About the topic of the event
Within the environmental context of early modern seafaring, the presence of impairment is perhaps easier to connect to modern ideas of disability. The social and physical pressures of life and work within the dangerous, largely co-operative, and confined space of the sailing ship both caused high rates of impairment and many of the conditions understood in Disability Studies today as foundational in cultures of stigma.
Some of the earliest state managed welfare systems in Europe originated in order to record, and then support, seafaring populations that were vital in the globalizing national projects of war, trade and colonization. The administration of pensions for worn-out and impaired sailors involved categories of disability that create some recognizable points of continuity with modern studies. However, experiences of impairment in early modern seafaring communities were often far more porous in practice.
This paper considers the implications of how the boundaries of our studies affect our methods for accessing and reading experiences of mental and bodily difference and impairment. The conditions on board an early modern sailing ship that seem to be so obviously productive of stigma and exclusion to our modern eyes, did not necessarily prevent impaired seafarers from continuing to work at sea. Their experiences across national boundaries challenge our understanding of how ‘disability’ is produced and what it means.
About Dr Catherine Beck
Dr. Catherine Beck is a social historian of medicine and the maritime world, focusing on experiences of impairment and particularly mental disorder, difference and distress at sea in the long eighteenth century. In 2022, she joined the University of Copenhagen as an EU H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow for her project MADSEA, investigating the relationship between madness, religiosity and environment among early modern seafarers. Recent publications include 'Breaching the cabin walls: madness, privacy and care at sea in the eighteenth-century British navy' in Klein Käfer (ed) Privacy at Sea: Practices, Spaces, and Communication in Maritime History (Palgrave, 2023) and her first monograph Patronage in the British Navy 1775-1815 (Boydell & Brewer, January 2025).
If you have any questions please contact Dr Anna McKay - anna.mckay@liverpool.ac.uk
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