Abstract
The article provides a new version of Frank Broeze’s definition of maritime history by putting it in a framework of a sea. It gives a critical approach to the various histories of the seas and oceans that use the sea as a setting and not as a dynamic agent of change. It argues that the true history of the sea is a maritime history that entails maritime activities: on the sea (seamen, ships, navigation, sea trade, war, piracy); around the sea (maritime communities, islands, port cities, shipping, shipping-related, fishing and touristic businesses); in the sea (fishing, maritime resources, environment); because of the sea (maritime transport systems and entrepreneurial networks, maritime empires, international and national maritime institutions and policy); and about the sea (maritime culture and heritage, the ideology, myths and poems of a sea, the impact of the sea on art).
Keywords
The history of the sea cannot be but a Maritime History. But is it? Non-maritime historians and scholars from various disciplines in the last two decades have used the sea as a space, as a setting, in order to write the history of the people of the land. The aim here is to show that the true history of a sea is a Maritime History.
Based on the historiographical tradition that started with Braudel and the Annales school and continued through the International Commission of Maritime History and the International Maritime History Association (IMHA), I will use a reinvention of Frank Broeze’s definition of maritime history. 1 I will thus provide a framework and methodology for the analysis of the history of the sea that identifies the interaction of humans and the sea as one of the main factors in the historical process; that is, a driver of continuity and change over the long- and short-term.
‘Mare’ in Latin means the sea, and its history is maritime history. Actually, to talk about the history of the sea sounds rather odd. Scientists might immediately regard the history of the sea as the history of the water that covers the planet; a perspective that embraces geography, geology, oceanography and marine populations. It was a novel concept to use the sea as a unit of research in history. It altered the historical perspective by lifting disciplinary and national borders to suggest different ways of research. Fernand Braudel started it in the 1940s when he introduced the Mediterranean as a unit of research of human history. 2 He dazzled us with an amazing combination of sea, land and people, putting the interaction of human societies with the sea at the centre of the analysis. And the sea becomes the key to general history; 3 an important dynamic agent in our understanding of world history and global history. He formed a majestic synthesis of the macro- and micro- levels, of the long-term and the short-term, using the Mediterranean to indicate how the sea connects. Braudel provided a model of how to approach the past – transforming history as the axis not only of humanities, but also of social and natural sciences. Nobody has been able to rival him, but the point is not to imitate him, but be inspired by his vision of the sea as a dynamic factor for the interpretation of history. On this line of thought, Frank Broeze, who had started writing the History of the Pacific Ocean, which he never finished, wrote that ‘the true oceanic history is the history in which the sea is not merely the setting but also the main dynamic agent’. 4
‘Thalassa’ in Greek means the sea. It was in the 2000s that I was hit by the waves of the new ‘thalassology’. I loved the title; it was all Greek. The ‘new thalassology’ has ‘sailed’ together with the upsurge of global history as the history of globalisation in the twenty-first century. The history of the seas and oceans has become very much en vogue in the last two decades, as specialists of various disciplines have been smitten by ‘thalassomania’ to produce a lengthy bibliography on the history of the seas – a cause of both delight and frustration for maritime historians. What happened was that the history of the seas and oceans replaced area studies, and became the new trend of research, the ‘spatial turn’. This trend seems to be linked with a crisis in the financing of regional and area studies projects, in the United States particularly, and the promotion of ‘globalism’, which has triggered a re-thinking of ways in which the world is divided. 5
It seems, however, that the vision of the sea meant different things to different people. Clearly, not all who research the history of the sea have studied maritime history. In fact, some think that the history of the oceans and the seas is different from maritime history, and in many cases the approach of maritime history is completely ignored. There are new histories of the seas, the oceans, the coasts, the islands, which make no mention of articles in the International Journal of Maritime History (IJMH), or books by acknowledged maritime historians. In a sort of ‘polemical’ article published in the book New Ways of History I edited 10 years ago, I stressed the lack of communication of scholars of thalassology with maritime historians.
The first criticism from maritime historians to other historians and scholars from various disciplines is that many do not write a true history of the sea. Maritime historians regard the sea a dynamic agent of change. Maritime history examines human activities – economic, social, political, cultural, environmental – related to the sea and their impact on human societies. When the sea is the unit of research, then this is a history beyond borders that transcends the history of a nation or a people. However, what is extraordinary in maritime history is that, on the one hand, maritime activities are nation-less, they are international/global industries, and on the other hand, they have been imbued through the centuries with a strong local character. 6 As maritime activities connect the world’s oceans and seas, maritime history is a global history. But as maritime communities, the communities whose population live from the sea, are connected to a particular place, it is a local history. Nowhere else but on the seas, which cover 70 per cent of the globe’s surface, have people indicated the strength of communications, of linking the global with the local. Despite many aspects of the interaction of humans and the sea, ‘humankind’s relationship with the sea has always been primarily economic’, as David Williams states in his paper in this Forum. Goods and services from the coastal and marine environment (including shipping, fishing, tourism and other activities) amount to more than $2.5 trillion each year, says Amélia Polónia in her paper.
The second criticism made by maritime historians about non-maritime historians is that they ignore the sea, even when the sea is integral to the topic. 7 Most of the historians of the ‘new thalassology’ have a ‘blue hole’, as Ingo Heidbrink called the ignorance of maritime history. 8 Maritime historians tend to embark on self-criticism and ‘soul searching’ about their field, as they attempt to identify its strengths and weaknesses. In a Forum two years ago in volume 29 of IJMH, maritime history was compared to more ‘trendy’ subjects, world history and global history. It is true that maritime history is not read as widely as it should be, but ‘Maritime historians can contribute as much as any other breed of historians’, David J. Starkey wrote in the editorial of that issue of the journal. 9
The fact is that there is now a large literature to choose from – readings on the sea, various concepts, new approaches or metaphorical allusions that can trigger inspiration and have enhanced the sea as a subject of reflection and research. 10 Moreover, the ‘spatial turn’ brought about the old Braudelian concept of insularity and littorality to the surface, ‘rediscovered’ as ‘coastal history’ or ‘island history’ that gives food for thought. 11 Still this approach disregards the maritime history approach best indicated in Frank Broeze’s book on the island nation of Australia. 12
I distinguish three kinds of histories of the seas of the last three decades. The criterion of the distinction is not the quality of the works. It is based on the ‘maritimity’ of the studies, meaning whether they indicate the dynamic relation of humankind and the sea and the impact on land. Whether they have asked questions like: what is the grand design that holds the history of the sea together? How far inland does the sea extend its influence? How have communications on the sea changed the world? How can maritime communities be identified and what kind of relationship do they have within their seas and beyond? 13
The first kind of study is the ‘maritime’ history of the sea in which the authors have built their analysis and narrative around various aspects of the interaction of humans and sea. The Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Baltic Sea have such histories. The Mediterranean has the most influential books, with two large syntheses inspired by Braudel almost 50 years after the publication of his seminal work. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s excellent book advances new and extremely rich ideas about the maritime dimension. 14 My favourite chapter concerns the connectivity of the Mediterranean and the concept of its micro-regions. The second is David Abulafia’s stimulating book, with its clear goals and methodology; I found a more balanced maritime approach in the first half of the book than in the second, where the political dimension is more prominent. 15 The history of Indian Ocean has been written by numerous maritime historians. I regard Michael Pearson’s book as one of the best. It is written from a maritime historian’s perspective that has a ‘grand design’ that follows the structure of the ocean, the ships and the trade, the local merchants and seafarers, the voyagers, the European maritime empires and the influence in the maritime communities, the ports in the hinterland and in the intercommunication of the ocean. 16 Alexis Wick’s interesting book on the history of the Red Sea follows the Mediterranean Braudelian tradition, reflecting on the latter trends of thalassology/thalassomania and putting in the picture the importance of the sea in Ottoman history to challenge European thalassocentrism. 17 The history of the Baltic Sea by David Kirby and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen is written from a maritime perspective, but its methodology is problematic. 18 On the other hand, Michael North’s work on the Baltic has an excellent structure and is well researched. All the chapters start from focusing from a port city to narrate the story of the land. Although this is not a maritime history of the Baltic Sea and it is more of the space of the Baltic, it does have a sense of the articulation of the Baltic maritime regions and how sea trade and cultural exchange shaped the sea before it was overtaken by politics. 19
Histories of the sea that are really area studies form the second group of works. There the ocean is just a setting and ocean history is just an imperial history in disguise. Such books are historical narratives that analyse people, empires or nations around an ocean. The Atlantic, the Pacific and the Black Sea have a number of such histories. The history of the Atlantic Ocean particularly, with the heavy luggage of imperial and colonial history of the northern Atlantic, as the studies by Paul Butel, Bernard Bailyn, and Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan attest. 20 Charles King’s analysis of the Black Sea is another example of a history of a sea where the author uses the maritime dimension ‘decoratively’ with minimal effort to integrate its components to interpret the extraordinary influence the sea has had in the development of the area, particularly during the early modern and modern eras. Moreover, it is interesting how historians who write about the oceans and seas feel obliged to start from time immemorial. Many a time in such books the sense of time becomes highly problematic and the interpretation too general and too well known.
The third kind of book on histories of the sea is the one I find quite inspirational although the authors are oblivious of maritime history. The best in my view are by John Mack and Philip Steinberg, who invent a relationship to the sea in an imaginative way, a constructed concept of the sea, as power relations, or sets of voyages, or glimpses of sea-life in fragmented, albeit attractive, narratives based on cultural interactions. 21 The Pacific has an array of non-maritime books on its history. Mat Matsuda’s Pacific history is ‘episodic’; a collection of characters and experiences that taken together define the Pacific. Likewise, David Igler uses selected individual stories and voyages to hold his book together, while Nicholas Thomas makes it clear that his islanders understand the sea, but the author would have gained so much had he read some maritime history. 22 It is odd that islanders or European voyagers communicated via the seas but their historians do not.
A new version of the old version
How do we approach the history of the sea? How does one study the sea as a dynamic agent and not just as a setting or a geographical area? Whether one uses an economic, social, political, cultural, anthropological, technological, environmental or legal historical approach, or a combination of the above, there are five approaches that encompass all mankind’s activities with the sea dynamically and diachronically. How does one trace continuity and change in the history of the sea? I have written elsewhere that Maritime History provides a methodology for linking the local, the regional, the national, the international, the global, so giving us the possibility of comparing the small and the unimportant, the big and the important, the everyday life, the material culture and the transactions of the most remote places around the world. 23 The time has come to explain what I meant by the ‘methodology of maritime history’, or the ‘framework’ as David Williams puts it in his paper in this Forum.
My view is Braudelian. This means that I believe that the sea as a concept of analysis on the one hand and the interaction of humankind and the sea on the other, can offer new, amazing ways to understand in history the unity and the diversity, the continuity and change over the long- and short- term. My view is that of a maritime historian. This means that I follow the definition of maritime history according to the six uses of the sea by humans identified by Frank Broeze. 24 I introduce here a re-invention of Broeze’s definition of maritime history. My framework of the sea comprises five categories that can form a methodology for analysing of the maritime history of the sea. It can also be used for a fragment of a sea, for a maritime region, a maritime community, a maritime activity for a short period, or a long period. One can pick one or two or any category that one chooses at any given period of time. However, any analysis of a sea should take into account the inter-connections of the five categories to understand its influence. This is because the sea has been and will continue to be the only natural element that people can use to circumnavigate and connect the world, transferring its produce on a massive scale. As David J. Starkey mentions in his paper in this Forum over 90 per cent of everything traded by humans is carried over the seas.
The five categories are defined by what humans did: on the sea (seamen, ships, navigation, sea trade, war, piracy); around the sea (maritime communities, islands, port cities, shipping, shipping-related, fishing and touristic businesses); in the sea (fishing, maritime resources, environment); because of the sea (maritime transport systems and entrepreneurial networks, maritime empires, international and national maritime institutions and policy); and about the sea (maritime culture and heritage, the ideology, the myths and poems of a sea, the impact of the sea on the art). Through these five categories one can follow continuity and change and see how humankind interacted with the sea and affected the path of history on land.
This category comprises human activities on the surface of the sea. It includes seafaring, ships and ship technology, exploration and discovery of the structure of the sea, maritime voyages and commercial sea routes, navigation technology, violence at sea either by war or piracy, carriage by sea of cargoes and ‘human cargoes’.
The history of the sea cannot be written without seamen and ships. At the moment you read these lines, millions of people are on the sea, sailing on ships. More specifically, in 2018 the world fleet comprised 51,000 ships above 1,000 gross tons. This means that on the world’s seas and oceans more than one million people are sailing in deep-sea vessels, a number that could be doubled or trebled if one includes the hundreds of thousands of smaller ships and boats. 25 Fleets, whether commercial or naval, were floating cities. For example in the battle of Lepanto in the Mediterranean in 1571, there were 500–600 Christian and Muslim galleys carrying 150,000 to 200,000 men, oar-men, seamen and soldiers. 26 In the Mediterranean in 1870, the Greeks owned 2,500 deep-sea vessels, with 20,000 seamen, as well as 6,000 smaller vessels with at least another 10,000 seamen. 27
Every sea – some over millennia – has had its local seafarers in coastal and long distance trips – the Greeks and the Italians in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the Scandinavians, the Dutch and the English in the North Sea, the Baltic and the Atlantic, the Portuguese and the Spanish in the Atlantic, the Arabs and the Chinese in the Indian Ocean, and the Polynesians in the Pacific Ocean. Seamen that sail on the surface of the sea are the sea people that make the world go round. Work on board a ship, whether on a sailing ship, a steamship, a tanker or a container, is hard and very particular – it is a way of life. Work defines the hierarchy of the small society of the crew of the ship with strict regulations. This small number of people live in the same space that they work, with limited food, limited social life, limited entertainment away from their families, dealing daily with the hazards of nature that are no less in today’s digital age, than they were five centuries ago. The working day has always been divided in four-hour shifts day and night and the ship has to sail whether it is Saturday, Sunday, Christmas or Easter. Malnutrition, contaminated water, diseases and death on board in the pre-industrial era were common. But even today, despite the incredible developments of medical science, if a seaman is injured in the middle of the ocean, there is no doctor on board merchant ships. The life of a seaman is harsh, but it has been compensated by a cosmopolitan life, sailing around the globe and visiting new lands, new ports, opening up to new tastes, new aesthetics, new ideas. For centuries, seamen carried more than goods and people – they carried ideas. The history of the seaman is at the core of the history of the sea. Life on board narrates the history of the life of the sea. Although crews on board form international communities, most of the time they were formed by single-nationalities connected to particular maritime communities of a certain sea. Marcus Rediker indicated the internationality of British crews, but forgot to mention the strong local dimension to their maritime communities at home, something that Balanchandran in his enlightened study of the lascar, the archetypal global seaman, did not neglect. 28
Travellers and novelists before the twentieth century provided wonderful accounts of maritime voyages. But they are much overrated in their use in historical literature. They are the ones who left written testimonies, not the seamen. The historians that use them extensively forget that these travellers were more ‘guests’ at sea, and that there is a great difference between a seaman and an occasional traveller. As well as sailors themselves, women, often wives of seamen, had other stories of the sea to narrate. 29
Every sea has its own structure, with many influenced by peoples’ movement over the sea and human settlements on its coasts and islands. Sailing on the sea requires knowledge of the geography of the sea and the land that surrounds and encloses it. The seaman and his ship that sails on the sea has to know the straits, the capes, the peninsulas, the islands, the islets, the reefs, the sandbanks, the continental coast and the safe anchorages; he has to recognize the mountains surrounding them, the rivers, the currents, the winds, the waves, the storm, the ice; and he has to read the sky. How did seafarers deal with this structure? How have they tamed it?
Seafarers started by discovering the micro-region of their nearest sea, and through that they sailed to the adjacent sea and then to the next one and then to the sea beyond. Each sea and ocean is a complex of many seas. The Mediterranean Sea, for example, is formed by many seas and enclosed by straits. From the Eastern Mediterranean a ship coming from the Black Sea crosses the Dardanelles straits to go to Alexandria, and then to the Red Sea (after the opening of the Suez Canal), or she has to cross the Aegean Sea and its hundreds of islands, the Cilician Sea, and the Levantine Sea. To continue from Alexandria to the Central Mediterranean to Venice, she has to cross through the Levantine Sea and the Aegean Sea to the Ionian Sea and then to the Adriatic. If she wants to continue to Genoa and circumvent the Italian peninsula, she has to cross the Adriatic Sea to the Ionian Sea, and then pass between the Libyan Sea and the sea of Sicily to turn north through the Tyrrhenian Sea to reach Genoa in the Ligurian Sea. And if she wants to continue from Genoa to the Straits of Gibraltar through the Western Mediterranean she has to cross the Balearic Sea and the Alboran Sea. And from Gibraltar she can enter the Atlantic Ocean and go northwards through the Bay of Biscay to the straits of the English Channel to enter the North Sea, or to cross the Atlantic to reach the Caribbean Sea.
The work of the historian of a sea is to uncover what is the pattern of sea routes which developed in every sea out of the needs of its people, whether economic, social or political, taking into consideration the structure of the sea and the structure of the land around it. Crucial to an analysis of the structure of the sea in history is the concept of ‘maritime regions’ and their connectivity. Here, one can use the theoretical concepts of economic geography with regard to space. A geographic region is usually a concept used for land. Using the concept of a ‘maritime region’ one can see the interaction of humans with the environment of the sea. The maritime regions of a sea are determined both by geography and by their cohesion and the complementarity of economic activities. The concept of the maritime region, and those of its hinterland and foreland, provide the dynamic agents of change in each area. They reveal the connection of the local (of the maritime region itself) to the peripheral, and to the global.
Discovering the navigation and the sea routes of a sea and an ocean is fundamental for the development of commercial networks and of the use of the surface of the sea for trade. But sailing on the sea and discovering the sea routes has not featured well in the traditional historiography. It has only attracted the attention of historians with regard to the glorious age of explorations. The hazards of the seas and discovery of oceans have been used to emphasise national achievements. Apart from the great explorers and their great achievements, for most historians sailing on the sea has been considered self evident. However, the discovery of navigating a water mass has been the outcome of the accumulated knowledge of decades and centuries and has meant the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of seafarers. Maritime voyages, exploration and establishment of maritime empires determine change in and around a sea/ocean, disturbing its continuity.
The navigator needs landmarks at sea to find his way. The islands are important, like stepping stones in the water. Together with peaks of the mountains or hills, or capes with lighthouses that are seen from afar, are excellent ‘route-marks’ that guide the seafarers. The lack of ‘route marks’ in the vast endless oceans, the scarcity of land to be seen, or lack of good anchorages, and the months needed to cross the oceans, meant lack of proper food, water, disease, and death up to the nineteenth century. Portolans in the early modern period, and pilot books later, are a mine of information since very early on, and have been written to give sailing instructions. They gave detailed descriptions on routes, landmarks, anchorages, currents, and entrances to ports. Sea charts were used along with the sailing guides. Professional pilots of the sea of the early modern period to the present day give another view of the sea. 30
Navigation in the past and today is the science of directing a ship, calculating its position, drawing its course, knowing the distance it travels, avoiding collisions, entering a port, and keeping the time schedule. 31 It is the history of seamanship, a combination of astronomy for celestial navigation, geometry and the use of various special instruments. From the astrolabe, the quadrant, the sextant, and the octant, to the magnetic and gyroscopic compass; the discovery of marine chronometry by John Harrison and the use of the ‘prime meridian: that helped calculate the longitude’; 32 from the sandglass of the ‘chip log’ that served to measure the ship’s speed through the water to the GPS (Global Positioning System). It was not before the science of navigation developed that the world was fully connected. In every sea and ocean, due to its particular structure, winds and currents on its main sea-routes have to be discovered to make the passage safer and quicker. It has taken centuries to discover which is the best passage on a sea or an ocean; knowledge acquired by experience, experiment and observation.
Equally, improvement of the technology of ships made circumnavigation of the globe and its connection possible. The type of function and cargoes determine the type of ships. There is usually a simplified distinction of three periods in ship technology from the early modern times to the present day according to the energy used. The first period is the sailing ship era that lasted to the last third of the nineteenth century. The second is the steamship era that took over sail from the last third of the nineteenth century and lasted to the mid-twentieth century. The third is the diesel era that took off from the 1950s to the present day. This distinction however does not take into consideration the incredible minor and major changes that took place in each era. The sailing ship developed from the one-masted ship with one big square canvas or a big lateen-sail for merchant ships and oared galleys as warships in the ancient or medieval times, to the multiple-masted ships with square sails of various sizes and a highly complex rigging that demanded highly skilled seamen.
But just as the sailing ship reached its technological culmination, the industrial revolution changed the world at sea with the introduction and the establishment of the steamship. The world was connected at a much faster rate, a steamship was three times bigger and did three times more voyages than a sailing ship and by the turn of the twentieth century sailing ships had been replaced in deep-sea sector. A worldwide network of coaling stations provided the energy needed for marine steam engines. With its speed, greater capacity, safety and reliability, the steamship revolutionized maritime transport, necessitating port expansion and improvement on a huge scale. The introduction of steamships destroyed the ‘old world’ of maritime communities around the world that had built their own vessels and changed the sea routes and port systems in all seas.
Developments in ship technology restructured the patterns of the world’s trade and port systems, as Frank Broeze has indicated in his pioneering studies. 33 One must not forget that technology helped in the opening of the Suez and Panama canals, which revolutionized global sea routes. The invention and introduction of the more productive diesel engines and the replacement of coal by oil took place after the 1940s. Merchant ships were built according to types of cargo – bulk dry cargoes and bulk oil cargoes. Tankers and bulk carriers were introduced to carry crude oil, and ship gigantism characterized the decades from the 1950s to the 1970s. If a ‘supertanker’ in the mid-1950s was about 50,000 gross registered tons (grt), by the early 1970s a Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) was of 250,000 grt. Moreover, while bulk cargoes were carried in huge ships, technology revolutionized liner trade with the introduction of container ships from the 1960s onwards. 34
Apart from the hazards of nature and the waves, seamen and ships had to face violence at sea; they still do. Ships carry flags; flags indicate the state to which they belong, and the ship is considered as ‘floating land’ of that state. Violence at sea can be divided into state and non-state violence. State violence is connected partly either with pure warfare with other navies, non-state violence at sea is entirely connected with commerce-raiding, that is, attacks upon seaborne trade. The non-state actors of commerce-raiding are the privateers, corsairs and pirates. 35 There is a large bibliography on that front, with many books straddling myth and reality. Plundering at sea, however, is endemic to sea trade. Whenever there is sea trade, there is plunder and violence at sea.
The reason for sailing on the surface of the sea is to move goods and people. The sea has been for centuries the safest way for merchants to ship high volumes of cargoes and for travellers to move in huge numbers. Counting the numbers and movements of goods and people, the arrivals and departures in ports reveals the extent of movement at sea. The largest movements of people took place through the sea. Bulk human cargoes: slaves, indentured labour, immigrants, along with passengers as simple travellers between continents filled the holds of the ships, or the cabins of modern passenger liners. About 10m Africans were transported forcefully across the Atlantic, while neither the Mediterranean nor the Indian Ocean has counted its slave trade. About 60m Europeans poured to the rest of the world during the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, all in ships. Millions of passengers travelled in the transoceanic liners up to the 1970s and similarly millions of refugees travel by sea to escape their war-torn or impoverished lands. Maritime historians calculate quantities in huge databases. With the sea still carrying 90 per cent of world trade, ships remain the largest and cheapest means of moving goods. Such business underpinned the phenomenon of globalization.
This category includes human societies that earn their living from the sea and the implication this has on their societies. In this way it deals with maritime communities, port cities, shipping businesses, shipbuilding, ancillary to shipping businesses, maritime tourism.
The history of the sea cannot be written without maritime communities. Every sea has its specific maritime communities that nurtured maritime entrepreneurship and its specific ports where ships arrive and depart. The two do not particularly coincide. Τhe largest part of the current bibliography looks at big port cities, but maritime communities, at least in Europe, have been located to a large extent in small places; in villages, towns in coastal areas and islands. This is where seamen, fleets, shipping and fishing businesses grew. For example, in the Ionian and Aegean archipelagoes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries about 40 islands have been identified as ‘maritime centres’; that is, places with deep-sea vessels, shipping companies and seamen over multiple generations. They formed what the Greek historian Spyros Asdrachas has described as ‘dispersed liquid city’, 36 whose ‘neighbourhoods’ were the islands, and whose populations ploughed the seas between the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean to the Western Mediterranean, the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. 37 They carried the goods of the Ottoman Empire, but they were not established in the main Ottoman ports, like Constantinople, Smyrna, Salonica or Alexandria. 38 The same happened in the western Mediterranean where there were vibrant maritime communities that owned fleets of deep-sea sailing ships; in the Ligurian coast they were not based in Genoa, but in the villages of Camoglie and Santa Margarita in what is today the Italian Riviera; in the French Riviera, they were not based in Marseille, but in Cassis, Ciotat and St. Tropez; further south, they were not based in Napoli but in small villages like Amalfi and Meta. Equally, most of Britain’s tramp operators in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not established in London, Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow, but in the small towns of north-east England, like Whitby and Scarborough, and in Wales in places like Swansea. 39 The same happened in the Indian Ocean, where the Arab seamen of the Hadramaut were the seamen of the Arabian seas and served the port-towns of the area. The list would be endless if one were to continue from the Asian seas to the Pacific.
Moreover, a history of the sea cannot be written without the ports and the cargoes from where trade starts and finishes. The ports that provide the cargoes, as Sarah Palmer clearly indicates in her paper in this Forum, and port-cities are the staple of maritime history. They are where ships and cargoes go; they are the end and the beginning of the voyage; they are the point of distribution of goods and ideas; it is where the geopolitical power of the world’s leading nations begins and ends. Apart from the importance of the port per se, the concept ‘port-city’ brings to the fore the importance of the port. What is a port-city? According to Frank Broeze, who used urban and historical geography on the one hand, and transport economics and location theory on the other: ‘A port city, is a city whose main economic base, for its non-local market, is its port, i.e. the area where goods and/or passengers are physically transferred between two modes of transport, of which at least one is maritime.’ One cannot isolate, Broeze continues, the port-city from ‘its double hinterland/foreland matrix’. It is these relationships that can explain the dynamics of the rise and fall of individual ports. The human community of the port and the city is in the centre, set in the spatial and architectural appearance; historians interpret its political, economic and social life in a series of ‘concentric centres’. Port-city studies include all aspects of urbanization, institutions and politics, spatial, economic and transport, along with social and cultural development in a comparative dimension on a local, regional, peripheral and international dimension. 40
Maritime communities, either in villages, towns of coastal areas and islands, or in port-cities, earn their living from the sea, shipping, shipping-related industries, fishing, other sea-based or shore-based industries and maritime tourism. Maritime communities are rarely isolated and generally link with similar places within a sea, between seas and across oceans. There is exchange and intercommunication. This includes the maritime labour force, shipping businesses and all that is necessary to carry out coastal and deep-sea going shipping, shipbuilding, insurance, chartering, brokerage, ship supplies and other industries connected with the sea. Maritime communities in European seas, for example, developed common institutions in maritime business practices. After the age of sail, a proportion of the population of these maritime communities furnished the big ports of their maritime region with entrepreneurship and know-how, or emigrated elsewhere to transfer their skills. From the second half of the nineteenth century to the present day, those who did not continue in shipping transformed themselves to other businesses related to the sea.
The most spectacular re-invention of the relationship of humankind with the sea in the last two centuries came in the form of maritime tourism – of leisure, beach life, holidays in seaside resorts, coastal tourism, yachting and cruising – which experienced unprecedented growth during the twentieth century. The history of tourism, still under-researched, is rarely connected with the history of the sea or maritime history. 41 It is interesting to note how important ex-sailing ship maritime centres on islands and coastal villages or towns with attractive architecture of houses built by the profits from shipping have been transformed to major tourist destinations during the industrial age. For example, famous tourist destinations in the Mediterranean, like Mykonos and Santorini in the Aegean, Camoglie and Santa Margarita in the Italian Riviera, and St. Tropez and Cassis in the French Riviera, were important maritime centres engaged in long-haul sea trades in the age of sail. They transformed their relationship with the sea from shipping to tourism in the industrial age. The history of maritime communities in villages, towns of coastal areas and islands and port-cities, worldwide, put in the wider context of their maritime regions and seas, present excellent units of analysis to study the main demographic, economic, technological and social growth trends in the history of the sea.
This category includes human activities that deal with the resources of the sea and the environment of the sea. It includes the fishing fields, extraction of oil, marine resources, oceanography, shipwrecks, the environment of the sea.
The sea provided food for humanity and the people of the sea developed various methods of fishing. Fish and fish farming were carried out by men and women transmitting their know-how from generation to generation in various maritime regions. People in the pre-industrial and industrial age found various ways to preserve fish for nutrition: salted fish, dried fish known as stock fish, canned fish, deep frozen fish, and fish oil. Fish was a staple food for a large proportion of the earth’s population over millennia. For Europeans, for example, fish was a common food for crews of ships, armies, city dwellers, farmers and common people, as it was light and easy to carry and at the same time nourishing. Fish was found either in coastal zones or in deep water. Various kind of popular fish like herring, sardines, anchovies, cod, mackerel, tuna, salmon, sea-mammals, shell fish, sea urchins, seaweed and other kinds of fish and animal population like sponges are just some examples of the kind of species people amassed from the animal population of the seas to be used by Earth’s populations.
Every sea has a particular kind of marine environment that makes some species abundant in particular areas. In the southeastern Pacific, for example, along a long shoreline of 2,000 miles from northern Chile to northern Peru, lie the most important anchovy fisheries in the world that today produces 20 per cent of the world’s commercial fish catch. 42 In the Mediterranean, the bluefin tuna is native and has been a much sought after fish food for millennia around the Balearic Islands and Sicily. In the Atlantic, abundant species, like cod on the banks off Newfoundland found in the fifteenth century, or herring in the North Sea, or whaling in the Atlantic and in the Southern seas, or lobster in the Indian ocean determined the survival and development of fishing communities in every sea and ocean.
Every sea has its fisher folk and fishing communities. In the Pacific, for example, the Hawaiians were unique for their extensive acquaculture. 43 In Asian waters, the Arabs in the Persian Gulf or the Chinese developed catching techniques to fish their shallow coastal waters where various species could be taken in enormous numbers. In the northeastern Atlantic, North Sea and the Baltic, the Scandinavians and English developed important fishing fleets. Deep sea fishing and trade in fish determined the rise of maritime empires in the Atlantic, with herring and the Dutch maritime empire serving as a prime example.
Every maritime region developed its own fishing techniques;, which have been studied to a certain extent by ethnologists and anthropologists on a local scale. Fisheries have been viewed from economic, social and cultural perspectives as histories of specific fisheries, like whaling, or national or regional histories or techniques. The extinction of many an animal population and sea mammals in the industrial era led to the commercialization of fish production and trade. The formation of global fish industries has led to the formation of large deep-sea going fleets that voyage far from their places of origin in the Indian Ocean, the Pacific or Antarctica for their catch.
The sea does not contain only animal populations. Its seabed hides treasures of multiple kinds. Oil and gas extraction from the seabed has developed apace over the last five decades, with workers living in maritime communities on platforms that are a new breed of ship/island on the sea’s surface. Shipwrecks have lain on the bed of the sea since ancient times and their cartography can reveal the history of the cargo routes and conflicts that took on the surface of the sea in former times. Shipwrecks of tankers filled with oil, however, have caused unprecedented ecological damage to marine populations, a new anthropogenic threat to nature that has to be solved and prevented. Litter from land and vessels dumped in the sea is also a danger to marine ecosystems, while overfishing has jeopardised the health of marine animal populations across the seas and oceans for at least a century.
Historians can contribute with natural scientists to the management of the oceans with the aim of preserving the marine environment. 44 Oceanography, the science of the nature and biology of the sea, has developed rapidly to provide further knowledge of the sea’s natural characteristics and behaviour. The history of the sea cannot be written without following the human activities that deal with the resources of the sea and the environment of the sea.
This category includes the dynamic agents that challenge and ultimately change the path of the history of the sea. These are the maritime transport systems (sea/land/river transport, entrepreneurial networks, shipping markets), maritime empires, international maritime institutions and policy.
What is the grand design that connects the seas and oceans? This category suggests a double method to analyse how the seas and oceans connect and make the previous three categories interact. In this category we propose two dynamic agents that coordinate the economic, technological, political and social forces that trigger change in the history of the sea. The first is maritime transport systems, the second is the maritime empires, or political hegemonies whose rise and fall influence the creation, destruction and re-invention of maritime transport systems.
In every sea and every ocean, people organized maritime transport systems according to particular routes and particular ways to trade. Europeans, for example, after their expansion to the world’s oceans, formed maritime transport systems, which connected the world. In 1980, J. H. Parry, Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University, wrote his classic examination of maritime transport and sea routes in the Mediterranean, the Baltic and North seas, and the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, as organized by Europeans. 45 Maritime transport systems in the sailing ship era followed the underlying system of winds, currents and safe harbours.
Maritime transport systems are the mechanisms that integrate maritime regions and port cities in a world economy.
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A similar concept of a maritime transport system at a regional level has been developed by Werner Scheltjens. His unit of research is the maritime region of the Dutch Deltas, in which he explores transport systems defined as: complexes of physical attributes (rivers, roads, canals, seas, etc.) and communities populating them, thus allowing for the exchange of people, goods and information between the locations of a trade network. The delta is deemed to be an appropriate geographical unit for a comprehensive economic-geographical analysis of the Dutch maritime transport sector before 1850.
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All seas are made from the articulation of many maritime regions. The main mechanism of connectivity of maritime regions and sub-regions is the sea transport system that evolves in each maritime region. 48 Drawing upon my research into the Mediterranean and Black seas, I regard the transport system of each maritime region as lying at the front end of a productive system that integrated markets within a maritime region and with other maritime regions. The main characteristic of the sea transport system is connectivity, where the sea routes of the foreland are connected with the land routes of the hinterland to construct a dense chain of interactions and communications. There are four aspects to be considered to understand the formation of sea transport systems:
in every maritime region, small, medium and large port cities/towns are the loading places that form the port system of a coastal zone;
in every maritime region, there is a hinterland where goods are brought by land, river and sea transport to the coastal loading export/import zone;
in every maritime region there are maritime communities that developed or attracted fleets and acted as maritime centres. Small, medium and large maritime centres formed a maritime zone that integrated local markets and connected the maritime region with the foreland.
The maritime transport system is the coastal import-export zone where goods coming from, or bound to, the hinterland pass through maritime centres that connect with the foreland. A ‘hinterland’ can be described as an organized and developed land space that is linked with a port by means of inland transport, 49 mainly road, river, canal and railway connections. The hinterland produces goods that are transferred to the sea port, which forms the export gateway. The supply of goods and the level of exports can be confined or controlled by a state’s economic, political and geostrategic policies. The concept of ‘foreland’ as opposed to that of hinterland, is what lies before the port, the overseas shipping connections of a port. Each maritime region is connected with the adjacent one uniting in this way the sea transport of a whole region with the hinterland/foreland matrix and therefore with the global economy.
The maritime transport system is formed and operated by maritime entrepreneurs, shipping and commercial companies. Maritime entrepreneurs, local to a sea or ‘foreigners’, cultivated commercial and entrepreneurial networks beyond a sea and developed business methods in financing, carrying, insuring, purchasing, selling cargoes and ships. They fostered the shipping markets and the market mechanisms. The type of cargo, ship and area in which it trades determines the shipping market in which a ship operates. For example, the massive introduction of steam after the 1860s brought about a significant change in the organisation of sea trade. It established a division in the shipping market that has survived to the present day: the division between liner and tramp shipping. In this way, liner steamships tended to call at a large number of ports and to carry general cargo and passengers, whereas during the same period tramp steamers and sailing ships loaded bulk cargoes, like grain, coal or cotton, at one port and delivered them directly to another port, without making any intermediate ports of call.
Every sea has its maritime businessmen, its local seafarers who developed maritime transport systems, mechanisms with which they were able to integrate the produce of the sea and its hinterland with international markets, as well as defence mechanisms with navies to repel intruders and police the seas. For many centuries, some to the present day, the Greeks, the Venetians and the Genoese in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the Scandinavians in the North Sea and the North Atlantic, the Arabs, Indians and Chinese in the Indian Ocean, and the Polynesians in the Pacific were the local seafarers of these maritime regions. Their maritime transport systems were either destroyed or reinvented by the European maritime empires that regulated local, peripheral and world commerce. From the fifteenth to the last third of the twentieth century, it was European shipping firms that ran world shipping and used their maritime tradition to become global shipping makers. 50 Shipping is a business that takes place beyond national borders and beyond the land base of the shipping firm where trust and communication was of prime importance. It grew and flourished in particular maritime regions, small places that developed maritime traditions and the know-how to run ships. Later, the entrepreneurship of the small regions furnished the formation of large maritime centres within and inter-regions. Despite the major transformations that have taken place, still to the present day one third of the world fleet is run by traditional European nations of southern and northern Europe. 51
The ‘thalassocracy’ of the ancient Greek states was reborn after the age of exploration and the European expansion across the world. A maritime or seaborne empire is an empire formed and held together by its power at sea, its naval and merchant shipping. Venice and Genoa from the Middle Ages reigning in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, with their commercial networks in the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean replaced by Portugal’s global maritime empire and Spain’s maritime empire in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans in the sixteenth century, the Dutch in the seventeenth century, the British and the French in the eighteenth century, and the British in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Until the end of colonialism and the independence of these colonies during the last third of the twentieth century, European ‘thalassocracies’ controlled world’s oceans and seas.
Maritime empires enacted their own maritime policies of ‘mare liberum’ or ‘mare clausum’, regulating and policing sea trade and also delineating their territorial jurisdiction in long debates and/or wars as to whom the sea belonged. The unprecedented increase of world produce due to the multiple industrial and technological revolutions from the eighteenth century to the present day stimulated spectacular rise of trade and the need for an international regulatory framework. In the post-1945 era, the old system of maritime hegemonies disintegrated along with the British Empire. The new hegemonical power, the United States of America, was not an important maritime nation when geopolitics and ‘ruling the waves’ co-existed at the core of world governance. 52 The United States drew up a new maritime policy, and a new system emerged around the use of the flags of weak countries, like Panama or Liberia, which the United States could control; these flags were used by traditional European maritime nations, like Greece. 53 In the post-1945 era, the world’s oceans and shipping were controlled through global non-governmental organizations like the International Maritime Organization (IMO), a specialized agency of the United Nations formed in 1948 to provide a regulatory framework for safeguarding life at sea, environment, international maritime law, etc. The IMO’s primary purpose is to develop and maintain a comprehensive regulatory framework for shipping and its remit today includes safety, environmental concerns, legal matters, technical co-operation, maritime security and the efficiency of shipping.
This category explores maritime culture and heritage and the sea as inspiration to art and ideology.
The people of the sea have developed a distinctive maritime culture in all the world’s maritime communities, a maritime culture that concerns their perception of the world, of society and the hierarchies and rules that evolved within it, religion and family relations, to mention just a few. This includes, of course, language, gender, material culture, different ways of visualizing or conceiving the sea. 54 John Mack has written about this category of maritime history, which he terms the ‘human engagement with the sea in a variety of cultural and temporal contexts’. He has certainly avoided writing a history in which ‘the seas are portrayed as the backdrop to the stage on which the real action is seen to take place, that is land’. However, I have to admit I have my reservations about cultural history, as in most cases it uses secondary literary sources and its practitioners do not carry out hard core archival research as a historian should do. 55 The relation of man with the sea has produced the culture of the sea. Maritime businesses that grew from people born and bred in maritime communities to develop their own, different culture. Historical research has to be undertaken to compare distinct maritime cultures of maritime communities on shores and islands to see if common patterns can be distinguished between maritime communities of the various seas and oceans, but also to identify differences with land communities.
The sea inspires the ideology of ‘maritime nations’ and serves national narratives to indicate national success and pride in their past or present. This is the case with traditional maritime nations, like the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the British, the Norwegians, the Greeks, the Italians. The importance of Museums in Maritime History and their popular outreach is indicative of the importance of maritime history to a wider audience beyond scholarship (see Lars Scholl’s paper in this Forum). The perception of the sea has been an inspiration to many and has challenged popular imagination, has turned the sea, ships, marine animal populations into cultural obsessions. Maritime museums have been established in many places to preserve maritime heritage and discuss the myths relating to humankind and the sea. The sea has been seen as a new territory to be conquered not only by military powers but by the power of mind and the soul, in the formation of the ideology of the nation. Popular writers in Greece, for example, talk about the Greek people having ‘salt in their blood’. Comparative international perspective on such museum exhibitions and approaches will connect the seas and maritime culture that lies fragmented in multiple small places. There is a lot of scope for collaboration of maritime historians with maritime museums to transfer and develop new knowledge and new approaches.
The sea inspires people to create art. The sea as a space, not a real place, has been a symbolic and metaphorical device used by poets, novelists and playwrights. The sea signifies for many the unknown, the end of things, full of myths and superstitions, something to be explored. It is not a coincidence that every sea has its own myth. Odyssey for the Mediterranean, the Argonauts for the Black Sea, Sinbad for the Arabian Sea, just to mention a few of the thousands of the deities of the sea all around the seas and oceans of the world. Every sea has its own language, its nautical argo that transforms itself according to the maritime hegemonies. Seamen are polyglots and speak a blend of language with which they have communicated, and still communicate, in ports and aboard ships. In the Mediterranean the nautical argo is a blend of Greek, Italian, Spanish and English, in the Indian Ocean it is Pidgin English, a blend of Portuguese, Chinese and English.
Every sea has its own sound that has inspired musicians, composers to write about the sea. The sea has a face; marine painting, thalassographies form a distinct pictorial category. The sea has a form; sculptures, installations, reliefs that are inspired by the sea. Every sea has its own colour and movement and cinema is much inspired by it. History of art and maritime history have to travel in oceans and seas to enrich both fields.
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The true history of the sea is a maritime history. It can trace continuity and change on the sea, around the sea, in the sea. It can identify change because of the sea through maritime transport systems connecting seas and lands, and the entrepreneurial networks that have been formed within or beyond maritime empires. It can trace culture about the sea and seek its impact on human societies. And all this should not be done from time immemorial to the present day, but within a specific time framework within a specific maritime region, sea or ocean. Writing the history of the sea is to identify how, where, when and why the sea has acted as a dynamic agent that brings change to human societies with its eternal movement and continuity.
Footnotes
Author’s note
Gelina Harlaftis is also affiliated with University of Crete, Greece.