Oceanic histories

Abstract

About 70% of the earth’s surface is covered by water and only the remaining 30% of it is dry land. In spite of this, even in recent times, attempts to describe human events in a global and deep historical perspective have had the hard and walkable surface of the world as a privileged object, or at least as a favoured framework. Oceanic Histories represents the first attempt ever made in contemporary historiography to counterbalance this intellectual bias with a comprehensive global history focused on the earth’s waters. The book’s structure is made of chapters dealing with the main seas, and all the oceans covering the earth. In this review I will not expand on the contents of each chapter to end up with a simple descriptive summary, but I shall leave to the reader the pleasure of discovering the historical peculiarities of each sea and ocean. What is more interesting, faced with such a significant book, is to understand what kind of historiographic operation we are facing, and how Oceanic Histories dialogues with contemporary academic debate. It is not surprising, in this sense, that the editors of the book come from important universities located at the antipodes of the world, all overlooking, or at least close to the seas that are described in Oceanic Histories, and in countries that played a leading role in the history of the oceans. In order to understand the book, it is also worth noting the different and complementary academic interests of the editors. David Armitage (Harvard University) is a political historian dealing with global circulation of ideas, with a particular focus on the Atlantic area and the role played by England and