Historians have been discovering the sea for some time - or, better yet, they are discovering it again. There has long been talk of an "oceanic turnaround", a "new thalassology", and "historical marine science" for a long time. There is hardly a sea that has remained without a monograph, even without a biography, in recent years. The reasons for this - still increasing and by no means limited to historical studies - trend are diverse: There is no question that the continuing interest in global history plays a role, which in many cases goes hand in hand with the (not just post-colonial) intention to “provincialize” European perspectives ".
In addition, there is the awareness that the historical investigation of maritime spaces as spaces without place and without borders can contribute to overcoming methodological bottlenecks, not least of all national provenances.
Not to mention the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary opportunities that the spatial and temporal “in between” the sea opens up.
Finally: There seems to be no question that the discovery or rediscovery of the sea as a historical (and historiographical) space of possibility also goes hand in hand with the growing understanding of the threat, if not the loss of the sea.
Mobility, dynamism, communication
Although the new historical marine science also knows what it has in Fernand Braudel's epochal Mediterranean book, first published in 1949 - “The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Epoch of Philip II” - it all in all relies less on long-term changes in natural space than on the respective connections that make up the sea and that allow one sea to correspond with other seas. Connections that historically can also have short terms. Not that the Braudelian time levels of long and medium duration have been forgotten. But today's historical interest in the sea goes in a different direction. In the current research discourse, the sea is above all movement - and thus encounters, relationships, networks.
This book also follows this trend.
Basically, mobility, dynamics and communication are its implicit guiding concepts.
First published in 2019 as “The Boundless Sea” based on a Shakespeare phrase, the English subtitle expresses this program better than the German: “A Human History of the Oceans”.
The author, Cambridge historian David Abulafia, divides his book into five parts, the first three of which are dedicated to the individual oceans: the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and its West and East Asian neighbors, and the Atlantic.
As an aside: from a historiographical perspective, this order is rather unusual, as the Atlantic attracted the attention of historical research much earlier than the Pacific.
Not to mention the Mediterranean.