Maritime history is the study of humankind's relationship with the seas and oceans. It is a sub-discipline of 'History' and cannot survive intellectually or philosophically without it. Since humans are terrestrial, the history of their encounters with the sea is implicitly an extension of the history of lands and their peoples.
Yet maritime history offers a fresh, distinctive and endlessly fascinating perspective on the historical process. Human societies have long since interacted with the sea and its resources. They have used the sea's surface to transport goods and people to near and distant shores in their quest to trade, explore and wage war. They have harvested fish and other forms of marine life from the depths of the sea, and extracted oil and gas from the ocean floor. They have also adapted the coast, the interface between sea and land, for the loading, discharge and construction of sea-going vessels, and resorted to that particular environment to meet their needs for recreation, recuperation and retirement.
Seas and oceans have therefore played a profound role in human history. Maritime historians attempt to understand how and why the character, extent and significance of this role have changed over time and space. Marine environmental history is a logical extension of this approach in that it also embraces study of the impact that the human engagement with the seas and oceans has had upon the physical and ecological characteristics of the marine environment - which, in turn, influences the form and importance of that engagement. The MHSC is concerned with both of these closely-related approaches to the maritime past, and what they reveal about the current and future engagement of human societies with a hostile, capricious environment that covers seven-tenths of the earth's surface.