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REVIEW ESSAY
TIDAL WAVES: THE NEW COASTAL HISTORY
| By Isaac Land |
Indiana State University |
| The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815. By N.A.M. Rodger (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. lxv plus 907 pp.).Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution. By Paul A. Gilje (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. xiv plus 344 pp.).The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century.
By Kathleen Wilson. (London: Routledge, 2003. xiii plus 282 pp.).A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire. Edited by Kathleen Wilson. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xv plus 385 pp.).Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1660–1857. By Michael H. Fisher. (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004. xvi plus 487 pp.).
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| The year 2007 will mark twenty years since the publication of Marcus Rediker's Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo- American Maritime World, 1700–1750. This provocative and well-written book introduced a generation of historians to the special problems presented by the social history of seafarers. In the tradition of Edward Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, Rediker placed labor relations and class conflict in a cultural context, emphasizing how life on a deep-sea sailing vessel created unique conditions, isolating captain and crew alike from the norms of society and fostering new forms of consciousness. Not surprisingly for a book that relied heavily upon the proceedings of admiralty courts, Devil and the Deep Blue Sea portrayed a maritime world riven with conflict, ranging from disputes about wages and mistreatment all the way to outright mutiny and whole crews that turned pirate. |
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Today, a book on this topic would undoubtedly have "Atlantic" somewhere in the title.1 Rediker's less ambitious reference to "the Anglo-American Maritime World" (and to the "North Atlantic" in his first chapter) actually seems prescient considering the charges leveled at the self-proclaimed "Atlantic History" that has flourished over the last decade. Some critics suggest that it is little more than imperial history under another name. Others have argued that it is simultaneously too big (pretending to subsume the southern Atlantic continents, Africa and Latin America, without seriously engaging with them) and too small (arbitrarily isolating the Atlantic from other bodies of water).2 Rediker's "North Atlantic" perspective turned out to be surprisingly broad, encompassing a string of port cities stretching from the Baltic to as far afield as the East Indies, but the spatial parameters of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea were—in another sense—far more constricted, focusing on the cramped quarters of the ocean-going vessel. Devil began with a chapter on ports, but was organized as a progressive journey away from land, until the final chapter—on pirates—established a self-sufficient maritime society that rejected terrestrial laws and customs. The boundaries that mattered most to Rediker were not the outlines of an ocean basin but the "wooden world" of the ship itself, defined and delimited by the surrounding water. He can probably claim some credit for establishing the trend in academic publishing of putting a ship at sea on the book's cover as a metonym for oceanic history. |
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Four of the five books under review feature ships on the cover as well, which is somewhat misleading since each of them, in their own way, falls into a category that might be called "coastal" history. None is strictly an oceanic project. In fact, several of them devote considerable effort to developing alternate metonyms— such as the waterfront, the island, or the beach—for the encounter with oceanic space. This quest for an alternative vision has its origins in the critical reception of Rediker's book. Devil was hailed as innovative and imaginative, but immediately drew fire for its portrait of sailors as a proletariat in the making. Rediker's preoccupation with the overdetermined space of the ship, with its fixed routines and draconian disciplinary practices, predictably produced an overdetermined narrative. |
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