The past twenty-five years have brought a dramatic expansion of
scholarship in maritime history, including new research on piracy,
long-distance trade, and seafaring cultures. Yet maritime history still
inhabits an isolated corner of world history, according to editors
Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. Benton and Perl-Rosenthal urge
historians to place the relationship between maritime and terrestrial
processes at the center of the field and to analyze the links between
global maritime practices and major transformations in world history.
A World at Sea consists of nine original essays that sharpen and
expand our understanding of practices and processes across the land-sea
divide and the way they influenced global change. The first section
highlights the regulatory order of the seas as shaped by strategies of
land-based polities and their agents and by conflicts at sea. The second
section studies documentary practices that aggregated and conveyed
information about sea voyages and encounters, and it traces the
wide-ranging impact of the explosion of new information about the
maritime world. Probing the political symbolism of the land-sea divide
as a threshold of power, the last section features essays that examine
the relationship between littoral geographies and sociolegal practices
spanning land and sea. Maritime history, the contributors show, matters
because the oceans were key sites of experimentation, innovation, and
disruption that reflected and sparked wide-ranging global change.
Contributors: Lauren Benton, Adam Clulow, Xing Hang, David Igler,
Jeppe Mulich, Lisa Norling, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Carla Rahn Phillips,
Catherine Phipps, Matthew Raffety, Margaret Schotte.
