Connecting Past and Present: Maritime museums and historical mission

Abstract

This article explores different approaches that maritime museums might consider to enlarge their audience and enhance their mission. In particular, it focuses on how we can incorporate the innovative research into ancient and contemporary structures of maritime trading networks by historians, archaeologists and others to broaden our geographic and thematic focus, and take on a more expansive, global vision of maritime history in ways that benefit the museum public, individual institutions, and the wider community of maritime museums worldwide.

Key words:

• maritime museums
• maritime history
• geography
• chronology
• thematic focus
• globalization
• human ecology
• technology

Notes

1 This article is based on the author’s keynote address to the International Congress of Maritime Museums in 2015.

2 Wang, ‘Merchants Without Empire’.

3 Bellamy, ‘Financing the Preservation of Historic Ships’, 358–9.

4 Peter, Museum in the Dock, 15.

5 Its collection and displays were partially relocated to the Tøjhusmuseet in 2016.

6 Hong Kong Maritime Museum, ‘History, Mission and Vision’, accessed 30 Oct. 2015, http://www.hkmaritimemuseum.org/eng/about-us/general-information/history-mission-and-vision/40/70/.

7 National Maritime Museum, Brest, accessed 30 Oct. 2015, https://museu.ms/museum/details/16163/national-maritime-museum-brest.

8 China Maritime Museum, ‘Introduction’, accessed 30 Oct. 2015, http://www.shmmc.com.cn/english/Museum/Museum.aspx.

9 Alain de Botton provides an interesting take on this phenomenon in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

10 Harding, ‘Organizational Life Cycles’, 7.

11 See Bourque, The Swordfish Hunters.

12 Main, ‘Undersea Cables’ and TeleGeography, ‘2014 Submarine Cable Map’, accessed 30 Oct. 2015, http://submarine-cable-map-2014.telegeography.com/.

13 For explorations of the impact of the sea on humankind see Mack, The Sea, and Paine, The Sea and Civilization.

14 United Nations, UN Atlas of the Oceans, accessed 30 Oct. 2015, http://www.oceansatlas.org/servlet/CDSServlet?status=ND0xODc3JjY9ZW4mMzM9KiYzNz1rb3M~.

15 ‘Container Shipping: The big box game’, 60–1.

16 Ruskin, The Harbours of England, 17.

17 For a slightly different take, see Weil, ‘Museums: Can and do they make a difference?’, 64–74.

18 Weil, ‘The Museum and the Public’, 202.

19 Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lincoln Paine

Lincoln Paine is a maritime historian and author of The Sea and Civilization: A maritime history of the world, Ships of the World: An historical encyclopedia and Down East: A maritime history of Maine. He is also a trustee of the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, Maine.