English Merchant Shipping, Maritime Communities and Trade from the Spanish Armada to the Seven Years War, c.1588-c.1765

The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 marked the start of England's transition from a peripheral European state to one with global ambitions. Just 175 years later, a recently united Britain emerged from the Seven Years War (1756-1763) as a front-rank European power with an expanding overseas empire. To develop the commercial and colonial potential of this maritime empire, England's traders, merchants, and shipowners invested in new ships, forged new trade routes, expanded the merchant fleet, increased size of the maritime labour force, and developed new skills for blue ocean sailing. Remarkably, the evolution of these processes has yet to be fully investigated. This period of proto-globalisation is of fundamental importance to contemporary Britain. The recent removal of statues of people associated with this expansion demonstrates the strength of the discourse surrounding this subject and reflects a wider dialogue that seeks to refine and reshape discussions of England's (and Britain's) role in imperial conquest. Knowing how maritime communities lived and worked across this period of English seaborne development will add much to scholarship and the general public's understanding of the role past societies played in this expansion. This research will foreground the voices and lives of the maritime community, shifting the focus away from the dominant personalities of the period, such as Francis Drake, or specific sectors of this expansion, such as the slave trade, and bring to the fore less famous but just as important figures in England's maritime past. This project will bring their stories to life, and analyse in detail the size and geographical distribution of this group, demonstrating important periods of change.

This period of England's transition to a global maritime power can be investigated through the rich seam of extant source materials. In England a sophisticated customs service meant that merchants trading overseas (imports and exports) had to pay tax. Therefore, every ship that imported and exported goods had its name and its home port recorded in a set of records called port books, and from 1565 England's extensive coastal trade was also documented. Additionally, the name of every ship's master, the merchants, and the commodities carried, were also recorded. Some 20,000 of these port books survive in The National Archives and form the basis of this project. These sources allow us to precisely map the evolution of English shipping capacity (size and regional distribution) and maritime trade. These rich source materials allow us to investigate the size and geographical distribution of England's maritime communities, and examine their socio-cultural lives, unlocking, for the first time, details of their lives afloat and ashore. We will reconstruct their careers, examine their marriage strategies, and demonstrate the important role women played in their lives, as wives, daughters, hostellers, but also as active traders working side-by-side in commerce. We have the following objectives:

1. To create a freely available dataset (c.200,000 entries) through an interdisciplinary approach using computer science to integrate several different data series on English shipping and maritime communities. This will encourage future research by making our data publicly available through our project website.
2. To use our new data to offer enriched biographies of members of the maritime community as England transitioned to a global power, allowing us, for the first time, to undertake a longitudinal examination of a group that was fundamental to the life-blood of England's economy and society.
3. To showcase how co-designed and co-produced research can successfully engage a public audience, and determine what academics can learn from community participatory research. This will create a methodology for working with a variety of professionals that can be applied to future projects in this field.