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This essay addresses Chinese maritime history and investigates a range of topics, including the international nature of research in Chinese maritime history; new archives and recent research in shipping and shipbuilding; maritime trade; ports and port cities; and maritime communities. It also focuses on Mitsubishi-Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) and China Merchants' Steam Navigation Company, two major Chinese and Japanese merchant shipping companies and provides suggestions on future directions of maritime history in East Asia.

This chapter discusses the significance of the shift in seaborne commerce regulation from the Maritime Trade Commission (Shibosi) to Maritime Customs (Haiguan). Compared with the former system, confined to few major ports, the Maritime Customs system produced a network of management covering a larger number and different scales of ports and thus opened the way to the growth of private trade. Not only did this enable southeastern China—the heart of the Qing economy—to open up to Europe and other Asian states but it also encouraged both Chinese private trade and the triangle trade between China, Southeast Asia, and Japan. This trade prospered into the early nineteenth century, integrating China, especially its coastal region, into the East Asian trade network and the global economy.

Specialist trades within the shipping industry rose to prominence in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The activities of the specialist Liverpool trade associations that sprang up as a result are housed in this collections. The records cover the following associations:- British Liner Committee; Canadian Atlantic Freight Secretariat; Liverpool Ship Owners’ Association; The Liverpool Steamship Owners’ Association; Shipping Federation, Liverpool and Mersey District; National Maritime Board; Employers’ Association of the Port of Liverpool; Marine Insurance Associations; Liverpool and London Steam Ship Protection and Indemnity Association; Liverpool and London War Risks Insurance Association; Liverpool Underwriters Association; Liverpool Cold Storage Association; The Liverpool Corn Trade Association; Liverpool Cotton Association; Liverpool Provision Trade Association; and The Sugar Association of Lancashire.

This essay provides a complex review and analysis of existing work on Ibero-American naval, colonial, and independent maritime history. Countries discussed include Spain, Portugal, South America, and others across the Caribbean and Latin America.

This chapter provides a record on individual seafarers of all ranks, mostly originating from Liverpool, who held positions ranging from captain and lieutenant to sailmaker and greaser. The chapter provides an archive of resources concerning the seafaring career, including personal certificates, obituaries, diary extracts, interviews and correspondence letters. In doing so, it highlights the difficulties in obtaining official records from a British seaman’s career and analyses the usefulness and reliability of general registries and crew lists.

The arrival of the Spanish naval expedition in the Philippines in 1521 CE transformed the archipelago from a series of small and fragmented ports and polities engaged in Southeast Asian intra-regional trade into a locus of a maritime trade network on a global scale. Manila became an entrepôt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries due to the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade, which ran for 250 years and linked the eastern and western worlds through the exchange of tangible trading commodities and technology as well as ideas, beliefs, and traditions. This chapter provides a brief historical background of the maritime trade in the Philippines, with special focus on the Manila galleon trade. It also provides a summary of the excavation results of Philippine underwater sites that have been dated to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The shipwrecks include the Manila galleons San Diego, Nuestra Señora de la Vida, Encarnación, and San José as well as other shipwrecks: Española, Marinduque, Royal Captain Shoal, and San Isidro. These vessels carried both peoples of different nationalities and a wide range of trading and utilitarian goods, and they provided valuable information on the diversity and complexity of maritime trade in the Philippines at this time.

This introductory chapter provides brief descriptions of the roles of merchants, shipbrokers and agents, and defines stevedoring and porterage. The chapter focuses in particular on the maritime development of Liverpool from the eighteenth century and uses resources from Merseyside Maritime Museum to provide records and accounts of merchants, ship brokers and agents, and stevedoring and warehousing companies.

This chapter describes Spain’s relationship with the sea over the years 1570 to 1870. The article concentrates on the reported numbers of sailors working in Spanish fleets and discusses their lives; characteristics; culture; origin; salaries and recruitment process. Also discussed in the chapter is the involvement of the government; group formation and striking; and mobility between seafaring careers.

This chapter is a study of maritime trade during the ‘mercantilism’ period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It explores the way oceans functioned as highways for ships, people, and commodities, and briefly introduces the Newfoundland fish trade in the eighteenth century - the framework through which the rest of the journal approaches the subject of maritime trade. It offers an overview of the developments in commodity trade in the period, primarily in the Atlantic community; the environment factors such as wind or current patterns that plagued sailing vessels; the risks inherent to ocean voyages during the period; the way family and kinship influenced maritime commerce; the types of trade undertaken; the safeguarding of investments; and the increase in both the military and government presence in maritime trade affairs. It concludes that in order to fully understand the importance of oceanic highways the intricacies of the land-sea relationship must be considered in detail.

This chapter outlines the development of shipbuilding in Liverpool during the late seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. It discusses the city’s initial success in the business but reports that due to high costs, competition from Sunderland and Canada, and a lack of demand, the 1890s saw the end of shipbuilding in Liverpool. The chapter also provides a detailed archive on Merseyside based shipbuilding, ship-repairing, and engineering companies, as well as a record on related trade businesses, such as supplying and manufacturing. Included in the collection of records are advertisements; wage books; engineering drawings; operational records; accounts; deeds; registers; ship specifications; and letters.

This chapter contains a detailed record of seven Liverpool-based families and their involvement in the city’s historical maritime economy. The report focuses on the social and economic lives of the Cropper, Earle, Crosbie-Oates, Danson, Stubbs, Mather and Laird families, and uses the family’s business and social affairs to provide an insight into slave trade; abolition; maritime law; shipping trade; the palm oil trade with West Africa; and emigration to Ireland and America. Resources featured include letters; minutes taken; estate deeds and family papers; business papers; newspaper clippings; accounts; diary extracts and travel journals; scrapbooks; and printed pamphlets.

This chapter explores the lives and social status of seamen in the Southern Netherlands and Belgium, and provides insight on the respective country’s labour market. It sheds light on the sailor recruitment process; influence of the industrial revolution on maritime growth; the government’s attitude toward maritime affairs; size of merchant fleets and the navy; working conditions; wages; and opportunities for promotion.

A bibliography of post-graduate theses concerning General and National Shipping Studies, subdivided into the following eras:- Ancient and Medieval; 1492-1700; 1700-1815; 1815-1914; and the Twentieth century until 1990.

This chapter concerns the Anglo-American efforts to reach an agreement regarding their colonial activities on the West African coast. It discusses Lord Palmerston’s foreign policy in relation to the slave trade; America’s economic interest in West Africa; escalating difficulties in Anglo-American diplomacy; the Webster-Ashburn treaty, Quintuple treaty, and the Tucker-Paine agreement. Rather than escalate confrontation over disagreements, both Britain and America used their navies to further their goals peacefully, proving sea power to be a useful mechanism in international diplomacy.

This chapter addresses Danish maritime history over 300 years, from 1570 to 1870. It reports ship and crew sizes in the Danish merchant marine, deep-sea fishery and whaling industries, and describes the voyage patterns of the merchant marine. While the article acknowledges the wealth of existing literature on shipping routes and cargoes, types of ships, and political aspects of Danish participation in international shipping, it also recognises that Danish sailors and their lives have been allotted little room in literature on Danish maritime history. Therefore, this article attempts to ask who the sailors were, and employs research into their nationality, ages, wages and range of experience. The chapter also looks at the role Danish sailors played in European and overseas maritime trade markets.