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

1588年西班牙无敌舰队的失败标志着英国开始从一个欧洲边缘国家过渡到一个具有全球野心的国家。仅仅175年后，最近统一的英国从七年战争(1756-1763)中崛起为一个拥有不断扩张的海外帝国的欧洲前列强国。为了开发这个海洋帝国的商业和殖民潜力，英格兰的商人、商人和船东投资新船，打造新的贸易路线，扩大商船队，增加海上劳动力的规模，并发展蓝海航行的新技能。值得注意的是，这些过程的演变还没有得到充分的研究。这一原始全球化时期对当代英国至关重要。最近与这一扩张有关的人物雕像的拆除表明了围绕这一主题的话语的力量，并反映了一种更广泛的对话，试图完善和重塑关于英格兰(和英国)在帝国征服中的角色的讨论。了解航海社区在英国海运发展的这一时期是如何生活和工作的，将大大增加学术研究和普通公众对过去社会在这一扩张中所发挥的作用的了解。这项研究将突出海运界的声音和生活，将重点从那个时期的主导人物，如弗朗西斯·德雷克，或这种扩张的特定部门，如奴隶贸易，转移到突出地位，并使英格兰海运史上不太知名但同样重要的人物脱颖而出。该项目将使他们的故事栩栩如生，并详细分析这一群体的规模和地理分布，展示重要的变革时期。英国向全球海洋强国过渡的这段时期，可以通过现有来源材料的丰富矿层来考察。在英国，复杂的海关服务意味着在海外进行贸易(进出口)的商人必须纳税。因此，每一艘进出口货物的船只都将其名称和母港记录在一套名为港口账簿的记录中，从1565年开始，英格兰广泛的沿海贸易也被记录在案。此外，每一艘船的船长、商人和所运载的商品的名字也被记录下来。这些港口书籍中约有2万本保存在国家档案馆，构成了这个项目的基础。这些来源使我们能够准确地绘制英国航运能力(规模和地区分布)和海上贸易的演变图。这些丰富的资料使我们能够调查英格兰海洋社区的规模和地理分布，并检查他们的社会文化生活，第一次揭开他们漂浮和上岸生活的细节。我们将重建她们的职业生涯，审视她们的婚姻策略，并展示女性在她们的生活中扮演的重要角色，作为妻子、女儿、招待员，也作为积极的商人在商业中并肩工作。我们有以下目标：1.通过使用计算机科学的跨学科方法创建一个免费可用的数据集(约200,000个条目)，以整合关于英国航运和航运界的几个不同的数据系列。这将通过我们的项目网站公开我们的数据来鼓励未来的研究。使用我们的新数据来提供丰富的航运界成员传记，因为英国正在过渡到一个全球强国，使我们第一次能够对一个对英格兰经济和社会的命脉至关重要的群体进行纵向审查。展示共同设计和共同制作的研究如何成功地吸引公众，并确定学者可以从社区参与性研究中学到什么。这将创建一种与各种专业人员合作的方法，可应用于该领域未来的项目。

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.