The idea of drawing together historians of different seas and oceans, often with quite different perspectives on how to write maritime history, is a good one, at a time when seas have emerged as a major dimension in historical research. Just thinking of the major oceans, the traditional division of the maritime world into three separate spaces, and three historical disciplines, has increasingly been challenged. It was already obvious from the classic work of Charles Boxer on the Portuguese and Dutch seaborne empires that the history of the high seas quite literally flows between oceans; after all, Portuguese shipping could not reach Macau from Europe without crossing from the Atlantic into the Indian Ocean and then the Pacific by way of the Cape route and the Straits of Malacca. At the same time, ever since Meilink-Roelofsz’s pioneering work on the trade of early modern Indonesia, awareness has grown of local trade networks that were operated not, or not mainly, by Europeans, along with interest in how the ‘country trade’ slotted into the very long-distance commercial routes created in the aftermath of Vasco da Gama’s voyages to India. As the editors point out in the wide-ranging introduction to this book, it may make more sense to talk of a single ‘world ocean’ than to carve up the oceans, whose limits are in any case arbitrary, at least in the southern hemisphere. In that sense, classical writers already knew best, even if Ptolemy was convinced that the entire Indian Ocean was ringed by land: a single great Okeanos was understood to encircle the world’s landmass.

Oceanic histories embraces not just oceans but largely enclosed seas (the Mediterranean, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Red Sea) and seas separated from the larger ocean of which they are a part by chains of islands (the South China Sea and the seas between Japan, Korea, and China). The Black Sea is well handled by Stella Ghervas, but it is a long way from any ocean. Space should have been found for the Persian Gulf, if the Red Sea is present – maybe for a comparison between these two seas, which in early Islamic times competed for the command of key trade routes – and space is also needed for the Caribbean plus the Gulf of Mexico, an area that barely appears in David Armitage’s otherwise excellent reconsideration of different types of Atlantic history. One can understand the Baltic better by including the North Sea, which has no chapter of its own. However, enclosed middle seas have rather different characteristics from the wide, open spaces of oceans: the long, narrow shape of the Mediterranean has facilitated very intensive trade and migration between all its shores, whereas when one looks at oceanic spaces links tend to be elongated, separated into distinct ‘highways’, and to a greater degree controlled by the massive forces of enormous wind systems and currents. Within the Mediterranean Sea, several substantial islands – most notably Sicily – have functioned as cultural bridges between the civilizations that have developed on the opposing shores of the sea. The island history of the oceans is rather different: as Armitage observes, widely scattered uninhabited islands in the Atlantic such as the Azores and the Cape Verde archipelago were only settled from the fifteenth century onwards; in the Pacific, the settlement of hundreds of islands took place over several millennia, only ending with the arrival of Polynesians in Aotearoa (New Zealand) around 1300 CE.

The book gives the impression that each author was handed a questionnaire setting out the major issues he or she should consider, beginning with nomenclature. Several authors become bogged down in debates about what their watery space should be called, particularly Alexis Dudden, who wrote the chapter cautiously entitled ‘The Sea of Japan/Korea’s East Sea’. The informative chapters on the Arctic Ocean and the Southern (or Antarctic) Ocean engage with various international commissions that defined these seas as oceans and, in the Southern case, set out its supposed limits, which are bound to be arbitrary. What does emerge from these discussions is several different ways of looking at the oceans: in the early modern period the Atlantic was often seen as two spaces, roughly corresponding to the fact that America is not one but two continents, but reflecting, too, the importance of Atlantic bases for navigation further away: St Helena became a valuable re-supply point for shipping coming out of the Indian Ocean, as did the Cape Verdes. The enduring image of the Pacific as the ‘South Sea’ attached a romanticized identity to the ocean (one thinks of Gauguin); but it was sometimes separated into two parts – although the physical division is not obvious, the different wind systems of the northern and southern Pacific validate this way of thinking.

A second question that contributors were obviously asked to address focused on the historiography of their sea or ocean, a theme that dominates several chapters. At the end of each chapter there are also brief critical bibliographies that often reflect the particular interests of the author rather than the subject as a whole. Thus Alison Bashford’s lively chapter omits the literature on Polynesian navigation by Howe, Kirch, Irwin, and others. Sujit Sivasundaram fails to cite the massive studies of the early Indian Ocean by Philippe Beaujard (Les mondes de l’Océan Indien, 2012), as well as that of Meilink-Roelofsz (Asian trade and European influence, 1962), whose methods surely anticipate those of Das Gupta. David Armitage does not mention Charles Verlinden’s pioneering studies of the Atlantic in the age of Portuguese exploration. Molly Greene fails to cite my own The Great Sea (2011) anywhere in her chapter on the Mediterranean, even though she addresses the idea of phases of integration and disintegration, and the emphasis on human agency, that lie at the heart of my book. Alexis Dudden omits mention of Charlotte von Verschuer’s ground-breaking study of early Japanese trade, not long ago translated from French (Across the perilous sea, 2006). Finally, Sverker Sörlin imagines that the first general history of the Arctic was only published in 2012, although Richard Vaughan’s The Arctic: a history appeared in 1994, and it seems that Sörlin is unaware of the much-admired work of Gwyn Williams on attempts to find Arctic routes to the Far East (for instance Arctic labyrinth, 2009). Very few of the publications mentioned are in any language but English, although the footnotes to the excellent chapters on the Red Sea and the Baltic are distinguished exceptions. Despite the undoubted prominence of English-language publications on maritime history, the book as a whole fails to do justice to the impressive scholarship of French, German, Portuguese, and other historians – figures such as Roderick Ptak, who has worked extensively on the ‘Silk route of the sea’ (Die maritime Seidenstraße, 2007).

The Red Sea and Baltic chapters, by Jonathan Miran and Michael North, stand out for another important reason than their openness to non-Anglophone scholarship. Too many authors have concentrated heavily on the period with which they are most familiar. Eric Tagliacozzo does take a long-term view of the South China Sea, but Sörlin has a very small amount to say about early modern attempts to find a north-west passage, and offers nothing on the equally vigorous attempts to locate a north-east passage. Alessandro Antonello’s chapter on the Southern Ocean would have improved if he had stopped to consider the search for the ‘Southern Continent’ in more than four lines. Most authors, though, pass extremely rapidly over the ancient, medieval, and, in some cases, early modern periods. David Armitage should have spent more time looking at eastern Atlantic networks before Columbus, though he does mention the Norse settlements in Greenland (they lasted over 400 years). The assumption that there is not much Atlantic history before Columbus, or at least Henry the Navigator, has been energetically challenged by the archaeologist Barry Cunliffe in Facing the ocean (2001), which takes a long view all the way to 1500 CE. Fortunately, North has much to say about the medieval Hanseatic merchants, though mainly within the Baltic itself. Key places are often absent: neither Melaka nor Singapore features in Oceanic histories, though Sivasundaram helpfully refers to John Miksic’s work The silk route of the sea, which in fact shows that fourteenth-century Singapore was a major trading hub.

Some of these criticisms could only have been met if the book were much larger. But there is a good reason for demanding a second edition that could incorporate not just these suggestions but a revised text that at the moment gives the impression of having been printed from uncorrected proofs. The publisher appears to have abandoned any attempt at copy-editing. There is no guide to transliteration, but Chinese names switch between Wade-Giles and pinyin spelling, though the port known in pinyin as Quanzhou is mis-rendered in Wade-Giles in various forms in close proximity to one another (and Alexis Dudden prefers in any case to use original Chinese and Japanese characters). We have Admiral Zheng He rather than Cheng Ho, but Chao Ju-kua for the medieval Chinese geographer, not Zhao Rugua. At one point a quotation from the Arctic explorer Alexander McKenzie is turned into gibberish by confusion between en-rules and hyphens (p. 283). Passages in several articles are rendered incomprehensible by poor editing, though here and there authors luxuriate in obscurity and jargon: ‘ship-based scientific mapping was performative as well as evacuative’ (p. 21). The Latin word maris (‘of the sea’) appears as marae. Dudden’s clumsy literary style, if it can be called that, badly needed copy-editing. The titles of a number of books and articles in the footnotes abide by no style sheet known to humans.

The book’s cover claims that this is ‘the first comprehensive account of world history focused not on the land but viewed through the 70% of the Earth’s surface covered by water’. And yet, as its title suggests, it is more concerned with historiography than history; and it is not ‘comprehensive’ (as if any history of the oceans could be). The series it heralds will include the Caribbean and North Sea, which, as has been seen, are omitted from this book. But these qualifications do not undermine the claim of the book to be a thought-provoking manifesto for the new series of ‘Cambridge oceanic histories’. To say that the authors adopt very different approaches is also to say that there are many possible approaches to maritime history, now that it has moved away from the traditional concerns of naval historians (ship construction, navigational instruments, battle tactics, and so forth). Some authors, such as Sivasundaram, show a strong interest in the transmission of knowledge about and across the seas. Others, notably the eminent economic historian Michael North, have most to say about trade, but several chapters do not pay sufficient attention to the role of trade in making trans-oceanic connections. Some contributors, at a time when ‘blue history’ concerned with environmental aspects of maritime history is becoming fashionable (and rightly so), emphasize ecological dimensions in an age of climate change and depletion of maritime resources. Despite its omissions large and small and its poor presentation, this book provides a handy guide to where we are now in the attempt to reshape maritime history. Actually, it is not one manifesto but a series of manifestoes, opening the way for plenty of debate about the subject matter of maritime history.