Richard Blakemore

My research focuses on the social history of seafarers, particularly British sailors during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As British sailors travelled ever further and more frequently during the early modern period, building and maintaining commercial networks and contacts across cultures, they brought home new wealth, objects and ideas. They also contributed to the emergence of new political and legal situations in Britain, Europe, and around the globe.

These centuries witnessed the separate kingdoms of the British Isles and Ireland become united under first a single sovereign and then a single government, at the same time as British traders and colonists established themselves across the Americas, Africa, and Asia. These were messy, uncertain, and very often bloody events; but they had a profound and cumulative impact, forging the first stage of globalisation, and in my work I seek to understand them from the perspective of the workers who made them possible.