David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram, editors. Oceanic Histories

No longer are the world’s oceans the exclusive domain of the natural sciences, as for about two decades now, they have become a topic for scholarly examination in the context of what Steven Mentz succinctly termed the “blue cultural studies” and others call the oceanic turn or a “new thalassology” (Mentz, “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature,” Literature Compass 6, no. 5 [2009]: 997–1013; Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, “AHR Forum: The Mediterranean and ‘the New Thalassology,’” AHR 111, no. 3 [2006]: 722–740). For the field of history, the collection under review—Oceanic Histories, which inaugurates a new book series, Cambridge Oceanic Histories, by the same editors, David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram—impressively demonstrates not only the vast array of research that has evolved in the wake of this turn to the sea as both human and nonhuman history (in reference to Saint Lucian Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea Is History” [2007]), but also critically discusses earlier historical work on the sea—Fernand Braudel’s famous study of the Mediterranean being just one case in point. Oceanic Histories features historians from Australia, Great Britain, Scandinavia, and the U.S., and presents the reader with research that is global in scope rather than limited by the closed conceptual entities of region or area, thus demanding, with John Gillis and Franziska Torma, a “fluid ontology” (18) as the basis for oceanic histories (“Introduction,” in Gillis and Torma, eds., Fluid Frontiers: New Currents in Marine Environmental History [2015], 1–12). Due to its scope, the collection is certainly also highly useful for both undergraduate and graduate courses in world history, which is refracted here through the world’s oceans and seas as both dividing and connecting human and nonhuman ecologies as interdependent, along both horizontal and vertical (submarine) axes—a perspective that has been all but obliterated in landlocked historiographical work. Helpful maps and “Further Reading” sections at the end of each chapter, including the introduction, as well as an extensive index also make the volume quite suitable for university classrooms.

Archaeology · Art history · Context (archaeology) · Classics · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Maritime and Coastal Archaeology