什么是海洋史?英语学界海洋史研究的兴起与发展

What is Maritime History?The Rise and Development of Maritime History Studies in the English-speaking World

从历史的视角出发,海洋不但是人类赖以生存的自然地理空间,也是人类文明交往、物质文化传播的重要媒介。在国外,尤其是英国、荷兰、澳大利亚等西方国家,海洋史研究有着深厚的历史积淀。①即便如此,因时代背景、学术环境、史学动向的不断变化,直至今日,学界对海洋史的概念仍然存在不同理解和界定。

The study of Maritime history in the English-speaking world began in Britain in the late 1880s,and it was not until the 1960s that Maritime history successively established its status as a sub-discipline of history in France and Britain.Since its inception,the concept of maritime history has been so vague that many people regard it as a mechanical superimposition of Maritime History,Shipping history,or Naval History.With the emergence of Imperial History studies in the late 19th century,the relationship between the two was once entangled.Influenced by the international environment under the Cold War and the Rankean historiography within the historical discipline,its research methods had always followed the historical tradition,and its research contents were mainly the history of naval warfare and the history of maritime exchanges.In the early 1970s,the Annals School’s commitment to the goal of“general history”opened up an interdisciplinary research path for maritime history.Based on the research paradigm of economic history and social history,Maritime Economic History and Maritime Social History gradually grew up.This dominant trend shifted until the late 1980s:faced with the dual dilemmas within and outside the discipline of maritime history at the time,some maritime historians sought the help of interdisciplinary research methods,that is,combining with the emerging fields of global history,environmental history,and new cultural history and applying their theories and methods to the study of maritime history.In 1989,Frank Broeze’s“six categories”of maritime history research based on the multiple ways in which humans interact with the sea further catalyzed the trend toward interdisciplinary studies of maritime history.The study of maritime history today seems to have reached an all-encompassing scale of general history,but at the same time,there is a potential risk of“historical fragmentation”.