MarCoMo project: Digital Humanities to resurface French Mediterranean Lines and maritime societies (1850-1970)

Résumé En

The Merchant Navy is an indispensable tool of globalisation. However, French Merchant Navy after 1830 has been long forgotten in the historiography, mostly due to the lack of access to the archives of the main actors: Shipping Companies.MarCoMo is a three-year project which aims on making French Shipping Companies archives more accessible to the research community. Relying mostly, but not exclusively, on the resources of the institution French Lines & Compagnies in Le Havre (5 km of archives and 32,000 items), MarCoMo has two principal tasks:– Digitising and making available liners and cargo ships log books;– Developing and feeding two databases, one to identify French Maritime flows, the other to list all ships of French Shipping companies.Focusing on Mediterranean Lines operated by the two largest subsidized French companies (Messageries Maritimes & Compagnie Générale Transatlantique), this presentation aims at showing the benefits of MarCoMo: how digitised material and databases could shed a new light on Imperial ambitions, Colonial habits, Economic fluxes or Maritime strategies, and how maritime societies have been shaped by these developments.Covering the evolution of Late Modern French Shipping, from its renaissance in the 1830s – driven by disruptive innovations – to its mutations after the Second World War, MarCoMo has already facilitated historical expertise on health risks at sea, contributed to the exploration of new maritime legal fields, and questioned the links between the French Navy and the Merchant Navy.Digitisation, OCR processing and classifying of French liners log books give more visibility to an underestimated primary source that could be the starting point for future studies, notably within the Mediterranean area. A “springboard” project, MarCoMo paves the way for more ambitious research: to connect with existing research projects abroad and, doing so, to open up the results to a transnational dimension.