Maritime Humanities, 1400-1800: Cultures of the Sea
About the Book Series
Early modern oceans not only provided temperate climates, resources, and opportunities for commercial exchange, they also played a central role in cultural life. This period of history was marked by increased exploration, travel, and trade, and early modern seascapes were cultural spaces and contact zones, where connections and circulations occurred outside established centres of control and the dictates of individual national histories. Likewise, coastlines, rivers, and ports were all key sites for commercial and cultural exchange.
Interdisciplinary in its approach, Maritime Humanities, 1400-1800: Cultures of the Sea welcomes books from across the full range of humanities subjects, and invites submissions that conceptually engage with issues of globalization, post-colonialism, eco-criticism, environmentalism, and the histories of science and technology. The series puts maritime humanities at the centre of a transnational historiographical scholarship that seeks to transform traditional land-based histories of states and nations by focusing on the cultural meanings of the early modern ocean.
If you are interested in making a proposal, please contact:
Claire Jowitt, Series Editor: [email protected]
John McAleer, Series Editor: [email protected]
Piracy Mythmaking in the Eighteenth Century: Criminality, Human Nature, and Civil Government
1st Edition
By Richard Frohock
May 21, 2026
Piracy Mythmaking in the Eighteenth Century: Criminality, Human Nature, and Civil Government focuses on the figure of the pirate as a literary phenomenon in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Taking a cultural studies approach, it complements historical studies of piracy by ...
Material Culture in the Swedish Navy, c. 1450-1850
1st Edition
Edited
By Simon Ekström, Niklas Eriksson, Anna Maria Forssberg, Leos Müller
May 06, 2026
Nearly 400 years have passed since the naval ship Vasa sank in Stockholm in 1628, and more than sixty years since its salvage in 1961. Today, Vasa stands as an iconic symbol – a ship, a shipwreck, a museum, and a unique manifestation of the material culture of Sweden’s early modern navy. But Vasa ...
Knowledge Exchanges Between Portugal and Europe: Maritime Diplomacy, Espionage, and Nautical Science in the Early Modern World (15th-17th Centuries)
1st Edition
By Nuno Luís Vila-Santa Braga Campos
December 01, 2025
Following recent historiographical appeals on the need to study knowledge exchanges between European maritime rivals and their impact on overseas expansionist processes, this book makes this study for the Portuguese overseas empire between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. As the first ...
Exploration, Religion and Empire in the Sixteenth-century Ibero-Atlantic World: A New Perspective on the History of Modern Science
1st Edition
By Mauricio Nieto Olarte
December 01, 2025
The Iberian conquest of the Atlantic at the beginning of the sixteenth century had a notable impact on the formation of the new world order in which Christian Europe claimed control over most a considerable part of the planet. This was possible thanks to the confluence of different and inseparable ...
Maritime Musicians and Performers on Early Modern English Voyages: The Lives of the Seafaring Middle Class
1st Edition
By James Seth
December 01, 2025
Maritime Musicians and Performers on Early Modern English Voyages aims to tell the full story of early English shipboard performers, who have been historically absent from conversations about English navigation, maritime culture, and economic expansion. Often described reductively in voyaging ...
Shipwreck Hauntography: Underwater Ruins and the Uncanny
1st Edition
By Sara Rich
December 01, 2025
Drawing on a broad theoretical range from speculative realism to feminist psychoanalysis and anti-colonialism, this book represents a radical departure from traditional scholarship on maritime archaeology. Shipwreck Hauntography asserts that nautical archaeology bears the legacy of Early Modern ...
The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain
1st Edition
Edited
By Richard Blakemore, James Davey
December 01, 2025
Britain's emergence as one of Europe's major maritime powers has all too frequently been subsumed by nationalistic narratives that focus on operations and technology. This volume, by contrast, offers a daring new take on Britain's maritime past. It brings together scholars from a range of ...
The Problem of Piracy in the Early Modern World: Maritime Predation, Empire, and the Construction of Authority at Sea
1st Edition
Edited
By John Coakley, Nathan Kwan, David Wilson
December 01, 2025
In the early modern period, both legal and illegal maritime predation was a common occurrence, but the expansion of European maritime empires exacerbated existing and created new problems of piracy across the globe. This collection of original case studies addresses these early modern problems in ...
Practices and Narratives of Early Modern Piracy: Connecting the Seas, 1550–1800
1st Edition
Edited
By Susanne Gruss, Marcus Hartner
September 22, 2025
Rather than looking at different manifestations of early modern piracy as geographically and temporally isolated cultural phenomena, Practices and Narratives of Early Modern Piracy: Connecting the Seas (1550–1800) pursues a comprehensive approach to this field of study. This volume investigates the...
Nautical Rutters and New Bodies of Knowledge in the Age of the First Globalization, 1400-1600
1st Edition
Edited
By Luis Ribeiro, David Salomoni, Henrique Leitão
August 06, 2025
The European maritime expansion of the fifteenth century reshaped global politics, economies, and perceptions of space. Central to this transformation was the mastery of long-distance sea routes and the development of rutters—technical documents recording navigational data and geographic ...