This book is about yachting, which is usually understood as leisure sailing, in which wind power is the major form of propulsion. So, this history covers all forms of yachting, including dinghy and keelboat sailing. It does not include motor yachts nor windsurfing, since this sport seems to relate more to the use of boards rather than boats.

Yachting has played an important part in this nation's leisure. It has long been a major, socially significant leisure activity. It proffered status, signified by yacht ownership and membership of yacht clubs. As part of our cultural and social history, leisure sailing can illuminate the wider society of which it is part – its values, its beliefs and its paradoxes.

Additionally, yachting has a much wider range of literature than other sports. Tom Cunliffe, introducing his In the Wake of Heroes puts it well: ‘Those of us who go down to the sea, whether for leisure, war or commerce, are incomparably blessed with good reading matter. Indeed, I believe no other sport or form of transport is so richly endowed.’

Other sports have their ‘How to’ books, autobiographies and biographies, but yachting has also generated thousands of accounts of passages and voyages, as well as some major fiction. More than other prestige sports, it has been represented in other media, such as painting and music.

Why a New History of Yachting is Needed

There has not been a history of yachting published for many years. The standard yacht histories, such as Heaton's Yachting: A History (1955) or Phillips- Birt's The History of Yachting (1974) are now some fifty years old.

Theirs was the ‘big history’ approach: important, rich owners, often public figures, owning large racing yachts, designed and built by the top yards, with large, professional crews, taking part in prestigious yacht races, being organised by the long-established ‘royal’ yacht clubs for large, silver cups, in one of the major yachting centres, such as Burnham-on-Crouch, the Clyde or the Solent, especially Cowes.

Charles II introduced yachting into this country and the sport was taken up by a few high prestige individuals outside the Royal family, such as Sir William Petty and Roger North.

Charles II and His Yachts

Up to the end of the eighteenth century, the word ‘yacht’ had much wider definitions than being only a leisure craft. As early as 1599, an Antwerp dictionary defined ‘jaght schip’ or ‘jaght’ as ‘a swift, light vessel of war, commerce or pleasure’. This definition reflected the use by the Dutch of yachts for transport and business on Holland's shallow lakes and inland seas. These uses of yachts were introduced into England by Charles II in the middle of the seventeenth century.

In 1646, when his father was losing the Civil War, his son, the future Charles II, fled from Falmouth to the Scillies, and thence to Jersey. He passed the time learning to sail in these locations and, in the summer of 1646, had a boat built at St Malo, borrowing the money from the Governor of Jersey. He then left for France where his mother was living. In 1648, he moved to the Hague, Holland.

As already mentioned, yachts had an important place in Dutch political and economic activity. Heaton wrote:

For the Dutch, by the middle of the seventeenth century ‘a yacht was a normal possession of a person of wealth and rank’, an ostentatious way of demonstrating that status, but also ‘an essential of life in a country where water was always nearby’.

We are indebted to the contemporary diarists, John Evelyn (1620–1706), and, especially, his lifelong friend Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) for much of our information about Charles’ yachts. Sadly, Pepys, usefully positioned as Secretary to the Naval Board, only kept his diary for nine years (1660–1669), before, fearing he was going blind, taking his doctor's advice to stop his record.

Has Ethiopia become all of a sudden the next legible frontier of ‘agroimperialism’? The American journalist and writer Andrew Rice seems to think that way. In a scintillating article that he published in 2009, Rice, like many after him, revealed how: ‘Fearing food shortages, investors from Saudi Arabia and other wealthy countries are snapping up land in poor countries like Ethiopia in order to grow food there’ and ship it back home in large quantities. They wondered if such practices amounted to ‘neocolonialism’ or ‘development’? If the majority of the studies that invoked that binary tended to focus on global, macropolitical and macroeconomic issues, what concerned other groups of writers and critiques, including the internationally active rights groups such as GRAIN and the Oakland Institute, was the threats that the resultant practices, most notably the proliferation of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) and large-scale commercial farming pose on the micro-environment and the livelihood practices of ‘indigenous’ populations. Consequently, they presented evidence and arguments contradicting the official Ethiopian government and World Bank view that exaggerated the virtues and potential of largescale commercial farming.

To be sure, there is nothing sui generis or unprecedented in the ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF)'s policy on large-scale commercial farming. Aside from being a global phenomenon, the theory and practice of large-scale commercial farming has also a relatively long, albeit convoluted, history in Ethiopia, one that can be traced back to the first three decades of the twentieth century. Yet, what is remarkable about that history is not its longevity. It is, rather, largescale commercial farming's inability to thrive, endure and become a viable undertaking in Ethiopia during in the twentieth century that is remarkable. On the contrary, smallholder agriculture has proved to be the most durable, most versatile and socially most sustainable sector in Ethiopia all along. In addition, smallholder agriculture has rendered meaning and direction to the science, politics and practice of agricultural development in Ethiopia for most of its history. Strikingly, these were the trends and the realities that EPRDF has sought to occlude, reverse and alter drastically when it made the decision to pivot large-scale commercial farming as the epitome of its so-called Agricultural Development-led Industrialization programme (ADLI) in 2008.

THE PUBLICATION OF Ulrich Plenzdorf 's Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. caused a commotion. As scholar Dieter Sevin declared: “Neben Christa Wolfs erstem erfolgreichen Werk Der geteilte Himmel wurde kaum ein anderes literarisches Werk bei seiner Veröffentlichung in der DDR mit so viel Furore rezipiert wie Ulrich Plenzdorfs Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.” (Apart from Christa Wolf 's first successful novel Der geteilte Himmel, hardly any other literary work in the GDR was received with such furor as Ulrich Plenzdorfs Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.). Gundula M. Sharman even went so far as to compare the impact of the publication of Plenzdorf's novel with that of Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werther. Indeed, while many young adult readers, in East Germany and West Germany alike, awarded the book cult status, GDR apparatchiks lambasted it. And West German critics were divided. The range of opinion on the subject of the novel may be demonstrated by juxtaposing several different responses to it: that of East German lawyer and mystery writer Friedrich Karl Kaul's letter to the editor of Sinn und Form (where Plenzdorf's novel was originally published), Wilhelm Girnus, on June 12, 1972; that of writer Stephan Hermlin's response to Kaul in Sinn und Form in 1973; that of an East German secondary school student referred to as Monika Sch.; and those of two different West German critics.

Kaul makes his opinion clear:

Kaul does not like the juxtaposition of Goethe with youth culture and with scatological images. This is indicative of the extent to which Goethe was revered in GDR cultural politics, in part as a result of the writings of Georg Lukács. (It is ironic, furthermore, that Kaul uses an abjective metaphor of vomiting in order to describe his disgust with the abjection in Plenzdorf's novel.)