Report on New Researchers in Maritime History Conference 2024

Posted: Friday 27th September 2024

The twenty-ninth BCMH Conference for New Researchers took place on 22-23 March 2024 at the University of Strathclyde. Having recently organised conferences in Portsmouth and Chatham, it was great to hold this year’s event in Scotland, and Glasgow – a city transformed through maritime trade and shipbuilding – proved an ideal host city. The conference ran very smoothly due to the attentive efforts of Dr David Wilson, who did much of the preparation work and ran the conference on the day.

Following a welcome by BCMH Chair, Dr Helen Doe, Professor Alison Cathcart gave a fantastic opening keynote on the subject of ‘The “scattered isles in the polar ocean”: Scotland and the sea in the (long) sixteenth century’, which perfectly centred the conference in its geographical location, while providing a thought-provoking analysis of the political, social, and cultural history of the Scottish Isles.

The conference itself saw a range of fascinating papers, arranged around four thematic sessions. The first on ‘Routes and Resources’ saw Robert MacLean speak on the commercial history of the Glasgow Soaperie Company, while Sabrina Fröhlich and Kamil Muratov presenting on a recent project investigating the English timber trade in the Baltic Sea. The second session on ‘Women and the Sea’ saw papers from Hannah Gibbons, Grace McNutt and Zara Money, all of which explored women’s agency across the maritime world. During the third session ‘Encounters at Sea’, the two speakers gave papers that worked very well together: Laura Birkenshaw presented on disease and the slave trade, while Alexandra Ward gave a paper that explored the health among ‘liberated’ Africans during the nineteenth century.

A final session on ‘the Sea and Identity’ – necessarily abridged after one speaker dropped out – concluded the conference. Muskaan Gandhi of the NMRN spoke on efforts to recover the ‘global’ history of HMS Trincomalee, while Jane Stewart spoke powerfully about how Elizabethan sea burial was represented in early modern funeral monuments. Professor Richard Harding, BCMH Vice-Chair, kindly provided some closing remarks. Throughout, the questions from the audience were typically generous and constructive, prompting numerous fruitful discussions. 

Dr James Davey, BCMH Conference Coordinator