sinkings resulted in a staggering loss of life at sea--more than 96,000 lives in total (3,840 per ship). While the circumstances of their losses were different than those of the "Titanic," the outcome in each was no less tragic. While it is not the intention to diminish the gravity of the "Titanic" case, these lesser-known tragedies do give "the worst disaster at sea" a sobering perspective. Despite the fact that the "Titanic" disaster ranks behind so many other losses, so powerful has her name become as a representation of extreme misfortune, that it was the inevitable choice to describe some of these other events. Hence, they have come to be known as "Germany's "Titanic"" and "The "Titanic" of Japan" as just two examples. Ships include the "Lancastria," sunk by German bombers with a loss of 3,000 British lives (Britain's worst maritime disaster); the "Ryusei Maru," a Japanese "Hellship" loaded with 6,000 Allied POWs that was torpedoed by a US submarine; and the "Wilhelm Gustloff," a German liner packed with 7,800 civilians in operation "Hannibal" evacuation, sunk by a Russian submarine. There were no survivors and this tragedy was the worst maritime disaster of all time.

Bringing together specialists in ancient history, archaeology and Roman law, this book provides new perspectives on long-distance trade in the Roman world. Recent archaeological work has shown that maritime trade across the Mediterranean intensified greatly at the same time as the Roman state was extending its power overseas. This book explores aspects of this development and its relationship with changes in the legal and institutional apparatus that supported maritime commerce. It analyses the socio-legal framework within which maritime trade was conducted, and in doing so presents a new understanding of the role played by legal and social institutions in the economy of the Roman world.Chapters cover: Roman maritime trade, the influence of commercial considerations on navigational decision making, Roman legal responses to the threat of piracy, the conduct of Roman maritime trade from a socio-legal perspective, the role of written documentation in the transport process, maritime finance and the insights provided by the juristic interpretation of contracts of carriage-by-sea into aspects of Roman private law.

A familiar sight on the Thames at London Bridge, HMS Belfast is a Royal Navy light cruiser, launched in March 1938. Belfast was part of the British naval blockade against Germany and from November 1942 escorted Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union and assisted in the destruction of the German warship Scharnhorst. In June 1944 Belfast supported the Normandy landings and in 1945 was redeployed to the British Pacific Fleet. After the war she saw action in the Korean War and a number of other overseas actions. She has been part of the Imperial War Museum since 1978, with 250,000 visitors annually.

This fascinating book comprises a series of documents that give information on the building of the ship, her wartime service history and life on board.

Report into the Loss of the SS Titanic is a complete re-evaluation of the loss of Titanic based on evidence that has come to light since the discovery of the wreck in 1985. This collective undertaking is compiled by eleven of the world's foremost Titanic researchers - experts who have spent many years examining the wealth of information that has arisen since 1912. Following the basic layout of the 1912 Wreck Commission Report, this modern report provides fascinating insights into the ship itself, the American and British inquiries, the passengers and crew, the fateful journey and ice warnings received, the damage and sinking, rescue of survivors, the circumstances in connection with the SS Californian and SS Mount Temple, and the aftermath and ramifications that followed the disaster. The book seeks to answer controversial questions, such as whether steerage passengers were detained behind gates, and also reveals the names and aliases of all passengers and crew who sailed on Titanic's maiden voyage. Containing the most extensively referenced chronology of the voyage ever assembled and featuring a wealth of explanatory charts and diagrams, as well as archive photographs, this comprehensive volume is the definitive 'go-to' reference book for this ill-fated ship.

In June 1802, the Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture was captured by special order of Napoleon Bonaparte and deported to mainland France, where he spent the remainder of his life in captivity in the prison of Fort de Joux. But Louverture, who had managed to rise from humble slave to governor of the richest of France's colonies, went down fighting. To defend his name and secure his release, he wrote a vivid account of his career. Historian Philippe Girard presents an annotated, scholarly, multilingual edition of the memoir, based on an original copy in Louverture's hand. Girard's introductory essay, based on archival research in France and the Caribbean, retraces Louverture's career in Haiti and provides a detailed narrative of the last year of Louverture's life. Girard analyzes the significance of the memoirs from a historical, literary, and linguistic perspective. Louverture's writing provides a vivid alternative perspective to anonymous plantation records, quantitative analyses of slave trading ventures, and slave narratives mediated by white authors. Though Louverture kept a stoic facade and rarely expressed his innermost thoughts and fears in writing, his memoirs are unusually emotional. He questioned whether he was targeted because of the color of his skin, bringing racism, an issue that Louverture rarely addressed head on with his white interlocutors, to the fore. The full transcript of these memoirs in both Louverture's idiosyncratic French and English helps paint a powerful yet nuanced portrait of the Haitian Revolution's most famous son as a gifted leader, a passionate advocate of slave emancipation, a loving family man, a compromising politician, a tragic hero, and an evocative author and user of Kreyol, Haiti's national language.

'An epic of survival' -- MICHAEL PALIN 'A "grade-A classic"' -- SUNDAY TIMES 'Utterly enthralling' -- GEOFF DYER, GUARDIAN 'Deeply engrossing' -- NEW YORK TIMES LISTED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, SUNDAY TIMES The harrowing, survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly wrong, with the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless, Antarctic winter August 1897: The Belgica set sail, eager to become the first scientific expedition to reach the white wilderness of the South Pole. But the ship soon became stuck fast in the ice of the Bellinghausen sea, condemning the ship's crew to overwintering in Antarctica and months of endless polar night. In the darkness, plagued by a mysterious illness, their minds ravaged by the sound of dozens of rats teeming in the hold, they descended into madness. In this epic tale, Julian Sancton unfolds a story of adventure gone horribly awry. As the crew teetered on the brink, the Captain increasingly relied on two young officers whose friendship had blossomed in captivity - Dr. Frederick Cook, the wild American whose later infamy would overshadow his brilliance on the Belgica; and the ship's first mate, soon-to-be legendary Roald Amundsen, who later raced Captain Scott to the South Pole. Together, Cook and Amundsen would plan a last-ditch, desperate escape from the ice-one that would either etch their names into history or doom them to a terrible fate in the frozen ocean. Drawing on first-hand crew diaries and journals, and exclusive access to the ship's logbook, the result is equal parts maritime thriller and gothic horror. This is an unforgettable journey into the deep.

WINNER OF THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2020 A SUNDAY TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, THE TIMES AND BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR For most of human history, the seas and oceans have been the main means of long-distance trade and communication between peoples - for the spread of ideas and religion as well as commerce. This book traces the history of human movement and interaction around and across the world's greatest bodies of water, charting our relationship with the oceans from the time of the first voyagers. David Abulafia begins with the earliest of seafaring societies - the Polynesians of the Pacific, the possessors of intuitive navigational skills long before the invention of the compass, who by the first century were trading between their far-flung islands. By the seventh century, trading routes stretched from the coasts of Arabia and Africa to southern China and Japan, bringing together the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific and linking half the world through the international spice trade. In the Atlantic, centuries before the little kingdom of Portugal carved out its powerful, seaborne empire, many peoples sought new lands across the sea - the Bretons, the Frisians and, most notably, the Vikings, now known to be the first Europeans to reach North America. As Portuguese supremacy dwindled in the late sixteenth century, the Spanish, the Dutch and then the British each successively ruled the waves. Following merchants, explorers, pirates, cartographers and travellers in their quests for spices, gold, ivory, slaves, lands for settlement and knowledge of what lay beyond, Abulafia has created an extraordinary narrative of humanity and the oceans. From the earliest forays of peoples in hand-hewn canoes through uncharted waters to the routes now taken daily by supertankers in their thousands, The Boundless Sea shows how maritime networks came to form a continuum of interaction and interconnection across the globe: 90 per cent of global trade is still conducted by sea. This is history of the grandest scale and scope, and from a bracingly different perspective - not, as in most global histories, from the land, but from the boundless seas.

This volume represents a more Africanist approach to the framework of maritime landscapes and challenges of adapting international heritage policy such as the UNESCO convention. While the concept of a maritime landscape is very broad, a more focused thematic strategy draws together a number of case studies in South Africa, Namibia, Tanzania, and Nigeria with a common thread. Specifically, the contributors address the sub-theme of sea ports and sea power as part of understanding the African maritime landscape. Sea ports and surrounds are dynamic centers of maritime culture supporting a rich diversity of cultural groups and economic activities. Strategic locations along the African coastline have associations with indigenous maritime communities and trade centers, colonial power struggles and skirmishes, establishment of naval bases and operations, and World War I and II engagements.

On 15 April 2012, 100 years will have passed since the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic hit an iceberg and foundered in the North Atlantic with the loss of 1,503 lives. Had the disaster not occurred, what is now the best-known ship in the world would have lost the title of the largest liner within just two years. She was certainly not the fastest passenger ship of the time and can be considered a technological throwback, yet Titanic captures the imagination like no other. This book seeks to explore the myths and the truth about Titanic and explores the legacy that has made the ship so well known. Why was she built? Who really owned her? Why was nobody ever proved negligent? How has today's transportation been made safer by Titanic? Have we really learned the right lessons? Perhaps not! Since 1912 there have been worse disasters yet none has replaced Titanic in the popular consciousness. Her legacy exists in procedures, building regulation, navigational practice, statues, poems, novels, movies and even a musical. This book explores why.

"Each of the twelve authors deftly plumb the depths of documentary sources, literary analyses, personal observations, biographical and historical accounts to improve vastly on the seemingly two-dimensional nature of the pirate"
--"The Great Circle: Journal of the Australian Association for Maritime History"

"With this collection, those swashbuckling heroes, or villains, ranging the wide seas in search of pillage and plunder, become individuals and groups situated firmly within their own geographic, political, economic, and historical contexts."
--"Journal of Folklore Research"

The romantic fiction of pirates as swashbuckling marauders terrorizing the high seas has long eclipsed historical fact. Bandits at Sea offers a long-overdue corrective to the mythology and the mystique which has plagued the study of pirates and served to deny them their rightful legitimacy as subjects of investigation.

With essays by the foremost scholars on these countercultural "social bandits"as Lingua Franca recently dubbed themthis collection examines various aspects of the phenomenon in the three main areas where it occurred: the Caribbean/Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and East Asia. We come to understand who pirates were, as well as the socio-economic contexts under which they developed and flourished.

Comparisons between various types of piracy illustrate differences in practice and purpose between pirates of different areas; social histories, including examinations of women pirates and their historical significance and circumstances, offer similar insight into the personal lives of pirates from diverse regions. Far from serving as dens of thieves, pirate ships were often highlyregulated microcosms of democracy. The crews of pirate vessels knew that majority rule, racial equality and equitable division of spoils were crucial for their survival, marking them as significantly more liberal than national governments.

Scholars, students and a general audience ever intrigued by talesand now truthsof piracy on the high seas will welcome Bandits at Sea.

This is a thought-provoking work, capturing the march of time which overtook the maritime world in the last quarter of the 20th century. The final crumbling of the British register caused officers like Hall to find themselves in a strange new world, sailing under flags of convenience with all the old certainties of life at sea having vanished. There is both sadness and a rage at seeing a way of life disappear forever under the wheels of commerce, made more poignant by the author himself swallowing the anchor and moving on. Expelled from Indonesia as an undesirable, medically discharged in Honolulu, confined in Nigeria, Hall's turbulent life takes him from West Africa to Japan, from Europe to the Persian Gulf to the South Pacific. At last a Master Mariner, he serves on one last break-bulk general cargo ship, before transferring to the new maritime world. The prose is as elegantly expressed as in his earlier works. Steaming along the Yemeni coast, he writes: The bleakness of the South Yemen coastline made the green sea seem sharper in contrast, almost emerald in colour.The sun sat as a bright white orb in a blue white sky, the colours scourged out by dust blown offshore from the desert interior. In a typhoon near the Macclesfield Bank: Us; wild-eyed in the wheelhouse, braced against the forward bulkhead, awaiting our fate, helpless against a show of nature's fickle anger that could take us down among the fishes before we could cry Noo-ooooo...Maturity and marriage finally see off his tendency towards alcohol abuse: I began to yearn to make myself a better person and abandon the self-serving creature I had become. Wistful, unvarnished, droll, in powerless rage against the changes, this is an important companion to Hall's previous acclaimed books, a fine work that captures, in arresting style, the life of men who go down to the sea in ships. .

In the post-war era, TS Bremen was one of the most popular liners operating across the Atlantic - but she had a remarkable wartime history. Built for the French as the SS Pasteur, in 1940 she made a dramatic escape in the face of invasion, carrying 200 tons of French gold bullion reserves to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Requisitioned by the British, she became a hospital troopship and played a major support role in the Battle of El Alamein. Indeed, Charles de Gaulle claimed that Pasteur's contribution 'significantly helped bring . . . Hitler to his ultimate end'. Her sale in 1956 to North German Lloyd Line as their final flagship - refitted and renamed Bremen - sparked protest in France, but Bremen sailed on unperturbed, now the pride of the German nation. Though she had been celebrated as one of the safest liners ever built, Filipinas Saudi 1, as she was then known, sank in 1980 in the Indian Ocean. It was a sad ending to a life filled with glamour, excitement and danger. Here Andrew Britton tells the story of this distinguished and much-loved vessel in intimate and colourful detail.

"Sea Peoples of the Bronze Age and Mediterranean" features the latest historical and archaeological research into the mysterious and powerful confederations of raiders who troubled the Eastern Mediterranean in the last half of the Bronze Age. Research into the origins of the so-called Shardana, Shekelesh, Danuna, Lukka, Peleset and other peoples is a detective 'work in progress'. However, it is known that they both provided the Egyptian pharaohs with mercenaries, and were listed among Egypt's enemies and invaders. They contributed to the collapse of several civilizations through their dreaded piracy and raids, and their waves of attacks were followed by major migrations that changed the face of this region, from modern Libya and Cyprus to the Aegean, mainland Greece, Lebanon and Anatolian Turkey. Drawing on carved inscriptions and papyrus documents - mainly from Egypt - dating from the 15th-11th centuries BC, as well as carved reliefs of Medinet Habu, this title reconstructs the formidable appearance and even the tactics of the famous 'Sea Peoples'.