Above the Water or in It? Episodes in the Global History of Swimming

Humans have been swimming in different modes and techniques since before recorded history, but a distinctive inflection point in the history of global swimming appears in the eighteenth century. Europeans, through their global travels and colonial practices, encountered many human cultures, from Africa to North America to the Caribbean, whose inhabitants were more skilled in the water then they were. The contrast between the American front crawl and European breaststroke provides a telling microhistory of different techniques of adaptation to aquatic environments during an early phase of globalization

Adaptation (eye) · Colonialism · Environmental history · Front (military) · Global climate · Global warming · World history · Adventure Sports and Sensation Seeking · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History of Medicine and Tropical Health