A World at Sea

Here is a collection of valuable studies that blend archival detail with wide comparative secondary reading, modest in scale and even in price, but with potentially wide ramifications. Global history is preached everywhere, and sometimes genuinely practised; maritime history is also in the ascendant. Yet maritime history has, editors Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal contend, been marginal in global history. The relationship between maritime and terrestrial processes is relatively neglected and so the connection between changing maritime practices and global change has been missed. The period in question is a very long early modernity, 1450–1900, dubbed here the first globalisation, a view with which some medievalists, most recently Valerie Hansen (The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began [2021]) might take issue. The first chapter (by Carla Rahn Phillips) addresses the big question of why anyone went to sea in the period. Its focus is on how

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Economic history · Globalization · Maritime history · Modern history · Modernity · Period (music · Perl · Political science · World history · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Maritime and Coastal Archaeology · Philosophy