The New Coastal History

Cultural and Environmental Perspectives from Scotland and Beyond

David Worthington

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319640891
• eBook ISBN: 9783319640907
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

This book provides a pathway for the New Coastal History. Our littorals are all too often the setting for climate change and the political, refugee and migration crises that blight our age. Yet historians have continued, in large part, to ignore the space between the sea and the land. Through a range of conceptual and thematic chapters, this book remedies that. Scotland, a country where one is never more than fifty miles from saltwater, provides a platform as regards the majority of chapters, in accounting for and supporting the clusters of scholarship that have begun to gather around the coast. The book presents a new approach that is distinct from both terrestrial and maritime history, and which helps bring environmental history to the shore. Its cross-disciplinary perspectives will be of appeal to scholars and students in those fields, as well as in the environmental humanities, coastal archaeology, human geography and anthropology.

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Editor and Contributors
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Part I Concepts in Coastal History From Scotland and Beyond
• Introducing the New Coastal History: Cultural and Environmental Perspectives from Scotland and Beyond
• The Urban Amphibious
• The Firth of Forth: What Drives Change
• Part II Coasts Beyond Scotland: Transcending Local and Global Perspectives
• Merchant Seamen, Sailortowns, and the Philanthropic Encounter in New York, 1843–1945
• The Influence of Post-glacial Rebound on the Island Community of Hailuoto on the Northern Baltic Sea
• Elvers and Salmon: Moral Ecologies and Conflict on the Nineteenth-Century Severn
• Part III Coastscapes of The Scottish Highlands and Islands
• Three Scottish Coastal Names of Note: Earra-Ghàidheal, Satíriseið, and Skotlandsfirðir
• The Making of the Minch: French Pirates, British Herring, and Vernacular Knowledges at an Eighteenth-Century Maritime Crossroads
• Charity and Philanthropy in a Coastal World: Scottish Fishing Communities and the Shipwrecked Fishermen and Mariners’ Royal Benevolent Society, 1839–1848
• The Importance of Geography: The Experience and Commemoration of the Two World Wars in Shetland
• The Creation of Airline Services in the Northern and Western Isles of Scotland: Impact and Legacy
• Thurso and the Pentland Firth as a Site of Sport
• Part IV Firths and Other Scottish Coasts
• Scotland’s Forgotten Frontier Littoral: The Solway Firth
• Witch Belief in Scottish Coastal Communities
• A Rock with a View: Re-examining a 1680s View of the Bass Island
• ‘…Of Which a Contraband Trade Makes the Basis of their Profit’: Tea Smuggling in the North Sea c.1750–1780
• ‘We Cannot See Them … They Have Gone Out of Our Reach’: Narratives of Change in the Fisheries of Scotland’s Great Firths, c. 1770–1890
• Index