The Boundless Sea

  • 27 January 2020
  • 3 minutes

Gonville & Caius Life Fellow Professor Abulafia’s latest book The Boundless Sea, a companion volume of the acclaimed book The Great Sea, has recently received a glowing review in The Week.

The book invites readers on a journey along the world’s greatest bodies of water to reveal their primary role in human history, touching on the spread of Polynesian seafarers across the Pacific, moving on to the Indian and Atlantic Oceans and people and places along the way, and Europe’s first bloody maritime contact with Africa and Asia.

The full review can be read below.

 


From THE WEEK, 11 January 2020:

The Boundless Sea

By David Abulafia

Allen Lane 1,088pp £35

The Week bookshop £29.99 (incl. p&p)

 

David Abulafia’s last book, The Great Sea (2011), was a 5,000-year history of the Mediterranean. His latest one, a companion volume, is “nothing less than a history of humanity written from the perspective of the seas”, said Jerry Brotton in the FT. Abulafia begins with the spread of Polynesian seafarers across the Pacific from about 1500BC – “an extraordinary process that culminated in the peopling of Hawaii and New Zealand” in the early 14th century AD. Moving on to the Indian and Atlantic oceans, he covers a staggering range of people and places, from “lost commercial kingdoms in Sumatra” to Europe’s first bloody maritime contact with Africa and Asia.

Throughout, his interest is above all in how seafaring opened up connections between cultures. A work of “phenomenal” richness and detail, The Boundless Sea is an “epic achievement”.

“Cast aside what you think you know about maritime history,” said Gerard DeGroot in The Times: “on page after page, myths are shredded.” Juan Ponce de León wasn’t the first European to set foot on what is not the United States, in 1513: “anonymous slave raiders undoubtedly got there first”.

Abulafia also shows that it was Hanseatic merchants, and not the Dutch, who gave the world pickled herring. More significantly, he corrects the common misperception that maritime history is primarily a “story of exploration”. The exploits of Columbus, Cook and Magellan were, he argues, “just the starting point”. The merchants who followed in their wake, and who took huge financial and physical risks to establish international trade networks, were more important.

Abulafia also avoids the common trap of adopting a “Eurocentric perspective”, said Margarette Lincoln in Literary Review. He focuses equally on the exploits of the Chinese, Japanese, Indonesians and Polynesians. To make the point, he recounts the story of a schooner captain who, having dropped his compass overboard, was guided to his destination by his Polynesian crew. When he asked how they knew where the island was, their reply was: “Why, is has always been there.” The Boundless Sea isn’t just fascinating – it’s also “essential”, said Simon Sebag Montefiore in The Daily Telegraph. As the “engines of human existence become ever more decentralised or globalised”, we need this type of “big history” more than ever. Abulafia has written an “intense and thrilling tour de force”.


 

 

Image: Japanese bowl of c.1800 showing Dutch merchants and ships visiting their base at Nagasaki, the only place European merchants could then trade in Japan.

Explore