Economic historians are frequently referred to - both by other historians and by themselves - as “plumbers.” As a person who cannot even replace a damaged washer in a kitchen tap - a failing that I have discovered over the years I share with a disturbingly large proportion of my colleagues - 1 have always found this nickname to be at best ironic and at worst oxymoronic. Regardless, economic historians are generally viewed by outsiders to the guild as people who possess certain esoteric technical skills but lack the humanistic sensibility that has always illuminated the work of the best historians.

Maritime historians have long suffered similar derision from a significant number of scholars in other fields. Perhaps the most charitable (and probably the most common) epithet hurled at those who chose to study ships, mariners and maritime transport is to tar them as “antiquarians,” people who write only for each other and who seldom burden their readers with either context or breadth of vision.

Even a cursory glance at the literature in maritime economic history will yield a disappointingly large (but fortunately decreasing) number of authors who fit one - or both - of these descriptions. But lest a scholar who approaches maritime topics from the perspective of economic history feel the need to renounce his or her specialization, I suggest strongly that they turn for inspiration to the impressive body of works that over the years have issued from the pen (and computer) of Professor Yrjö Kaukianen. In the years that I have known him and his work I have always been impressed, challenged and, perhaps most important, reassured by Yrjö and his logical, meticulous, insightful and humane writings. If you know his work, you will find many moments of intellectual joy in this collection, which his friends in the International Maritime Economic History Association are presenting him on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Helsinki, nuggets that remind you how privileged you are to be entertained, instructed and enlightened by a scholar with a truly brilliant mind. But if you are coming to his contributions to the literature fresh, you will soon understand why Yrjö Kaukiainen makes me both proud and, to be totally honest, a bit humbled to be a maritime economic historian.