Note: For a full list of publications, please see the CV page.
My semi-monthly series of short essays, Leeway: Past people, their technology, and us is available here.
A Boston Schooner in the Royal Navy, 1768–1772:
Commerce and Conflict in Maritime British America
Boydell Press, 2023–out now
The publisher’s page for the new book is available here. (Link will open in a new window.)
In 1767, the shipyard owned by Benjamin Hallowell, Boston’s most prominent shipwright, completed a small schooner for an English client. By the fall of the next year, the schooner Sultana had been bought into the Royal Navy and was on station back in British America as part of a squadron of customs interceptors attempting, with some success as it turned out, to enforce the Townshend Duties, the London government’s latest effort to regulate imperial trade and increase revenue in the debt-ridden wake of the Seven Years War,which had handed the French North American empire over to the British (and British Americans). HM Schooner Sultana‘s service in American waters from 1768 to 1772 provides a unique entree into the maritime world of the eighteenth-century British Empire in America, the commercial and technological success of that world, and the efforts of the Empire’s rulers to control it, fraught as they were with competing interests and strong, frequently contradictory, convictions. Because Sultana–an example of British American technological success–was bought into the Navy, almost all the documentation we could wish for survives in The National Archives of the UK–her master’s and commander’s logs, her muster books, a draught plan, and specifications of her hull, rig, and equipment. From that documentation, a large group of committed people built a faithful, fully-operational replica of her in Chestertown, Maryland, and launched her in 2001. She has been sailing the Chester River and Chesapeake Bay ever since. Her owners had copies made of all the original documents, which they now own, and to which they have allowed me full on-site access. So, we have all the original documentation to learn from here on this side of the pond, and we have the closest thing we can get to the ship herself. That is almost unheard-of for what was, essentially, a perfectly ordinary eighteenth-century merchant type. Sultana‘s story is the story of commercial, technological, political, and cultural forces cooperating and colliding in British American waters, shaping the world that, to an extent few realize, is still the world we live in.
The Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600–1800:
Continuity and Innovation in a Key Technology
Brill, 2020
My first monograph, The Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600–1800: Continuity and Innovation in a Key Technology, has just been published by Brill, as Volume 18 in their Technology and Change in History series, edited by Adam Lucas and Steven A. Walton.
The publisher’s page for the monograph may be accessed here. (Link will open in a new window.)
The entire series may be viewed here.
Cultural Economies of the Atlantic World:
Objects and Capital in the Transatlantic Imagination (edited collection)
Routledge, 2020
The edited collection is called Cultural Economies of the Atlantic World: Objects and Capital in the Transatlantic Imagination, edited by Victoria Barnett-Woods, published by Routledge on 30 April 2020. My chapter is titled “Conveyance and Commodity: The Ordinary Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600—1800.”
The publisher’s page for the volume, including Table of Contents, may be accessed here. (Link will open in a new window.)
“Cultural Economies explores the dynamic intersection of material culture and transatlantic formations of “capital” in the long-eighteenth century. It brings together two cutting-edge fields of inquiry—Material Studies and Atlantic Studies—into a generative collection of essays that investigate nuanced ways that capital, material culture, and differing transatlantic ideologies intersected. It is an ambitious and provocative work and provides new interpretive critiques and methodological approaches to understanding both the material and the abstract relationships between humans and objects, including the objectification of humans, into the larger current conversation about capitalism and inevitably, power, in the Atlantic world. Chronologically bracketed by events in the long-eighteenth century circumatlantic, this collection’s essays employ material case studies from littoral African states, to abolitionist North America, to Caribbean slavery, to medicinal practice in South America, providing both broad coverage and nuanced interpretation. Holistically, Cultural Economies demonstrates that the eighteenth-century Atlantic world of capital and materiality was intimately connected to both large and small networks that inform the hemispheric and transatlantic geopolitics of capital and nation of the present day.”
The following four articles are available on-line using the following links. (Links will open in a new window.) Note: All are behind publisher paywalls, so you will need some form of institutional access to get to them. However, we have 50 free shares for the newest one (listed first), as of online publication date, 26 Oct 2022. I will include that direct link after the standard (title) link. If it no longer works, you can still use the hyperlink by clicking on the title of the article.
“Revisiting the Brigantine Problem: The origins and development of eighteenth-century two-masted square-rigged ship types.” Mariner’s Mirror 108:4 (November 2022), 407–22.
For the limited-time free-share link, click here.
“Notes from a Published Treatise in an Ordinary Eighteenth-century Shipwright’s Journal.”Mariner’s Mirror 104:1 (January 2018): 79–83.
“The Ordinary Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600—1800: A Call for Further Research,” International Journal of Maritime History 29:4 (November 2017), 911–26.
“Something Ventured: The Ordinary Merchantman of the British Atlantic as a Technology of Risk Mitigation, 1600-1800,” Journal of Transport History 38:2 (December 2017), 196–212.
PHILLIP REID 