In 1972 an image became an icon: 'Blue Marble', a photograph of the Earth as seen from outer space. The picture features prominently the globe's water-covered surface. The ocean connects nature and culture in the modern world. Within the time-span of 100 years, the sea changed its cultural meaning, from a dangerous place to an endangered environment. This volume traces diverse processes of oceanic transformation in the Anthropocene: it follows scientists, seafarers, diplomats and filmmakers from ship-decks to the arenas of political decision making on land. The essays lead...
In 1972 an image became an icon: 'Blue Marble', a photograph of the Earth as seen from outer space. The picture features prominently the globe's wa...
The sea is omnipresent in the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean basin. It is an inexhaustible source of food, but also a well-traveled roadway and a means to communicate, trade with, or wage war against one's neighbors. Perhaps because these practical meanings of the sea were so deeply embedded in daily life, the sea also had a profound religious and symbolic significance for ancient people, from the worship of sea-deities by anxious mariners to the creation of intricate literary devices based on 'the wine-dark sea' and concepts such as insularity. People even imagined that,...
The sea is omnipresent in the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean basin. It is an inexhaustible source of food, but also a well-traveled roadway ...
This volume covers a period when Europeans were making great advances in the production and application of pure knowledge, especially in the fields of navigation and discovery. Thus European powers gained empires around the globe and the benefits that came with them, while the rest of the world had to be content with supplying the raw material (i.e labour, bullion, wood, plants, ore) of these good things. This would not have been possible without navies and trading monopolies, enterprises in which the freedom of the seas was disputed, then gained or lost. The essays in this...
This volume covers a period when Europeans were making great advances in the production and application of pure knowledge, especially in the fields...
The cultural history of the sea during the Middle Ages is a young and dynamic field. Born only recently in the literary criticism of European sources, this innovative volume pushes out beyond this European heartland to explore the shape and potential of a cultural history of the sea constructed also from global literatures and oral traditions, and from material things. The chapters in this volume bring together the perspectives and expertise of archaeologists, historians and literary historians with a core focus on Afro-Eurasia and its encircling seas. Topics explored include: ...
The cultural history of the sea during the Middle Ages is a young and dynamic field. Born only recently in the literary criticism of European sourc...
For the first time during the Early Modern period, ships regularly traveled between and among all of basins that comprise the World Ocean. During this period European mariners ventured into new waters, where they encountered new trading partners, new environments, and new opportunities. In the Caribbean and Atlantic coast of the Americas, European mariners sought everything from pearls to gold to codfish, and in pursuing these resources they fractured Indigenous communities. Entering into the ancient monsoon routes of the Indian Ocean brought European ships in touch with the...
For the first time during the Early Modern period, ships regularly traveled between and among all of basins that comprise the World Ocean. During t...
Across the 19th century, maritime globalization expanded at a hitherto unimaginable pace, transforming transport and communications over the seas into oceanic networks at a planetary scale. These networks shaped culture in its most expansive sense, affecting seafaring, warfare, empire, commerce, communications, passenger travel, leisure and science. Authors recover the sea experience of people and groups entangled with and yet neglected in an earlier generation of maritime history focused on conquest, empire, and knowledge. Thus, across a century when Britannia nominally ruled...
Across the 19th century, maritime globalization expanded at a hitherto unimaginable pace, transforming transport and communications over the seas i...
