Maritime History, Microhistory, and the Global Nineteenth Century: The Edwin Fox

Abstract

This article explains how the melding of microhistory and maritime history through the career of the Edwin Fox, an unexceptional British sailing ship that was active between 1853 and 1905, provides an innovative approach to understanding some of the myriad complexities that characterized the globalization of the period 1850 to 1914, and thus the complex and contradictory inner workings of staggering and unprecedented change on a global scale. Such an approach makes it possible to write a history of globalization on a human scale, highlighting local conditions and human agency at work, as well as decentring the Atlantic world. The article uses the story of the pianos that the ship carried from Great Britain to New Zealand in 1881 as an example of the intimate, unexpected, and otherwise invisible interconnections of globalization that this approach can reveal.