Mariners: Religion, race and empire in British ports, 1801-1914

Religion was central to the world view of mariners and merchants in the age of imperialism but there has been little research on the mentalities and realities of working seamen and the Christian charities which sought to convert and support them. Mariners aims to create a new religious history of missions to seamen through a study of institutional archives, oral histories of present and past marine chaplains, and the visual and material record of missions in ports and places.

It will illuminate the hidden histories of British seamen and seamen of colour, who have been neglected by both historians of missions and historians of Britain's maritime inheritance.

Marine missions were once ubiquitous features of British ports, coasts, canals and lighthouses where their object was to save the drunken and lascivious sailor from themselves. They evolved into vitally important humanitarian societies which continue to support merchant crews around the world. Through partnership with the Anglican Mission to Seafarers (founded 1856) and the Hull History Centre, the project will open up the archives of major marine missions.

It will investigate the London-based missions to lascars, the common term for Asian seafarers, including the Strangers' Home (1857), which have not yet been fully integrated into our understanding of the British maritime past. The work is urgent and important, not just because of the scale and importance of the marine workforce in the nineteenth century, but because many of the problems faced by the merchant marine, from low wages, to insecure employment, hazardous conditions, risk of shipwreck, piracy, disease and abandonment, remain just as urgent today.

Research has been divided into three thematic workstreams, each with a dedicated team with the necessary skills and access to archives and resources. The first workstream will focus on British mariners, especially those who were clients of the Anglican Mission to Seafarers and Sailors' Society. With the support of project partners, it will interrogate the ways institutional missions grappled with local and global issues, including that of over rapid expansion.

The second workstream will focus on lascars, who by the later decades of the nineteenth century made up to a third of the British marine workforce. It will assess the effectiveness of the few missions created to cater for them, and innovations such as the Liverpool and Hull missions for Indian seamen. Because of the sheer scale of the marine mission movement, the third workstream will focus on three port cities: Bristol, Liverpool and Hull.

This will investigate ways in which local missions were integrated into port environments and the significance of their legacy today. It will address pressing issues about the status and future of marine missions in sites such as Liverpool, which in 2021 lost world heritage standing for its historic port.

The project is committed to ensuring outputs are diverse, accessible and academically rigorous. To ensure this, there are a wide range of outputs built around three key milestones: (1) the Mariners' website, which will include archival text, maps, images, interviews, and directories of people and places (2) the Mariners' conference, which will engage academic historians from the UK, Europe and South Asia to reflect and challenge our research questions (3) the Mariners' exhibition will tour Bristol, Liverpool, London and Hull and will form the capstone event for the project.

It will include commissions from local artists, text, images, and artefacts chosen from the archives, including those from the Hull History Centre, as well as education resources. Mariners addresses timely and challenging questions about marine missions which currently lack scholarly histories and context. It provides a fresh analysis of the multi-faith and multi-racial merchant marine and the religious encounters of these working people.