In this recent book, historian of science and of the environment Antony Adler considers how modern Western societies have imagined the oceans. While the main title might suggest a laboratory-focused history of science and the book follows the typical timeline of a history of marine science and hits some of the standard notes – nineteenth-century dredging, the 1870s Challenger expedition, marine stations in Naples and elsewhere, twentieth-century military patronage – Adler's emphasis is generally not on how scientists have explored the oceans and what they found when they did so. Instead, as the subtitle well conveys, this is a social and cultural history of how Western societies have, over the last two hundred years, conceptualized the oceans as a place that can be scientifically understood.

Adler notes that he is in part responding to a thread in the early history of oceanography that focused on specific ships and expeditions – a kind of Great Ships version of old-fashioned Great Man history. Instead of this somewhat heroic, adventure science-at-sea origin story, he argues, ‘Marine science was birthed … in landlocked marine stations and universities but also in museums, fairgrounds, and homes’ (5). In order for scientists to engage with and study the oceans, the public (or various publics) had to imagine the oceans as something that could be approached scientifically. What this meant varied, from nineteenth-century interest in the oceans as source of fish both for dining and display, to twentieth-century World's Fair exhibit, to habitat of the future. These imagined oceans contributed both goals and support for scientific investigation. They also fostered – and were fostered by – political interest in the seas, where sites of imagined future competition and conquest drove scientific investigation.

Adler's story is a Western one; he examines case studies from Great Britain, France, Monaco, Italy and the United States, though he acknowledges the need for histories of marine science from other points of view. Considering public and political understanding of the oceans allows him to pull together several threads that are clearly related but which for various reasons tend to attract the attention of different historians, such as fisheries history, the history of marine biology, and environmental history.

The book begins with nineteenth-century British interest in the oceans, which grew with increasing access to both the seaside and the sea itself thanks to the Industrial Revolution. This isn't new ground, but he tells the story in new ways, focusing on fish as a commodity newly available to a public beyond the immediate shore and as denizens of a growing number of public – and even home – aquariums. The usual major figures in the history of oceanography are background for the main story here, which foregrounds the parallel interests of public consumers and government sponsors. Essentially, Adler argues, ‘the establishment of marine science cannot be appreciated without taking into consideration the wider context in which nineteenth-century society was turning its attention to the seas’ (45).

Adler then engages marine science's attempts at internationalism in the first half of the twentieth century. As others have argued, many saw the oceans as an inherently international field for science, both because boundaries and borders at sea are literally less solid and because their scope requires very broad engagement. He examines in particular efforts in France, Monaco and Italy to establish shore-based marine-science stations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the ways those stations aligned varyingly with nationalist or internationalist sentiment. In the twentieth century, he argues, attention of both scientists and the public shifted to the Pacific as a new ground for internationalism, both scientific and popular, which he examines through two World's Fairs held in San Francisco in 1914 and 1939. The timing of these fairs and their associated scientific meetings demonstrate new efforts at a Pacific internationalism, which waned as the oceans were increasingly recognized as militarily useful spaces during the world wars. The perceived need to turn both oceanic spaces and the secrets of ocean science to national purposes during the Cold War further undercut internationalism; during this period, he examines several efforts to establish habitats on the sea floor, whether because of futuristic dreams of undersea colonies or fearful concerns about controlling future battlescapes.

Finally, he looks at public visions of the sea in the twentieth century, a period during which the oceans were ‘reconceived from an environment that could be conquered and controlled to something fragile, broken, and dying’ (139). Adler here shifts more fully into the sensibilities of the environmental historian, and he considers in his conclusion the implications of modern public and political ocean imagining and the challenge of ‘making people care about something they cannot experience firsthand’ (170).

Altogether, this book is thoughtful and well conceived. It communicates a changing understanding and imagining of the oceans by various groups, only a relatively small portion of whom were scientists, but each of whom had their own ideas about the usefulness of ocean space and ocean science. It thus joins other recent work in the history of science in including not just laboratories and organisms, but also amateurs, patrons and publics, and setting their goals alongside and inclusive of those of scientific practitioners.

While of obvious interest to scholars of the ‘oceanic turn’, it should also find a much broader audience among those interested in how the public interacts with science and with the environment, and how these interests feed and are fed by political goals and fears. In the age of the Anthropocene, that audience could and should include graduate and undergraduate scholars in both the marine and other environmental humanities and STEM subjects, but also the general public, who might indeed be usefully challenged to consider how we imagine the oceans and why.