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AHR Forum
Oceans of History
Introduction
KÄREN WIGEN
| Chances are, readers of the AHR have found the ocean catching their eye of late. Maritime scholarship seems to have burst its bounds; across the discipline, the sea is swinging into view. Historians of science have documented the discovery of longitude and the plumbing of underwater depths;1 historians of ideas have mapped the conceptual geographies of beaches, oceans, and islands;2 historians of labor and radical politics have drawn arresting new portraits of maritime workers and pirates;3 historians of business have tracked maritime commerce;4 historians of the environment have probed marine and island ecologies;5 and historians of colonial regimes and anticolonial movements alike have asserted the importance of maritime arenas of interaction.6 No longer outside time, the sea is being given a history, even as the history of the world is being retold from the perspective of the sea.7 |
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This AHR Forum looks at one branch of this burgeoning scholarship: namely, studies that adopt a single, more or less bounded body of water as their focus or frame. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell open the forum with a review of work on the Mediterranean, the ur-sea for what has been called "the new thalassology"; Alison Games surveys the self-consciously younger field of Atlantic basin studies; and Matt Matsuda introduces an ethnographically inflected literature based in the Pacific.8 The resulting essays capture three emergent communities of scholarship, at once dramatically different and dynamically interrelated. |
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One telling relationship is suggested by the order in which the essays are presented. The Mediterranean, first in this forum, was also the first to be colonized by networks of routine, round-trip exchange. Aided by the basin's closure as well as by its relatively intimate dimensions, the Phoenicians and Greeks managed to turn circum-Mediterranean voyaging into a reasonable risk—and a regular practice—by the seventh century b.c.e. Two thousand years would pass before Iberian, English, and Dutch sailors mastered the larger and stormier Atlantic for routine crossings, while the Pacific would be sutured by only the slenderest of ties for at least two centuries after that. The Polynesians who managed the astonishing feat of peopling Oceania's far-flung archipelagos did not habitually circumnavigate its vast expanse; conversely, the seafaring communities of coastal Asia and America established vigorous but largely separated spheres of connectivity, a ring of coastal seas. Only with the incursion of whaling vessels and steamships in the 1800s did the Pacific become a place of dense, crisscrossing connections on the Mediterranean model. |
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But this raises a second sense in which the sequencing of these essays is significant. For the Mediterranean, the first sea to be colonized, was also the original maritime region in the Euro-American imagination. Established early on as a space of historical inquiry—initially among scholars of antiquity, later among admirers of Fernand Braudel—the Mediterranean remains the model to which other maritime regions are inevitably compared. Tellingly, Horden and Purcell celebrate the Mediterranean in this forum not only as a prototype of seaborne connectivity, but indeed as the only sea boasting transmarine interactions of sufficient density to shape patterns of primary production and staple trade around its shores. Summarizing the argument of an earlier co-authored book, they sketch here the distinctive regime of risk, logic of production, topographical fragmentation, and internal connectivity that, taken together, can be said to have stamped the Mediterranean as a coherent region over three millennia. |
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Games picks up on the theme of unity through connection, albeit in a backhanded form. Her essay emphasizes the extent to which the Atlantic lacks the kind of coherence that scholars have found in the Mediterranean. Given the magnitude of its scope, as well as the ecological and demographic diversity around its rim (a diversity that, as she reminds us, is still only dimly grasped), historians have conceived the Atlantic primarily as an "intercontinental highway," a space of transit for people, ideas, germs, and goods. In the early modern period, the most important flows facilitated by this waterway were those of population—above all, the unprecedented forced migration of some 12 million enslaved Africans. The scope and violence of the slave trade have rightly riveted Atlantic historians' attention from the start. But massive demographic movements have also compelled careful attention to transoceanic cultural exchange and "creolization," a concept that Games thoughtfully interrogates here. Most striking, however, is Games's implication that Braudel's paradigm remains the salient standard for Atlantic studies. In a memorable metaphor, she likens her field to "a surly middle sibling," less established than the Mediterranean, and "in the throes of an adolescent identity crisis." In lamenting the "impediments" to the implementation of a Braudelian vision for Atlantic history, Games confirms the continuing hegemony of the Mediterranean model. |
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The author who closes the forum, by contrast, pointedly distances himself from that model. To make sense of the Pacific as a region, Matt Matsuda fastens on a different kind of unity: one forged not in environmental and economic interdependencies, but in cultural imaginings. Typically, he tells us, the Pacific has been narrated from colonial and continental perspectives, creating a storyline that runs "from an ancient Polynesian and early modern Magellanic space of transit, to an Enlightenment theater of sensual paradise, to a strategic grid of labor movements and military 'island-hopping,' to a capitalist basin." Against this externally imposed Pacific, Matsuda posits a different imaginary generated from within: one where Oceania is "Our Sea of Islands," an archipelagic world permeated by prehistoric kinship and cultural ties. Marked by tales of cargo cults, vestiges of female authority, and a shared legacy of navigational know-how, this Pacific is imagined as a space less of discovery than of ancestral return. Moreover, the registers in which its histories are transmitted are predominantly those of ethnography, autobiography, and performance; notes insistently point the reader toward memoirs, poetry, paintings, songs, and films. In Matsuda's portrait, the field of Pacific-cum-Oceania studies comes across as a lively conjuncture of art, activism, and academic enterprise. It also emerges as a self-consciously subversive domain, challenging the methodologies of an emerging ocean studies establishment whose poles of power lie on the opposite side of the globe. |
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If each essay thus offers a glimpse of a distinctive geography and history, however, disparity is not the only message this forum conveys. Difference is not even necessarily its dominant chord. For despite their striking contrasts of scale and development, these basins have generated similar historical dynamics, and prompted similar scholarly concerns. As a result, a number of shared themes run through the literatures on the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Pacific. Collectively, I would submit, these essays reveal some striking consistencies in contemporary ocean-oriented scholarship. Building on Horden and Purcell's claims for the new thalassology, we might identify five common properties of the ocean-oriented histories surveyed here. |
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First, across the globe, maritime regions are demonstrated to be modern cultural constructs. It is worth noting that each essayist who has participated in this forum embraces a metageographical project—sustained inquiry into the cultural construction of the region in question—as an indispensable component of oceanic historiographies. Horden and Purcell go so far as to identify this kind of inquiry as a hallmark of the new regionalism: in their view, scholars cannot take for granted, but must discover and argue about, the basis on and extent to which a given stretch of water can serve as a meaningful field of inquiry. The spatial framework, rather than being an unselfconscious analytic tool, becomes an object of research in oceanic history. |
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One potentially troubling corollary is that for historians of premodern eras, oceanic labels are fundamentally anachronistic. As Games points out, what we call the Atlantic was typically perceived by our ancestors as several distinct seas.9 Perhaps more troubling is the imperial context in which these concepts were originally forged. Not surprisingly, the idea of an "Atlantic basin," as well as the corresponding "Pacific," turns out to have its origins in modern colonial and scientific enterprise. But Horden and Purcell insist that even the Mediterranean as a region (and not simply as a sea) was a post-Enlightenment conceit, invented in the course of the nineteenth century. On the evidence of these essays, one can only conclude that basin thinking is a product of high imperialism. |
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If this raises the question of whether a unit such as the Atlantic is inescapably an imperialist category, investigations into emic conceptions of the sea—whether articulated by littoral peoples, sailors, merchants, or islanders—form an important counterweight, constituting a second commonality among the literatures surveyed here. Indeed, a good part of the drama of oceanic history lies in the clash between indigenous and outsider discourses. As Matsuda observes, "Oceanic histories are particularly rich and contested where Islander stories are matched against other global histories of seaborne empires emanating from European states and kingdoms, creating theaters of encounter and contact." Pacific scholars have worked with particular success to reconstruct the early phase of these encounters as "situations of appropriation, indeed collaboration and mutual engagement," effectively recovering "middle grounds" from a landscape that would be flattened over the long run by "the organized and unequal power relations of guns, germs, and steel." |
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Third, maritime regions everywhere are understood to be fractured, fragmented worlds, unified more by contact among contrasting places than by any purported similarity across their shores. Explicitly theorized by Horden and Purcell under the rubric of "seaborne connectivity," this emphasis on integration over homogeneity plays out in the other essays as well. Games writes that Atlantic history is effectively "a style of inquiry" that emphasizes "commonalities and convergences, seeking larger patterns derived from the new interactions of people around, within, and across the Atlantic"; Matsuda likewise characterizes oceanic histories as the study of "movements and interconnections." Indeed, both take this insight further, with Matsuda stressing that "such work resituates 'discoveries' as already diverse encounters." |
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Fourth, maritime regions are understood to be intrinsically unstable, in multiple senses. On the one hand, sea space from the Mediterranean to the Pacific is characterized here as "essentially contested" (Horden and Purcell); on the other hand, ocean-oriented communities are repeatedly described as civilizations "without a center" (Matsuda). That oceanic histories invert scholarly convention by turning political peripheries into regional cores is a recurrent theme. Likewise, all of the reviewers wrestle with the fact that the resulting regions have fuzzy and fluctuating borders; more than one refers to Braudel's image of the Mediterranean as "pulsing" over time to convey the pervasive dynamic by which sea-oriented communities have historically expanded and contracted to embrace adjacent zones (Horden and Purcell). |
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Finally, all of these authors evince a recognition that oceans connect at a global as well as at a regional level. The networks to which these waterways gave rise not only have linked their own shores, but ultimately have joined the fortunes of one sea to another. As Horden and Purcell put it, the seas that are the objects of the new thalassology "join up to constitute a changing global history." Precisely because each piece has such distinctive contours, they conclude, "it is in the study of long-distance interaction even more than in comparison that the greatest advantage of the new regional history lies." |
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This brief overview points to an ambitious agenda, in some ways a remarkably comprehensive vision. Yet one concern remains largely unaddressed. For all its vibrant variety, the research surveyed in this forum rarely peers beneath the waves; sea space within the basin-centered genre comes across as essentially a two-dimensional (and practically friction-free) surface for the coming and going of ships. Yet as headlines remind us daily, whole ecosystems lie beneath that surface. A fuller engagement with marine biology may one day allow the whales and otters and cod that lured ships out onto the seas in the first place to take their rightful place in maritime historical studies. |
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Kären Wigen is co-editor, with Jerry Bentley and Renate Bridenthal, of the forthcoming Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges (Honolulu, in press). She teaches Japanese history and historical geography at Stanford University.
Notes
1 Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York, 1996); Helen M. Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).
2 Arif Dirlik, ed., What Is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (Boulder, Colo., 1993); Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840 (Berkeley, Calif., 1994); Philip Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge, 2001); John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York, 2004).
3 Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge, 1989); Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge, 1992); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2001).
4 Mike Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York, 1998); John Steele Gordon, A Thread across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable (New York, 2003).
5 Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1868 (Cambridge, 1996); Richard Ellis, The Empty Ocean (Washington, D.C., 2003); Helen M. Rozwadowski, David K. Van Keuren, and Maury Conference on the History of the Ocean, eds., The Machine in Neptune's Garden: Historical Perspectives on Technology and the Marine Environment (Sagamore Beach, Mass., 2004).
6 Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2001); Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, eds., The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Baltimore, Md., 2005); Elija Gould and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World (Baltimore, Md., 2004); Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).
7 Bernard Klein and Gesa Mackenthune, eds., Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (New York, 2004); Daniel Finamore, ed., Maritime History as World History (Gainesville, Fla., 2004). Nor are historians the only group drawn to oceanic focuses and frameworks. Ethnomusicologists have taken up the study of circum-Atlantic performance, English departments host conferences on the maritime novel, and students of public policy and international law are turning out important studies of maritime regulatory regimes.
8 Regrettably, the equally rich historiography of the Indian Ocean is not covered in this forum. For entrées into Indian Ocean literature, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Introduction," in Kenneth McPherson, ed., Maritime India (Oxford, 2004); and Bose, A Hundred Horizons.
9 Martin Lewis, "Dividing the Ocean Sea," Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (April 1999): 188–214.
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