Royal Museums Greenwich

John McAleer

Profile

Curator of Imperial and Maritime History

John McAleerI try to convey the importance of imperial and maritime history using the rich and unique collections of objects and artefacts held here at the National Maritime Museum. I do this in all sorts of ways from working on exhibitions and publishing scholarly articles to giving lectures and facilitating education sessions. I contribute regularly to conferences and journals by giving papers and writing articles and reviews related to my area of expertise.

My favourite part of my job

The most rewarding part of my job is the opportunity to work in a setting that encapsulates so much history. From the maritime and imperial history showcased in the Museum, to the artistic and architectural significance of the Queen’s House and the scientific stories displayed at the Royal Observatory, one gets a real sense of their collective importance to British and world history.

Of course, the best thing about my job is the opportunity to work with fascinating artefacts and, if I am lucky, to find out something significant and interesting about them.

My recommended books and links

If you are interested in imperial and maritime history, the best place to start is with a good book!

I recommend the Oxford History of the British Empire, which is published in five volumes. This may sound like a lot but there are articles on individual subjects that will help you to refine your search. For maritime history, the best place to start is in the Caird Library!

You might also look at the Collections Online section of this website to see the richness and variety of the NMM collections. In addition, the following websites are worth consulting:

If you are interesting in finding out more about the ‘Atlantic World’, here are some useful books and websites:

  • David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
  • Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (London: Harvard University Press, 2005). 
  • The British Asia – British Atlantic Network

The best resource for finding out about NMM collections relating to slavery is the catalogue:

  • Robert J. Blyth and Douglas Hamilton (eds), Representing Slavery: Art, Artefacts and Archives in the Collections of the National Maritime Museum (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2007).

If you are interesting in finding out more about the transatlantic slave trade, here are some useful books and websites:

  • Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade, The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (London: Picador, 1997).
  • Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (London: John Murray, 2007).
  • Douglas J. Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
  • Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery (London: Pan Books, 2006).
  • John R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-slavery: the Mobilisation of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
  • John R. Oldfield, ‘Chords of Freedom’: Commemoration, Ritual and British Transatlantic Slavery (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
  • Voyages: The Trans-atlantic Slave Trade Database
  • Understanding Slavery website and related resources
  • British Library Campaign for Abolition online resource
  • BBC Abolition website
  • Slavery, Emancipation and Abolition website maintained by Dr Brycchan Carey, Reader in English Literature at Kingston University
  • Houses of Parliament

Academic profile

Curator of Imperial and Maritime History

Biography

My PhD thesis focused on the representation of landscape, exploration and empire in 18th- and early-19th-century southern Africa. Following the completion of my doctorate, I developed interests in Atlantic history, focusing on the slave trade, abolition, and British missionary and military involvement in the Caribbean and Canada. Recently, I have been working on military and scientific networks in Britain’s Indian Ocean World. I am also co-editing a collection of essays on the subject of Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience.

Areas of research and interest

My research focuses on the British encounter and engagement with the wider world in the 18th and 19th centuries. Specific areas of interest include:

  • The British presence in the southern Atlantic and Indian Oceans, especially the Cape of Good Hope and St Helena
  • Slave trades, slavery and their suppression
  • British naval, military and missionary activity in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean
  • The Royal Navy and empire
  • The public recognition and commemoration of British naval and military figures and campaigns
  • Museums, collecting and their relationship to empire

Current NMM projects

  • Britain’s Maritime Worlds’ galleries. This project aims to develop permanent displays that showcase the Museum’s rich collections related to Britain’s maritime and imperial history. The ‘Traders’ gallery, focusing on the history of the East India Company, will open to the public in autumn 2011.
  • Centre for Imperial and Maritime Studies. I am currently involved in a range of publication and research projects under the auspices of the NMM’s Centre for Imperial and Maritime Studies.
  • Monsoon Traders. Together with my co-authors (H. V. Bowen at the University of Swansea, and Robert Blyth here at the Museum), I have just completed a history of the maritime world of the East India Company. The book is extensively illustrated by objects from the Museum’s collections.
  • Presentation swords and the politics of public recognition in the British Caribbean. This project focuses on a number of objects of esteem presented to naval officers like Admirals George Rodney and John Duckworth, who were involved in the defence of the British Caribbean, its strategic islands and their plantation economies.
  • ‘Anti-slavery and the Royal Navy in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, 1810–1890: race, empire and identity’. This AHRC Collaborative Doctoral scholarship provides funding for two PhD students to assess the impact of anti-slavery sentiment on the work of the Royal Navy in the Atlantic Ocean and Indian Ocean respectively. The students’ work is supervised by Professor David Richardson and Dr Douglas Hamilton at the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE) at the University of Hull, and myself.
  • 'Circuits of Knowledge: The Royal Navy and the Caribbean, 1756–1815’. This AHRC Collaborative Doctoral scholarship provides funding for a PhD student to study the role of the Royal Navy in collecting and disseminating knowledge about the British Caribbean. It focuses on the period between 1756 and 1815, when thousands of officers and men were deployed to the region as part of the struggle for global mastery. The project aims to explore how naval personnel represented the Caribbean and to assess how their observations of its climate, geography, wildlife, society, and manners impacted on British metropolitan understanding and perceptions of the region. The project is supervised by Professor John Oldfield and Dr Christer Petley at the University of Southampton, and by myself.

Previous NMM projects

  • ‘Atlantic Worlds’ gallery, 2007. The gallery explores the interrelationship, connections and exchanges created between Britain, Africa and the Americas. The movement of people, goods and ideas across the Atlantic Ocean, from the 17th century to the 19th century, changed the lives of people on three continents, profoundly affecting their cultures and societies, and fundamentally shaping the world we live in today.
  • ‘Sustaining the Empire: War, the Navy and the Contractor State’. This research project was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and investigated how the Royal Navy sustained its sailors during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It was based at Greenwich Maritime Institute, University of Greenwich, in conjunction with the NMM. A book resulting from the project, Sustaining the fleet, 1793–1815: War, the British Navy and the Contractor State (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010) by Roger Knight and Martin Wilcox, has recently been published.
  • NMM-China curatorial exchange. This project was generously funded by Swire and Son and provided an opportunity for Professor May Bo Ching of Sun Yat-sen University to spend time at the NMM researching our Chinese-related collections. Amy Miller and I travelled to Guangzhou and Hong Kong in April 2008. The NMM also organised a symposium entitled ‘Britain and China’s entangled maritime histories’. Papers addressed a range of themes, including the collecting of Chinese art and artefacts, the social and cultural exchanges resulting from Anglo-Chinese relations and the representation of the intersections between Chinese and British maritime history in museum spaces.
  • British Atlantic-British Asia Network. I have been an active participant in the British Atlantic-British Asia Network.

Selected publications

Books

Edited collections

  • (Edited with Sarah Longair), Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012)

Chapters in books

  • ‘The case of Thomas Baines, curator-explorer extraordinaire, and the display of Africa in nineteenth-century Norfolk’, in Longair and McAleer (eds), Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012)
  • ‘1810: change, continuity, and connections’, in Vineesh Y. Hookoomsing (ed.), Isle de France, Mauritius: 1810, the Great Turning Point (Port Louis: SHIM, 2012)
  • ‘The Gibraltar of the East: Mauritius and Britain’s Indian Ocean World’ in Vineesh Y. Hookoomsing (ed.), Isle de France, Mauritius: 1810, the Great Turning Point (Port Louis: SHIM, 2012)
  • (With Joan Coutu) ‘“The Immortal Wolfe”?: monuments, memory and the Battle of Quebec’, in John Reid and Phillip Buckner (eds), 1759 Remembered (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011)
  • ‘Thomas Baines: a born artist and explorer’, in Robin Hanbury-Tenison (ed.), The Great Explorers (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010), 72–9
  • ‘“The sharer of my joys and sorrows”: Alison Blyth, missionary labours and female perspectives on slavery in nineteenth-century Jamaica’, in Hilary M. Carey (ed.), Empires of Religion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 199–221

Articles

  • ‘“Stargazers at the world’s end”: observatories, telescopes and “views” of empire in the nineteenth-century British World’, British Journal for the History of Science (forthcoming)
  • ‘“Eminent service”: war, slavery and the politics of public recognition in the British Caribbean and the Cape of Good Hope, c. 1782–1807’, Mariner’s Mirror, 95:1 (2009), 33–51
  • ‘The production and publication of Captain Henry Butler’s South African Sketches (1841)’, Studies in Travel Writing, 12:2 (2008), 111–36
  • ‘“The slavery question in eastern Africa”: representations of Indian Ocean slavery and its suppression in nineteenth-century Britain from the collection of the National Maritime Museum’, Journal for Maritime Research (2008)
  • ‘Captain Henry Butler in South Africa’, Journal of the Butler Society, 4:4 (2007), 633–43
  • ‘Colonial landscape and the sublime aesthetic’, Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, 1:3 (2004), 124–35

Reviews

  • I am one of the reviews editors of the Journal for Maritime Research
  • I write regular reviews for the Journal for Maritime Research, the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, the Journal of Museum Ethnographers, and Museums and Society.
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