The Boundless Sea : A Human History of the Oceans

WINNER OF THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2020
A SUNDAY TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, THE TIMES AND BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR

For most of human history, the seas and oceans have been the primary means of long-distance trade and communication. They have facilitated the spread of ideas, religion, and commerce. This book explores the fascinating history of human movement and interaction across the world's greatest bodies of water, charting our relationship with the oceans from the time of the first voyagers.

From the Earliest Seafarers to Global Trade Networks

• David Abulafia begins with the Polynesians of the Pacific, early seafaring societies with remarkable intuitive navigational skills. Long before the invention of the compass, they were trading between their far-flung islands by the first century.
• By the seventh century, trading routes connected the coasts of Arabia and Africa to southern China and Japan, linking the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific through the international spice trade.
• In the Atlantic, centuries before Portugal's rise as a seaborne empire, Bretons, Frisians, and the Vikings sought new lands. The Vikings, now recognized as the first Europeans to reach North America, were particularly notable.
• As Portuguese supremacy declined in the late sixteenth century, the Spanish, Dutch, and eventually the British successively dominated the seas.

Humanity's Maritime Adventures

Following merchants, explorers, pirates, cartographers, and travelers in their quests for spices, gold, ivory, slaves, lands for settlement, and knowledge of the unknown, Abulafia weaves an extraordinary narrative of humanity's relationship with the oceans.

From the earliest voyages in hand-hewn canoes across uncharted waters to the routes now traversed daily by thousands of supertankers, The Boundless Sea demonstrates how maritime networks formed a continuum of interaction and interconnection across the globe. Remarkably, 90 per cent of global trade is still conducted by sea.

A History of Grand Scale and Scope

This is history told from a bracingly different perspective—not from the land, as in most global histories, but from the boundless seas. It is a sweeping and compelling account of how the oceans have shaped human civilization.