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 disciplines to explore the manifold ways in which the sea shaped British history, demonstrating the number of approaches that now have a stake in defining the discipline of maritime history. The chapters analyse the economic, social, and cultural contexts in which English maritime endeavour existed, as well as discussing representations of the sea. The contributors show how people from across the British Isles increasingly engaged with the maritime world, whether through their own lived experiences or through material culture. The volume also includes essays that investigate encounters between English voyagers and indigenous peoples in Africa, and the intellectual foundations of imperial ambition.

This book revises earlier views of statecraft reformer Wei Yuan and of Chinese foreign relations during the last century. Approaching the history of nineteenth-century China from the perspective of Southeast Asian history, the author demonstrates the interaction, from Ch’in times onward, between China and the Southern Ocean or Nan-yang. In the process, she casts new light upon Chinese behavior during the Opium War and allows the reader to see that war in the context of a long history of Sino–Nan-yang relations rather than merely as a reaction to the West. In the past, Wei’s Hai-kuo t’u-chih (Illustrated Treatise on the Sea Kingdoms), 1844, has been understood in terms of China’s “response to the West,” and seen principally as a source of new information about Western geography. Jane Leonard identifies its main thrust as geopolitical, and its main purpose to describe Western expansion into maritime Asia and to analyze the dynamics of that expansion. Rediscovering China’s past relationships with the southern maritime regions, especially during the Yuan and Ming dynasties, Wei recommended dramatic changes in Ch’ing maritime policy and awakened his contemporaries to the importance of the Nan-yang.