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 main means of
long-distance trade and communication between peoples - for the
spread of ideas and religion as well as commerce. This book traces
the history of human movement and interaction around and across the
world's greatest bodies of water, charting our relationship with
the oceans from the time of the first voyagers. David Abulafia
begins with the earliest of seafaring societies - the Polynesians
of the Pacific, the possessors of intuitive navigational skills
long before the invention of the compass, who by the first century
were trading between their far-flung islands. By the seventh
century, trading routes stretched from the coasts of Arabia and
Africa to southern China and Japan, bringing together the Indian
Ocean and the western Pacific and linking half the world through
the international spice trade. In the Atlantic, centuries before
the little kingdom of Portugal carved out its powerful, seaborne
empire, many peoples sought new lands across the sea - the Bretons,
the Frisians and, most notably, the Vikings, now known to be the
first Europeans to reach North America. As Portuguese supremacy
dwindled in the late sixteenth century, the Spanish, the Dutch and
then the British each successively ruled the waves. Following
merchants, explorers, pirates, cartographers and travellers in
their quests for spices, gold, ivory, slaves, lands for settlement
and knowledge of what lay beyond, Abulafia has created an
extraordinary narrative of humanity and the oceans. From the
earliest forays of peoples in hand-hewn canoes through uncharted
waters to the routes now taken daily by supertankers in their
thousands, The Boundless Sea shows how maritime networks came to
form a continuum of interaction and interconnection across the
globe: 90 per cent of global trade is still conducted by sea. This
is history of the grandest scale and scope, and from a bracingly
different perspective - not, as in most global histories, from the
land, but from the boundless seas.
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