Article
Origins of public maritime history
This paper explores how Britain’s commercial and trading classes responded to the country’s naval achievements from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the war with Napoleon, and considers the impact of that response on public maritime history. The activities of these social groups gave rise to memorials and artefacts that make a contribution to a shared sense of national history even today. The meaning of other surviving objects related to their efforts is more often constrained by the context in which they are made accessible to the public