“Port History: Some Thoughts on Where it Came from and Where it Might be Going”

Summary

There comes a time later in most historians’ lives when there is a sudden rush of blood to the head which convinces them that the time has arrived to summarise the knowledge about their subject. A yellowed card index, perhaps initiated for a long-forgotten thesis, is exhumed in the quest for the beginnings of a synthesis which merits that accolade “magisterial.“ Somewhere in the background there probably lurks the hope that perhaps this will be the piece which finally earns some royalties to supplement the pension. Gordon Jackson, undoubted master of British port history, cannot follow this perhaps pretentious path, for in 1983, when he was a long way from retirement, he produced his History and Archaeology of Ports, one of those very rare works which combine a broad overview with a detailed and incisive insight and thus genuinely deserve to be called “magisterial.“

Obviously a great deal of work on port history has been done since 1983. In Liverpool, for example, a huge amount of detailed information has come into the public domain. Similar changes have benefited the histories of many other ports in the UK and elsewhere. The work of Natividad de la Puerta Rueda on Bilbao; Frank Broeze on the ports of Asia; and Malcolm Tull on Fremantle might be expected to damage the underlying assumptions of a History and Archaeology, which is both comparatively general and limited to British ports. Moreover, Gordon did not have access to the detailed records of port authorities that have become available over the last few years, and he did not extend his attention to ports overseas. Nor could his research benefit from the power of the personal computer, which was in its infancy in the early 1980s.

If I turn to my own yellowing card index, I can find plenty of things of which Gordon could not possibly have been aware in 1983. They challenge basic assumptions on which some earlier work on the port of Liverpool rests. Yet there are few instances in which they lay any of Gordon's work open to question, much less invalidate it. There is a simple reason for this: Gordon Jackson's book is an incisive, seminal work.