In recent years oceanic histories, buoyed by the institutional efflorescence (and decline?) of Atlantic history, have emerged as a discrete and growing subfield within world history. This subfield emphasizes the oceanic mechanisms of globalization and traces global patterns of maritime connections. As the subfield expands, the need for synthesis and reflection grows. Oceanic Histories, edited by David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram, begins the work of taking stock of where the scholarship on the world’s oceans has been and where the field might be going as it comes into its own. Inaugurating the Cambridge Oceanic Histories series, this volume and its contributors seek to address the question: “what is the historical and historiographical relation between world histories, the world’s oceans and the world ocean?” (3).
The editors draw from an extensive, although not comprehensive set of essays to see how a range of disciplines have approached the maritime and environmental pasts of the world’s aqueous spaces. To bring order to the wide-ranging collection, the editors organized the volume into three sections, the first on oceans, the second on seas, and the third on the world’s oceanic poles. The essays on the world’s oceans, written by each of the editors, focus on historiographic issues, either re-visiting old conceptual debates as is the case with David Armitage’s chapter on the Atlantic World or providing a more traditional historiographic genealogy such as Alison Bashford’s contribution on the Pacific Ocean. Sujit Sivasundaram’s chapter offers a particularly compelling intervention by framing historiographic debates on the Indian Ocean within the “sea’s narration over the longue durée” (31). The second section on seas offers a more variegated set of oceanic and maritime histories, whether land-locked and profoundly influenced by land-based polities like Stella Ghervas’ essay on the Black Sea, or the archipelagic South China Sea studied by Eric Tagliacozzo. Along with presenting a diverse array of oceanic and maritime geographic units of analysis, the essays on the world’s seas adopts a more historical rather than historiographic approach, except for Molly Greene’s essay on the Mediterranean world which describes the challenges and questions recently posed to Braudel’s legacy in the context of Mediterranean studies. Finally, the section on the world’s poles presents the reader with what Sverker Sörlin calls the Ocean of High Modernity and global capitalism in the 21st century, a space only recently subjected to sustained resource extraction.
The inclusion of two essays on the poles in this edited volume drives home a central point that surfaces from the various contributions, the need for historians of the world’s oceans and seas to think more expansively and comparatively about the historical approaches and historiographic assumptions driving much of the scholarship on oceanic and maritime history. The essays by Sujit Sivasundaram on the Indian Ocean, Alison Bashford on the Pacific, Molly Greene on the Mediterranean and Sverker Sörlin and Alessandro Antonello’s discussions of the poles, raise significant challenges to Braudel’s historiographical legacy in oceanic and maritime history. From these essays it appears that the intellectual trajectories of these fields did not necessarily emerge as mimesis of Braudel’s The Mediterranean nor as a cadet branch of Bernard Bailyn’s genealogy of Atlantic history as is sometimes suggested. Historians of the Pacific Ocean can trace their field back to geographers as well as the work of anthropologists Malinowski and Mead. The Indian Ocean’s historiography displays a “long-term fluidity”; possessing “no clear beginning, nor has it operated in a linear track, by way of geography, temporality or method” (63). Indeed, for Sörlin, Braudel’s legacy on oceanic history stifles discussions of the predominantly deserted poles as a part of oceanic history. The range of historiographic and historical examples provided in this volume should encourage maritime and oceanic historians to reach for new comparisons across the world’s oceans and disciplinary traditions.
While collectively these contributions challenge historiographic assumptions about the origins and trajectory of oceanic histories, suggesting broader readings across disciplines and world history, there remains little that explicitly ties these essays together. The wide-ranging essays in this volume offer readers a glimpse into the varied approaches that appear to be guiding the latest research in the sub-field. Environmental histories figure prominently here, offering ways forward especially for less well-known oceanic arenas like the poles. With an environmental focus in this edited volume, however, there’s a great deal of attention paid to these oceanic spaces as increasingly exploited ecologies rather than on the types of maritime communities that predominantly inhabited the world’s marine environments. The broad temporal perspectives of the essays often flatten the seamen and coastal communities that animated these spaces. Despite this flattening of maritime history, the contributors and editors acknowledge a consensus forming around the need to challenge standard narratives of globalization that ignore the persistence and influence of local maritime knowledge and traditions. These conclusions must be teased out by the reader and are only briefly mentioned in the volume’s introduction. A concluding essay would allow the editors the space for a more satisfying synthesis of the sprawling subfield in world history. A concluding chapter would have also allowed the editors to reflect and expand on how different types of aqueous spaces, such as ports, islands, and archipelagos may relate to the areas discussed in the contributions to this volume.
Nevertheless, this edited volume begins to chart a way forward for oceanic world histories by encouraging comparisons and challenging the historiographic primacy of Atlantic and Mediterranean history. And as the introduction to the Cambridge Oceanic Histories series, this volume might attract maritime historians with explicitly environmental or inter-disciplinary approaches or perspectives. Students and researchers interested in engaging with this growing subfield of world history will find such a collection a useful place to start thinking comparatively about oceanic and maritime history.
