This project, based at King’s College London and led by Professor Andrew Blick and Alix Mortimer and is funded by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation. We work with professional historians researching maritime topics to provide historical context and insight to contemporary maritime safety challenges. The goal of the project is to deepen understanding of these issues and provoke creative solutions in an era of huge technological and organisational change for the industry. Working with the materials in the Lloyds Register Foundation Heritage Education Centre (HEC), historians will produce “Hindsight Reports” within the scope of the challenges of the Lloyd’s Register Foundation.
Dr Louis Halewood and Dr Rory Hopcraft (both at Plymouth) talk to Alix Mortimer about their cross-disciplinary collaboration, fusing Louis’s work on international security, law and the development of institutions over the nineteenth and early twentieth century with Rory’s focus on the very twenty-first century concern of cyber security at sea. Finding an echo in seventeenth-century discussions of the “sea as a global commons” by Hugo Grotius and John Selden, their forthcoming Hindsight Perspectives report proposes the policy lens of the “maritime cyber commons”. The complex history of governance at sea, as well as the distributed nature of cyber vulnerabilities, suggest this is best seen as a distinct governance category which the International Maritime Organization and other governance and law-making bodies will have to grapple with as the challenges of the twenty-first century in maritime unfold.
On 16 May 2023 we launched the second Hindsight Perspectives report Reducing the dangers of dock work in the UK, 1899-1939: how past approaches could prevent future tragedies, by Dr Guy Collender. We were joined by Dr Derek McGlashan, Head of Health, Wellbeing and Safety and Head of Strategic Projects at the Port of London Authority, as industry respondent.
The report, which you can download here, draws on Guy’s PhD research into the history of the Port of London between 1900 and 1939, so there was a great direct crossover between our speakers. We had many great audience questions and a detailed and interesting discussion about the problems and pitfalls of setting historic data (in this case on safety) alongside modern data.
In the forthcoming second report in the Hindsight Perspectives Series, Dr Guy Collender looks at the improvements made in safety over the first decades of the twentieth century and draws out lessons for what is still one of the world's most dangerous occupations
In this second post diving into the International Journal of Maritime History, we open too many tabs and suggest how industry researchers can get started with historical scholarship
On 23 March we held an online seminar with an expert panel of historians and industry figures to mark the launch of the first report.
Page 1 of 3 pages
H&P is based at the Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, University of London.
We are the only project in the UK providing access to an international network of more than 500 historians with a broad range of expertise. H&P offers a range of resources for historians, policy makers and journalists.