The New Coastal 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 brings 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. 

David Worthington is Reader in History and Head of the Centre for History at the University of the Highlands and Islands, UK. He is author of British and Irish Experiences and Impressions of Central Europe, 1560-1688 (2012) and Scots in Habsburg Service, 1618-1648 (2003), and editor of British and Irish Emigrants and Exiles in Europe, 1603-1688 (2009).  More recently, he has published numerous articles on the coastal history of the north of Scotland. 

Foreword; John M. MacKenzie.- Introducing the New Coastal History: Cultural and Environmental Perspectives from Scotland and Beyond; David Worthington.- The Urban Amphibious; Isaac Land .- The Firth of Forth: What Drives Change; T.C. Smout.- SECTION TWO - COASTS BEYOND SCOTLAND: TRANSCENDING LOCAL AND GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES.- Merchant Seamen, Sailortowns, and the Philanthropic Encounter in New York, 1843-1945; Johnathan Thayer.- The Influence of Post-Glacial Rebound on the Island Community of Hailuoto in the Northern Baltic Sea; Outi Korhonen.- Elvers and Salmon: Moral Ecologies and Conflict on the Nineteenth-Century Severn; Carl Griffin and Iain Robertson.- SECTION THREE - COASTSCAPES OF THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS AND ISLANDS.- Three Scottish Coastal Names: Earra-Ghàidheal, Satíriseið, and Skotlandsfirðir; Andrew Jennings.- The Making of the Minch: French Pirates, British Herring, and Vernacular Knowledges at an Eighteenth-Century Maritime Crossroads; Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart.- Charity and Philanthropy in a Coastal World: Scottish Fishing Communities and the Shipwrecked Fishermen and Mariners' Royal Benevolent Society, 1839-48; Cathryn Pearce.- The Importance of Coastal Geography: The Experience and Commemoration of the Two World Wars in Shetland; Linda Riddell.- The Creation of Airline Services in the Northern and Western Isles of Scotland: Impact and Legacy; Andrew Rae.- Thurso and the Pentland Firth as a Site of Sport; Matthew McDowell.- SECTION FOUR - FIRTHS AND OTHER SCOTTISH COASTS.- Scotland's Forgotten Frontier Littoral: The Solway Firth; Ted Cowan.- Witch Belief in Scottish Coastal Communities; Lizanne Henderson.- A Rock with a View: Re-examining a 1680s View of the Bass Island; Amy Todman.- '...Of Which a Contraband Trade Makes the Basis of their Profit': Tea Smuggling in the North Sea c.1750 - 1780; Derek Janes.- 'We Cannot See Them...They HaveGone Out of Our Reach': Narratives of Change in the Fisheries of Scotland's Great Firths, c.1770-1890; Peter Jones.