The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans

"David Abulafia is a remarkable historian and this is, I think, his masterpiece. As you say, he’s already written a history of the Mediterranean, but what seemed a remarkable book at the time was just a little hors d’oeuvre compared to this, the real à la carte stuff. The book has so much breathtaking knowledge and learning contained within it, but is also wonderfully accessible. The key to it is in the subtitle, it’s “a human history of the oceans.” It’s not a book devoted to maritime technology, although David plainly knows his stuff when it comes to that. It’s about the way in which men and women have engaged with the formidable force that is the ocean. There’s an element of the book that’s about exploration, but it actually takes him a very long time to get to 1492—not least because he devotes a great deal of space to the extraordinary adventures of the Polynesians. He also looks at the Norse navigators, who used a light-sensitive crystal called a ‘sólarsteinn’ (or sunstone). That allowed them to locate where the sun was, even on a dark day. The Polynesians were just incredible people who made vast journeys without any proper navigational tools at all. There’s a really great story in the book about a western captain who loses his compass, but his Polynesian crew locate their destination anyway. He asks them how on earth did they knew where the place was and they say, ‘It’s always been there.’ You just want to know how these remarkable people managed to navigate without any of the tools that we take for granted on this vast scale of the Pacific. It’s an extraordinary story, one of the greatest stories in all of human history. David spends a lot of time on that before getting to what we call ‘the age of discovery.’ But even then, he doesn’t get too obsessed with the expeditions of Prince Henry the Navigator and Columbus and so on. It’s more about trading. The impulse is not to be the first person there, or the first person to discover an island. It’s about the way in which trade opens up the world on this vast scale, and brings humans into contact, often in a benevolent way. In many ways this book an antidote to The Fortress , where we see humans come together in the most appalling, wholly malign way. Trade brings people together and gives them shared aspirations. The sea is this great thing, making up by far the majority of the world’s surface, that brings people together. It’s actually quite an optimistic book and David tells it brilliantly. I wholly recommend this book. No, not at all and that’s really quite striking. Trade inspires innovation, it inspires contact, it is a very, very benevolent thing. In a way, this book makes the case that trade is what makes us human in a benign way. Yes, it’s not a book to sit down with in one go, but it’s nicely broken up in terms of periods. It’s almost got books within books, and it’s beautifully written. He’s a very good writer and because it’s full of human stories, it has a novelistic aspect to it as well. So it’s very easy to read. It never feels like a difficult book, it’s very, very accessible. One is just taken along on this tide of knowledge and human stories. He starts in Polynesia, and he makes the point that we don’t know when these things happened. In these very early voyages, it’s very elusive but by looking, for example, at linguistic roots, we can see that the connections go very, very deep. For instance, the languages of Hawaii, Tahiti and New Zealand are related and the word for sweet potato resembles linguistically the one people use in South America. It’s difficult to track exactly when this began. We’re going into the deepest parts of human history—which are undateable, essentially—and he brings us right up to the modern age. But the emphasis is always on trade."

"If Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five is a book that concentrates on the minutiae of a small number of people in the East End of London in a specific period of time, David Abulafia’s The Boundless Sea goes to the opposite extreme: it’s a historical study of the human dimension of the oceans throughout the whole of recorded history. David Abulafia is a historian of the Mediterranean, but here he’s expanded his vision to encompass the whole of human history. It’s sweeping in its coverage across time and space, and he has a magisterial command of the scholarship on the extraordinarily diverse range of regions, periods and events tackled. The sea covers most of the globe, but here we have a history that takes it as a single topic. It’s staggeringly learned but it’s also very readable. “Global history has made great strides in the last 15 years or so and The Boundless Sea is a very good example of how history on a global scale is being written in Britain at the moment.” What’s impressive about it is that it’s not Eurocentric. It gives equal weight to the whole range of seagoing civilizations. So, for example, famously in the Middle Ages, the Chinese emperor had fleets built that sailed to at least Africa. He tells the fascinating story of these epic voyages, but also cuts it down to size. Legends have inflated the size of these fleets to quite unbelievable levels, and Abulafia takes a more realistic view without in any way diminishing their achievement. Global history has made great strides in the last 15 years or so, and The Boundless Sea is a very good example of how history on a global scale is being written in Britain at the moment."