The Great Windships

The Great Windships is the author-led brand of Brian Stafford, focused on the history of merchant sailing ships and their influence on the modern world. Its featured book, The Great Windships: Five Centuries of Merchant Sailing Ship History, traces the story from the fragile vessels of the Age of Exploration to the powerful windjammers of the nineteenth century. It examines how sailing ships connected regions through global trade, carried goods and ideas across the oceans, and helped shape colonial expansion, as well as the opium and slave trades.

The book also considers the commercial, social, and political forces behind ship development, drawing together maritime history and the wider consequences of oceanic trade. Stafford, an economist and Sydney University alumnus, brings both a practical interest in sailing and a lifelong enthusiasm for merchant ship history to the work. The website provides an excerpt, author information, reviews, and a blog, and offers the book for purchase, including first editions with personalised inscriptions