Professor Craig Lambert

• Late medieval and early modern maritime historyMerchant shipping and overseas tradeMaritime communities and port societiesNaval logistics and administrationDigital humanities and historical databasesArtificial intelligence and historical researchHistorical GIS and spatial analysis

My research explores the development of Britain's maritime economy, merchant shipping, and overseas trade between the late medieval period and the eighteenth century. It combines traditional archival research with digital humanities methodologies, including relational database design, artificial intelligence, and historical GIS, to reconstruct the people, places, and networks that shaped England's emergence as a global trading nation.

In 2026 I was awarded a €2.8 million European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant to lead Uncharted Maritime Worlds: An Integrated Digital History of Seaborne Trade from European Archives (UMW). Bringing together historians, computer scientists, and digital humanities specialists, the five-year project will use artificial intelligence, handwritten text recognition, natural language processing, and spatial analysis to integrate maritime records from archives across Europe. By connecting information on ships, merchants, cargoes, ports, and voyages within a unified digital research infrastructure, the project will transform our understanding of European and global seaborne trade between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Alongside the ERC project, I continue to lead a £1 million Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project, English Merchant Shipping, Maritime Communities, and Trade from the Spanish Armada to the Seven Years War, c.1588–c.1765. This research is producing the first systematic national reconstruction of Britain's merchant shipping over nearly two centuries, creating an open-access database of more than one million voyages alongside interactive maps, analytical tools, and educational resources for researchers, heritage organisations, schools, and the wider public (www.maritimebritain.org) 

I also collaborate with Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh (University of Kent) on a £180,000 project investigating Kent's maritime history, trade, and overseas connections between c.1450 and c.1650. The findings from this research are being integrated with the wider digital infrastructure developed through my maritime research programme. The project has recently culminated in the publication of the edited volume Kent and Europe, 1450–1640: Merchants, Mariners, Shipping and Defence (Boydell Press, 2025), which brings together new research on the county's maritime economy, shipping, defence, and European connections.

My earlier work was supported by a £250,000 AHRC award, The Evolution of English Shipping Capacity and Shipboard Communities from the Early Fifteenth Century to Drake's Circumnavigation. That project created a freely accessible database of more than 53,000 ship voyages from over 600 English, Welsh, and Channel Islands ports, together with interactive maps of ports and trade routes, laying the foundations for my subsequent large-scale digital maritime research (www.medievalandtudorships.org)