This volume brings together a diverse selection of the latest academic research in the field of naval history. No longer confined to analyses of ships and battles, it is the first publication to capture a new form naval history that engages with race, sexuality, gender, material culture, popular culture and fine art. Edited by two leading historians of the Royal Navy, it will become a defining book in the field.

During the nineteenth century, British and American naval supremacy spanned the globe. The importance of transoceanic shipping and trade to the European-based empire and her rapidly expanding former colony ensured that the ocean became increasingly important to popular literary culture in both nations. This collection of ten essays by expert scholars in transatlantic British and American literatures interrogates the diverse meanings the ocean assumed for writers, readers, and thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic during this period of global exploration and colonial consolidation. The book’s introduction offers three critical lenses through which to read nineteenth-century Anglophone maritime literature: "wet globalization," which returns the ocean to our discourses of the global; "salt aesthetics," which considers how the sea influences artistic culture and aesthetic theory; and "blue ecocriticism," which poses an oceanic challenge to the narrowly terrestrial nature of "green" ecological criticism. The essays employ all three of these lenses to demonstrate the importance of the ocean for the changing shapes of nineteenth-century Anglophone culture and literature. Examining texts from Moby-Dick to the coral flower-books of Victorian Australia, and from Wordsworth’s sea-poetry to the Arctic journals of Charles Francis Hall, this book shows how important and how varied in meaning the ocean was to nineteenth-century Anglophone readers. Scholars of nineteenth-century globalization, the history of aesthetics, and the ecological importance of the ocean will find important scholarship in this volume.

Geomorphometry is the science of quantitative terrain characterization and analysis, and has traditionally focused on the investigation of terrestrial and planetary landscapes. However, applications of marine geomorphometry have now moved beyond the simple adoption of techniques developed for terrestrial studies, driven by the rise in the acquisition of high-resolution seafloor data and by the availability of user-friendly spatial analytical tools. Considering that the seafloor represents 71% of the surface of our planet, this is an important step towards understanding the Earth in its entirety. This volume is the first one dedicated to marine applications of geomorphometry. It showcases studies addressing the five steps of geomorphometry: sampling a surface (e.g., the seafloor), generating a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) from samples, preprocessing the DTM for subsequent analyses (e.g., correcting for errors and artifacts), deriving terrain attributes and/or extracting terrain features from the DTM, and using and explaining those terrain attributes and features in a given context. Throughout these studies, authors address a range of challenges and issues associated with applying geomorphometric techniques to the complex marine environment, including issues related to spatial scale, data quality, and linking seafloor topography with physical, geological, biological, and ecological processes. As marine geomorphometry becomes increasingly recognized as a sub-discipline of geomorphometry, this volume brings together a collection of research articles that reflect the types of studies that are helping to chart the course for the future of marine geomorphometry.