Quaker whalers, Indigenous peoples – and Haureh Hussein in between
This post reaches you from Melbourne! I arrived yesterday in Australia and will soon take part in the 50th Anniversary Conference of the Australian Historical Association between 3 and 6 July 2023. Therefore, I still have some days to practice and to shake off my jet lag!
On 5th July, I will contribute a case study in the Panel “Freedom & Coercion: Labour in the maritime contact zone” chaired by Eva Bischoff, together with Jared Davidson and Lena Moser. You can find the full program here:
I am glad to invite you to a workshop entitled “Maritime labour practices in colonial contexts”. In a small audience in person, but hopefully joined by a wider digital audience, a number of historians and scholars will come and share their research together.
Starting with Marcus Rediker’s and Peter Linebaugh’s Many headed Hydra (2000), the past decades have brought a number of scholarships and disciplines to analyze the diverse maritime working conditions across Time, Oceans, and Globe. The emerging field of Global and Maritime History demonstrated the mobility and importance of those, who crucially filled the ships. Depending on the purpose of the voyage, working and living circumstances at sea changed and differed dramatically.
The diverse purposes of voyages influenced the socialization and consistency of the crew, as they were isolated from mainland systems of society, government, work, and leisure. For several years, a pelagic-whaling ship, which required frequent stopovers, had different necessities as a trade ship. Both the composition of a crew and the hierarchies of a Convict ship might have been different, compared to a Royal Navy Ship.
These different circumstances mirrored in the wage-system too. Facing a several-year absence from home and family, whalers needed a payment in advance to sustain their families. Ships on the American continent became places of hope for slaves who were escaping.
The purpose of this workshop is to highlight and reveal these different conditions and to bring together scholars from diverse disciplines and areas to engage in a dialogue about the results of their research.
You can find the full program here. If you are interested in participating in person or online, please contact me at hussein@uni-trier.de
This new blog article reaches you form Germany. On the 21st of December, I arrived back from my over three-month research stay and took a second christmas break (after the one week summer break in Sydney). After spending almost three months in Aotearoa/New Zealand between 16th September and 2nd December, I flew to Melbourne to Australia in order to visit the “Marine World of the Long 18th century” Conference at the FitzRoy Campus of the Catholic University of Melbourne.
Three keynotes from Prof. Dr. Lynette Russell (Monash University), Assoc. Prof. Dr. Kevin Dawson (University of California, Merced) as well as of Dr. Miranda Staynton (University of Melbourne) accompanied the various panels throughout the three days. You can read the full conference programm here:
On the following PDF, you can read a compilation of the other panels, presentation titles as well as their submitted abstracts:
Together in a panel with another PhD researcher Shameer T.A. from the University of Hyderabad in India, I also contributed a paper to the Conference in the Panel “Whaling and Fishing in the Global South”. I titled my presenation as “The whaling industry and the Tasman World” and provide you hereby with my abstract:
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“When the Englishman James Cook and the Polynesian Tupaia left the Australian continent and the Aborigines in 1770, they, unintentionally, revealed the differential and diametric temporalities of the Tasman Sea (Alison Bashford 2021). While Cook and Tupaia only ‘perceived’ the door (1770), Lit-Gov. King and Tuki/Huru ‘opened’ the door (1793); this paper demonstrates that it was the whaling industry which eventually ‘passed’ through the door, and so enabled the alleged connecting factor of the Tasman World.
Between 1790 and 1840, Port Jackson, Norfolk Island, Hobart, and the Bay of Islands emerged as important stopover places for the transoceanic whaling industry. Rangatira of the Ngāpuhi Iwi actively fostered the interactions with whaling ships by providing supplies and young men’s labour. Many of these whaling ships were either captained or financed by Quakers in the Atlantic world. This industry enabled a new form of mobility, which crucially connected the Tasman World as an interaction space.
This paper builds on Alison Bashford’s thoughts (2021) and argues that it was the transoceanic scale of the whaling industry which contributed to the formation of the Tasman Sea. With its manifold maritime interaction spaces, the whaling industry played a crucial role in shaping the Tasman Sea.”
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In my presentation, I adopted on a recent journal article of Prof. Dr. Alison Bashford (University of NSW Sydney).1 and highlight the connecting and disconnecting contributions of the whaling industry to the notions of a “Tasman World”. For this, I used a case study of one whaling family.
Back in May/June 2022, when Aotearoa/New Zealand enabled international guests to visit the country again, I planned a research stay ahead for the months between September and December 2022. During this organization period, I not only had intense correspondences with Museums, Libraries and Archives for manuscripts, but encountered also Call for Papers, and one of them was the “Archaeology of Interaction” Conference of the “Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology“, which will take place from 27th to 30th September 2022 in Russell (former: Kororāreka), at Pēwhairangi/ Bay of Islands.
I remain very happy and proud to be able to introduce my research project in front of the attendes and look forward to the next days. The programme holds numerous highlights throughout the following days, and can be seen here:
This blogpost reaches you from Auckland in Aotearoa/New Zealand and was planned already some days ago, but no chance!
Last week on the 17th September, I arrived in Auckland after a long flight of 33 hours, departing from Frankfurt over Hong Kong to Auckland. Experiencing a long-distance flight for the first time, I suffered a heavy jetlag throughout the next days, leaving me with an almost not existing sleep-cycle and unconcentration. The flight went considerably well although I could barely find any sleep. What is worth to be mention is the wonderful flight safety clip, which Air New Zealand have shown before leaving the Airport of Hong Kong. I am happy to have found it online.
After arriving on Saturday morning and reaching my hotel, I spent most of the following days with discovering the city and practicing my presentation on this Conference, which will take place already next week. The days between Tuesday and Thursday were shaped by archive visitings in the reading room of the Auckland War Memorial Museum, where I had ordered relevant material.
It took me some days to shake off the jetlag, and it is a pity to leave this big city with over 1 million inhabitants, yet I look very much forward to travel to Russell town in the Bay of Islands next Saturday.
