The Elephant and the Whale: Empires of Land and Sea

Abstract

The Trustees and Director of the National Maritime Museum have done me a double honour by asking me to deliver the Caird Lecture and to mark the opening of the Museum's new Research Centre for Imperial and Maritime Studies. With a double honour comes a double duty. I must both attempt to continue a distinguished tradition of Caird lectures and also seek to inaugurate what will surely become an equally great tradition emanating from this timely new Centre. The theme of my lecture will therefore be a double one: to reflect – and to reflect upon – the two fields covered by the Centre, imperial history and maritime history, their relationships and their differences.