The project explores patterns and practices of consumption and material culture in the mobile maritime space of the ship in the mid-eighteenth century. It uses sources found sporadically amongst a ship’s papers in the Prize Papers collection:inventories of mariners’ personal belongings and lists of sales ‘at the mast’ drawn up when sailors crewing on French ships died or deserted mid-voyage. Whereas research to date on the material culture amongst mariners has largely used bulk collections of wills and probate inventories – often drawn up at the end of life – the inventories in the Prize Papers were seized mid-voyage and thus offer a snapshot of material culture on board. Moreover, because they have survived together with ship’s papers as well as business, and personal archives on board at the time of capture, these inventories offer a rare opportunity for microhistorical contextualization of consumption practices and networks at individual and crew levels.

The project draws on a number of digital humanities tools and methods. It uses handwritten text recognition (HTR) to transcribe inventories and then extracts quantitative and qualitative data about object ownership, descriptive attributes in the inventories, monetary value at sale, and object itineraries within crews (networks) into a database. A combination of quantitative statistical analysis, qualitative language analysis and network analysis is then used to reveal the ‘mental map’ of personal consumption, consumption practices and object value underpinning the particular culture of material circulation in the mobile maritime space. This project not only provides a case study of mobile maritime consumption that may be compared to consumption culture on land or in other spatial contexts. It also devises a mixed methodology for using inventories to analyse abstract socio-cultural phenomena.