Humanities: Communities The study of people is central to research in the Humanities. Maritime connections between individuals and societies have always been crucial to global trade, governmental networks, and cultural and technological innovations. Empires and systems of commerce have been consolidated; traditions of social exchange are continued; and new forms of communication are still emerging from these maritime connections. By highlighting these issues, research in the humanities demonstrates that it is impossible to understand economies, politics and cultures without an understanding of the development of communities across oceans. Networks Maritime global networks were essential to the expansion of trade, colonisation and empires in the period after the famous ‘voyages of discovery’ of the fifteenth century. They made possible new trans-oceanic communities, linking people on the shores and hinterlands of distant continents. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the ‘Atlantic world’, a geographical region that developed as a result of new connections of commerce and colonisation around the rim of the Atlantic Ocean. Sugar and slavery were of huge importance to the British Atlantic world. Ships left Liverpool, London and Bristol, to trade for enslaved people along the coast of West Africa before shipping them to work on plantations in the Americas and returning home laden with American staple products, such as sugar, rum, tobacco and rice. This relied on Atlantic communities of merchants, entrepreneurs, colonists and investors, who created new ways of extending credit, managing risk and extracting profit from the mass movement of people and goods. It also required close communication, and British slaveholders in the colonies kept in constant touch with merchants, friends and family ‘at home’. Many of them also retired to the British Isles once they had made their fortunes, managing their colonial plantations from the other side of the Atlantic and further strengthening the far-flung links that bound Britons into global communities. Colleagues in history and other humanities disciplines at Southampton research these Atlantic and other maritime global networks. Their work has been funded by grants from sources such as the AHRC and the British Academy, and their publications have addressed themes such as cultural identities, migration, slaveholding, refugees and port cities. They have also developed links with the National Maritime Museum, helping to create a new ‘Atlantic Worlds’ gallery. Coasts Located in antiquity at boundaries between ‘the known’ and ‘the unknown worlds’, maritime communities were the interface between emerging networks of people. Maritime archaeology attempts to access, understand, and explore the role of these communities in maritime contact, and ultimately discover the connection they have with people today. Ships Outputs Stephanie Jones, ‘Colonial to postcolonial ethics: Indian Ocean “belongers ”, ’, Interventions, 11.2 (2009),1-23. A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in Continental Europe and its Empires, eds. Prem Poddar, Lars Jensen and Rajeev S. Patke (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Boats of South Asia, eds. Sean McGrail, Lucy Blue, Eric Kentley and Colin Palmer (London: Routledge, 2003). Christer Petley Slaveholders in Jamaica: Colonial Society and Culture during the Era of Abolition (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009). Christer Petley ‘“Home” and “This Country”: Britishness and Creole Identity in the Letters of a Transatlantic Slaveholder’, Atlantic Studies 6:1 (2009), Fraser Sturt ‘Fishing for meaning: lived space and the early Neolithic of Orkney’, in Set in Stone: new approaches to Neolithic monuments in Scotland, eds. V. Cummings and A. Pannett (Oxford: Oxbow, 2005), Collaborations Our partners include: AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), National Maritime Museum, Open University, Southampton Archaeology Museum, UCLAN, UCLA, University of Cambridge, University of Liverpool. ZBA1586: Attack and Capture of the rebels’ positions near Montego Bay by boats from HMS Blanche (Repro ID: F7405 © National Maritime Museum) Shipboard experiments in a sixteenth-century Italian woodcut., proving the curvature of the sea. Liber Pompilii Azalii Placentini (Venice: Scoto, 1544) fol. 80r. © The British Library Board. London, British Library, 536.l.7. Solent Estuary region has enabled the mapping of submerged landscapes that were inundated due to Holocene sea-level rise. This work addresses the impact of environmental change on people from the Mesolithic through to present day. The Chumash ‘maritime’ communities of south central California faced similar challenges with changing hydrological conditions throughout the later Holocene. Research funded by the University of Southampton, UCLAN and UCLA has revealed how relationships between interior highland zone, lake dwellers and coastal communities shifted with a move to a more arid climate during the medieval epoch. In both the Solent and South Central California, changes in hydrological regimes altered how people interpreted the world around them, on both functional and spiritual levels. In more recent history, ‘port cities’ have been the point of arrival and departure for countless millions of migrants. The experiences of these migrants raise a number of important questions. For example, how do these groups interact with ‘host’ communities and with what consequences? In what ways is the host community – in this context, the port city – shaped by migrants? Members of the Parkes Institute for the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations are researching the life experiences of ‘port Jews’, while other scholars in the School of Humanities are asking similar questions in relation to Asian and African diasporas. Beach Idols, Southern India. © Lucy Blue Communities and their relationship with the sea, the technology of their boats, and the choices they make in the selection of the vessels they construct, is the focus of ethno- archaeological work conducted in the Indian sub-continent, supported by the British Academy funded Society for South Asian Studies. Maritime ethnography examines the boats in a modern day context, acquiring an insight into the practice of maritime communities of the past. Complementing work on the significance and influence of boat technologies, research in English is focused on how the maritime connections experienced by navigators were 'translated' by writers of texts and cartographers between the twelfth and the fifteenth-centuries. How does a practical understanding of the Ocean translate into bookish and cartographic knowledge? Measurement was by time travelled more often than by units of distance; space was marked out by what one does to get to it, rather than according to geometry. Communities of geographers and cartographers wrestled with whether and how the space of communities of travellers, explorers and navigators should be incorporated into the image of the world. Other work in the School of Humanities is directed towards different questions of legitimacy, and different types of community forged aboard boats. The AHRC funded project on The Indian Ocean: narratives in literature and law supports research into recent and historical narratives of piracy. Current stories of Somali pirates (by others and themselves, as communities of criminals and heroes, as nation builders and nation breakers) have both continued and altered stories of pirate communities begun in the late 17 th century by travellers, journalists, lawyers, and writers of fiction. Coastal communities are subject to both social and environmental change. Geological and Geophysical work in the