Trading in War: London's Maritime World in the Age of Cook and Nelson

"What surprised me with so many of the books on the shortlist was how much I enjoyed them, even when they were about subjects that I don’t naturally warm to—like ships and shipping, which bore me rigid. But when I opened this book, I became absolutely fascinated and drawn in by it, because it appealed to a positive obsession of mine, which is local history. This is supremely clever local history, magnified as a prism to look at national and global history. She bounded it in a very interesting way. Physically it’s bounded because it’s about an area of East London which had grown up with one function in mind, which was to serve a great overseas trade. She’s also describing a well bounded period, both in national history and in local history, from the 18th century—when Britain became a real global power—to the early 19th century, when a new British Empire was about to be developed. In the 1820s and 30s a vast enterprise of building new docks happened in East London which completely transformed the area, literally gouging bits out of it. Historic buildings were demolished in order to create docks. Very much so: war seen at a distance and the effects of war. It also reminds one rather depressingly of the stimulus that war gives to trade and the money to be made out of war by all sorts of levels of people: not just arms profiteers, but ordinary people keeping pubs in Rotherhithe. It’s also about the extraordinarily varied nature of trade in 18th century Britain. It’s a very crowded world, isn’t it? It’s crowded on the water and it’s crowded on the edges of the water. It was a world feeling its way to how to cope with this extraordinary concentration of people, who were so ill defined and so multifarious in nature. But in the book there is also the reassuring sense that despite all the apparent chaos, 18th century administrators and local officials could just about manage it all. It was no more chaotic and sleazy than modern London. “18th century London was no more chaotic and sleazy than modern London” That’s one of the fascinations of the book, that it’s very, very high-class local history—that knows every street, that understands the way buildings functioned—and yet looks at the wider implications of all that."