The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  65. The estuary of the Singapore River was lined with ‘godowns’, storage facilities for the goods that passed through the port between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

  66. The white houses on the right were home to the Jewish merchants of Mogador (Essaouira), who controlled the tea trade from England to Morocco. From their windows in the royal casbah they looked out over the wharves where their goods were unloaded.

  67. The massive buildings erected in the port of Liverpool at the start of the twentieth century included the Royal Liver Building and the Cunard offices. This was the city’s golden age.

  68. In a similar style to the Liverpool waterfront, the bustling street along the river in Shanghai, known as the Bund, hosted banks and trading companies and included the vast Sassoon headquarters, far right.

  69. Even after the triumph of the steamship, tea, grain and mail clippers raced to their loading stations in China and Australia and back to Europe. Here is the Ocean Chief in the 1850s on the Australia run.

  70. The pride of the Cunard White Star fleet, the Queen Mary, arriving in New York on 8 August 1938. The interwar years were the great age of international liner voyages.

  71. The largest cruise ship in the world at the time this book was being written, the Allure of the Sea has capacity for more than 7,000 passengers.

  72. The largest container ship in the world at the time this book was being written, the CSCL Globe has capacity for more than 19,000 containers.

  Museums with Maritime Collections

  A book ranging across the globe and across the millennia cannot be based on close reading of the millions of archival sources that exist. Instead, I have made extensive use of museum collections from many countries, whether in maritime museums, described as such, or more general museums with relevant material such as contemporary maps and documents, ceramic finds from shipwrecks, porcelain imported into Europe, and in some cases the physical remains of the ships themselves. This is a list of some of the museums that have provided me with the richest material and the most valuable insights. They are not all big or lavish. Sometimes a small hut containing a local collection has been as helpful as a vast repository.

  CAPE VERDE ISLANDS

  Praia, Santiago: Archaeological Museum; Ethnological Museum.

  CHINA

  Hong Kong SAR: Historical Museum; Maritime Museum. Macau SAR: Historical Museum. Hangzhou: City Museum.

  DENMARK

  Copenhagen: Nationalmuseet. Helsingør: National Maritime Museum. Skagen: By-og Egnsmuseum.

  DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

  Santo Domingo: Alcázar de Colón; Fundación García Arévalo, Pre-Hispanic Collection; Museo de la Casas Reales; Museo del Hombre Dominicano.

  FINLAND

  Mariehamn, Åland Islands: Maritime Museum.

  GERMANY

  Bremerhaven: Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum; Deutsches Auswandererhaus. Lübeck: Hansemuseum.

  ITALY

  Genoa: Galata Maritime Museum.

  JAPAN

  Tokyo: National Museum.

  MALAYSIA

  Melaka: Cheng Ho Cultural Museum; Maritime Museum; Stadthuys Museum; Sultanate Palace Museum.

  THE NETHERLANDS

  Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum; Scheepvaart Museum.

  NEW ZEALAND

  Wellington: Te Papa National Museum; Wellington Museum.

  NORWAY

  Bergen: Bergen Museum; Hansa Museum. Oslo: Viking Ship Museum; National Museum.

  PORTUGAL

  Angra do Heroísmo, Terceira, Azores: Museum. Faro: Archaeological Museum. Lisbon: Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga; Gulbenkian Museum.

  QATAR

  Doha: Islamic Museum.

  SINGAPORE

  Asiatic Civilizations Museum; Historical Museum; Maritime Museum; Peranakan Museum.

  SPAIN

  Ceuta: Museum of the Instituto de Estudios Ceutíes. La Rábida: Convent and Museum.

  SWEDEN

  Gothenburg: Maritime Museum. Stockholm: Historiska Museet, Vasa Museum. Visby, Gotland: Museum.

  TURKEY

  Istanbul: Maritime Museum.

  UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

  Fujairah: Museum. Sharjah: Archaeological Museum; Maritime Museum; Islamic Museum.

  UNITED KINGDOM

  Belfast: Titanic Belfast. Bristol: M Shed; SS Great Britain. Liverpool: Maritime Museum. London: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

  Further Reading

  Chapter by chapter, the references indicate the large number of specific studies and primary sources on which I have relied. This bibliography presents books that deal more generally with the oceans. Some of the books deal with matters such as the ocean environment that have not been addressed closely in this book, but are certainly worth pursuing further. Most of the books cited appeared in the twenty-first century, quite a few even while this book was being written – this reflects the remarkable explosion in maritime history in the last couple of decades.

  GLOBAL APPROACHES

  A mass assault on maritime history is provided by C. Buchet general ed., The Sea in History – La Mer dans l’histoire (4 vols., Woodbridge, 2017), by an army of learned authors, but the end result is a miscellany of studies in French and English with an emphasis on Europe and the Mediterranean. As the saying goes, ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’, and the books lack a common approach, while coverage of some areas of the world is patchy, despite a claim that the book is ‘comprehensive’. D. Armitage, A. Bashford and S. Sivasundaram, eds., Oceanic Histories (Cambridge, 2018), contains brief chapters by various hands on most of the world’s major seas, including the Red Sea, the South China Sea and the Japan Sea, as well as about the oceans; however, the approach is resolutely historiographical, and occasionally mired in jargon; there are large bibliographies which are marked as much by surprising omissions, such as Beaujard’s monumental study of the Indian Ocean, as by helpful inclusions. In most chapters, lack of attention to the ancient and medieval periods is a fault found in much of the existing literature.

  L. Paine’s readable The Sea and Civilization: a Maritime History of the World (New York, 2013; London, 2014) makes a clear and spirited case for the role of maritime connections in the development of human civilization. The book is excellent on nautical technology. A very brief but thoughtful thematic treatment of similar issues is P. de Souza, Seafaring and Civilization: Maritime Perspectives on World History (London, 2001). Michael North, an excellent economic historian based in Germany, has written a short but wide-ranging maritime history of the world: Zwischen Hafen und Horizont: Weltgeschichte der Meere (Munich, 2016); even briefer is R. Bohn, Geschichte der Seefahrt (Munich, 2011).

  The archaeologist Brian Fagan has written a number of stimulating books showing how humans have interacted with the sea from the earliest times, including Beyond the Blue Horizon: How the Earliest Mariners Unlocked the Secrets of the Oceans (London, 2012), and Fishing: How the Sea Fed Civilization (New Haven, 2017), which deals with an aspect of maritime history largely left to one side in this book. J. Gillis, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (Chicago, 2012) is concise, lively and relevant. Maritime archaeology provides the basis for the enjoyable A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks (Lebanon, NH, 2015), by S. Gordon. A fine survey of the oceans in the medieval and early modern period was provided by Geoffrey Scammell, The World Encompassed: the First European Maritime Empires, c.800–1650 (London, 1981); Scammell also edited a series of four concise but valuable books on the seas and oceans that will be mentioned under the appropriate heading. Three classic accounts of seaborne empires cross the imagined boundaries between oceans: C. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825 (London, 1969); C. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800 (London, 1965); J. H. Parry, The Spanish Seaborne Empire (London, 1966), all published in J. H. Plumb’s pioneering series entitled The History of Human Society.

  World trade, much of it maritime, and expanding demand for high-quality material goods, is the theme of B. Lemire’s valuable Global Tra
de and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: the Material World Remade, c.1500–1820 (Cambridge, 2018). A superb account of the last century of maritime history, going far beyond Europe, is provided by M. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World: a Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge, 2012). The study of naval history and the study of the sort of maritime history portrayed in this book, with its emphasis on maritime trade, have diverged somewhat. R. Harding, Modern Naval History: Debates and Prospects (London, 2016), addresses problems such as the nature of sea power and the structure of national navies. The classic starting point is A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston, 1890), and subsequent works by the same author. Excellent examples of naval history are provided by N. A. M. Rodger in his multi-volume A Naval History of Britain: The Safeguard of the Sea 660–1649 and The Command of the Ocean 1649–1815 (London, 1997 and 2004).

  Environmental histories of the oceans often look back to times before the coming of humans: D. Stow, Vanished Ocean: How Tethys Reshaped the World (Oxford, 2010); J. Zalasiewicz and M. Williams, Ocean Worlds: the Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets (Oxford, 2014). But Callum Roberts has issued timely warnings about the way humans, and the climate changes they are generating, affect the seas, along with overfishing and other short-sighted policies: Ocean of Life: How Our Seas are Changing (London, 2012), and his earlier The Unnatural History of the Sea: the Past and Future of Humanity and Fishing (London, 2007). To these should be added a study of declining and extinct island populations (non-human): D. Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction (London, 1996).

  In this book the Mediterranean, with less than 1 per cent of the earth’s waters, is largely left offstage. The literature is vast but a few titles might help fill this gap. For the long view, see David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a Human History of the Mediterranean (London and New York, 2011), to which this book is a sister; also David Abulafia, ed., The Mediterranean in History (London and New York, 2003); for the earliest human presence, C. Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea (London, 2013); on ancient and early medieval ‘connectivities’, with relevance to other periods too, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea (Oxford, 2000) and more recently J. G. Manning, The Open Sea (Princeton, 2018), dealing with the economy of the ancient Mediterranean; on the sixteenth century but with much wider significance for the writing of all maritime history, Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, translated by Siân Reynolds (2 vols., London, 1972–3).

  THE PACIFIC

  This is the least studied of the three large oceans, though the literature is well aware of the need to look closely at the native population; for the long view, see M. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: a History of Seas, Peoples and Cultures (Cambridge, 2012); D. Armitage and A. Bashford, eds., Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (Basingstoke, 2014); and D. Freeman, The Pacific (Abingdon and New York, 2010), in the Scammell series. Narrower timescales are represented by A. Couper, Sailors and Traders: a Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples (Honolulu, 2009), and D. Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (Oxford and New York, 2013).

  THE INDIAN OCEAN

  Philippe Beaujard has been attempting to portray the Indian Ocean in its wider setting in his literally heavyweight Les Mondes de l’Océan Indien (2 vols., Paris, 2012). Inspired by Braudel, he sometimes wanders as deep into Asia as the Gobi Desert, so that it becomes less a maritime history than a rich and varied history of the continents touching the Indian Ocean. A readable survey is offered by R. Hall, Empires of the Monsoon: a History of the Indian Ocean and Its Invaders (London, 1996). Focusing on trade through the South China Sea and Indian Ocean, R. Ptak has written Die maritime Seidenstrasse: Küstenräume, Seefahrt und Handel in vorkolonialer Zeit (Munich, 2007). K. N. Chaudhuri’s lively Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: an Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1985) also lays an emphasis on trade, and like Beaujard he is heavily influenced by Braudel. M. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (Abingdon and New York, 2003), in Scammell’s series, is by a master of Indian Ocean history.

  THE ATLANTIC

  The literature on the Atlantic is even more extensive than that on the Mediterranean. There are several handbooks that manage, more or less successfully, to draw together a great variety of topics, from life in the early colonies in North America to the slave trade. Where they generally collapse is their lack of attention to the Atlantic before 1492, apart from passing references to Norsemen in Vínland and the Portuguese in the Atlantic islands. They include: N. Canny and P. Morgan, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World c.1450–c.1850 (Oxford, 2011); J. Greene and P. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: a Critical Appraisal (New York, 2009); D. Coffman, A. Leonard and W. O’Reilly, eds., The Atlantic World (Abingdon and New York, 2015). The same reservation applies to single- or double-author books about the Atlantic: B. Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); C. Armstrong and L. Chmielewski, The Atlantic Experience: Peoples, Places, Ideas (Basingstoke and New York, 2013); F. Morelli, Il mondo atlantico: una storia senza confini (secoli XV–XIX) (Rome, 2013); but less so with C. Strobel, The Global Atlantic 1400–1900 (Abingdon and New York, 2015), and with P. Butel, The Atlantic (London and New York, 1999), in the Scammell series. Bailyn’s book has been particularly influential, but the Atlantic there conceived has a northern focus and comes into being with Columbus and Cabot.

  The best route into the pre-Columbus eastern Atlantic is provided by Barry Cunliffe in On the Ocean: the Mediterranean and the Atlantic from Prehistory to AD 1500 (Oxford, 2017), and his earlier Facing the Ocean: the Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000 BC to AD 1500 (Oxford, 2001). On the pre-Columbian Caribbean, the latest account, though rather densely written, is by W. Keegan and C. Hofman, The Caribbean before Columbus (Oxford and New York, 2017), and then for later centuries a book by the leading historian in the Dominican Republic, Frank Moya Pons, History of the Caribbean: Plantations, Trade, and War in the Atlantic World (Princeton, 2007), or another of the Caribbean histories mentioned in my references. For the Gulf of Mexico in modern times, see J. Davis, The Gulf: the Making of an American Sea (New York, 2017).

  The Atlantic is understood in this book, and in Cunliffe’s books, to embrace the North Sea, which itself cannot be understood without the Baltic. The most authoritative general history of the Baltic is that of Michael North, The Baltic: a History (Cambridge, Mass., 2015; original edition: Geschichte der Ostsee, Munich, 2011). D. Kirby and M.-L. Hinkkanen contributed a volume on The Baltic and the North Seas (London and New York, 2000) to the Scammell series, but its thematic organization does not always make it easy to identify long-term changes. M. Pye has written a lively history of the medieval North Sea: The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (London, 2014), contentiously insisting that the North Sea was even more important in the development of European civilization than the Mediterranean. A general history of the English Channel is P. Unwin, The Narrow Sea (London, 2003). Finally, The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe 1300–1600 (Abingdon and New York, 2017), edited by W. Blockmans, M. Krom and J. Wubs-Mrozewicz, has the virtue of physical breadth even if its chronological range is shorter than most of the works cited here.

  THE ARCTIC OCEAN

  Richard Vaughan, best known for his books on the Valois dukes of Burgundy, also wrote The Arctic: a History (Stroud, 1994), though he ranges beyond the borders of the Arctic Ocean, as does J. McCannon, A History of the Arctic: Nature, Exploration and Exploitation (London, 2012). The Arctic Ocean has a chapter in Oceanic Histories, mentioned earlier – as does the Southern or Antarctic Ocean (by S. Sörlin and A. Antonello respectively) on which see now J. McCann, The Wild Sea: a History of the Southern Ocean (Chicago, 2019).

  References

  Preface

  1. On winds see F. Fernández-Armesto, ‘The Indian Ocean in World History’, in A. Disney and E. Booth, e
ds., Vasco da Gama and the Linking of Europe and Asia (New Delhi, 2000), pp. 14–16; A. Dudden, ‘The Sea of Japan/Korea’s East Sea’, in D. Armitage, A. Bashford and S. Sivasundaram, eds., Oceanic Histories (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 189–90.

  2. D. Armitage, A. Bashford and S. Sivasundaram, ‘Writing World Oceanic Histories’, in Armitage et al., Oceanic Histories, pp. 1, 8, 26.

  3. D. Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, in D. Armitage and M. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World (London and New York, 2002), pp. 11–27; also now D. Armitage, ‘Atlantic History’, in Armitage et al., Oceanic Histories, pp. 85–110; R. Blakemore, ‘The Changing Fortunes of Atlantic History’, English Historical Review, vol. 131 (2016), pp. 851–68.

  4. D. Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction (London, 1996).

  5. E. Tagliacozzo, ‘The South China Sea’; Dudden, ‘Sea of Japan/Korea’s East Sea’; J. Miran, ‘The Red Sea’: all in Armitage et al., Oceanic Histories, pp. 156–208.