Oceanic History

Abstract

Writing about oceans has a very long history. In this chapter, the author points out the advantages and perils of writing about oceans. The chapter sketches the present state of oceanic history, and perhaps suggests areas where we could do better. In the early modern period, bullion from South America flowed seamlessly over three oceans: the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian. If we write about oceans and seas we need to consider when they were first perceived to have some unity, some connections which meant they could be seen as capable of analysis. A central question, which needs to be bravely confronted, is to consider whether we can write a history of a body of water in isolation from the land. Some take a totally dismissive stance, denying any “history” to the sea. Oceanic studies can add to or modify our more familiar terrestrial models.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.