This volume is about people and their relationship to the Sea. It focuses on the writing, and therefore the planning and organizing, of histories of the Sea. It sets out the wider historiographical shift towards microhistory, exchange relations, networks, and—above all—materiality that current writing about the Sea has undergone in recent decades. It also provides a critical assessment of the field, dissecting its strengths, weaknesses, and possibilities, and displays through case-studies possible improvements or areas of future inquiry.



Peter N. Miller is Dean and Professor at the Bard Graduate Center.


Table of Contents
Introduction: An Age of Thalassography?
Peter N. Miller

1. Two Men in a Boat: The Braudel-Goitein “Correspondence” and the Beginning of Thalassography
Peter N. Miller

2. Towards an Integrated Approach: The Atlanticist Analysis of a Hybrid and Entangled World
Wim Klooster

3. The East Asian “Mediterranean” – A Medium of Flourishing Exchange Relations and Interaction in the East Asian World
Angela Schottenhammer

4. Metaphorical Perspectives of the Sea and the Sulu Zone, 1768–1898
James F. Warren

5. Tide, Beach, and Backwash: The Place of Maritime Histories
Nicholas Purcell

6. Connecting Maritime and Continental History: The Black Sea Region at the Time of the Mongol Empire
Nicola Di Cosmo

7. An Ocean of Islands: Islands, Insularity, and Historiography of the Indian Ocean
Roxani Margariti

8. Skerries, Haffs, and Icefloes: Small Seas and Maritime Histories
David Kirby

9. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Peiresc
Peter N. Miller

Afterthoughts
Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Reviews
No one has written such a book, and the book’s raison d’être is wholly warranted. The essays together are intriguing. They make important points—collectively a very important historiographical point—and they highlight for scholars the importance of such work and its potential for extension.

—David Hancock, University of Michigan

Wide-ranging, well-written, it fills in the historiographical background, summarizes the problems and possibilities. This is an exciting project.

—Peter Burke, Emmanuel College of the University of Cambridge