From Restoration to Preservation: Global Public History and the Many Worlds of the Edwin Fox

The merchant vessel Edwin Fox was exceptional for being unexceptional. It was old fashioned even before its keel was laid down in Thomas Reeves’s shipyards near Calcutta in 1853. It was neither large nor fast, and had none of the prestige of the great tea and opium clippers that captured the public imagination in the mid-nineteenth century.

Yet the life and career of this undistinguished ship coincide with a pivotal era in globalization: the years between 1860 and 1890 that Jurgen Osterhammel calls the “inner focal point” of the 19^th century. The Edwin Fox participated in many of the developments that made these years so crucial: the intensification of trade around the globe; the spread of industrialization to many regions; the great thrust of Western imperialism; the unprecedentedly large migrations of people, both free and forced; the large-scale dispossession of Indigenous peoples and their replacement with settler populations; the integration of settler colonies into imperial markets; and environmental change on a massive scale.

This paper explores the extraordinary efforts on the part of local history enthusiasts in small, coastal hamlet of Picton, New Zealand to rescue the ship’s remains from their final resting spot on a sandbar in the poetically named Shakespeare Bay to their efforts to first restore and finally to preserve the ship’s remains as a popular tourist attraction for the tens of thousands of tourists who visit the Picton annual on their way to the fabled Marlborough wine region nearby. Finally, the paper will discuss the ship’s extraordinary career, which provides public historians with rich and colourful opportunities for telling the story of nineteenth century globalization as it unfurled from the deck of a single ship as well as many interpretative challenges and potential pitfalls.