The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans

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Indonesian city states sending tribute to the distant emperor of China as political tool against neighbors forms a major part of the more political usages of the great seas. Unlike Fernand Braudel, Abulafia ascribes world-shaping importance to religion. It was not just European geopolitics or Castilian cupidity but personal idealism that impelled Columbus to weigh anchor that August morning. “It was the Lord who put into my mind (I could feel His hand upon me) the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies.”

P. Horden, ‘Situations Both Alike?: Connectivity, the Mediterranean, the Sahara’, J. McDougall and J. Scheele (eds), Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwest Africa (Bloomington, IN., 2012), 25-38. River tells Bertie that the stories of H. G. Wells about the stars are real. He thinks she means the one about the centre of the Earth.The setting up of competing trade companies, that failed to achieve scale versus the first moving naval empires, reminds me of the commercial scramble for the internet or the streaming market currently.

Can Professor Song stop any more members of the expedition from dying? What deadly secrets lie buried within the crypt? And will British Consul Bertie Potts prove to be a help, or a hindrance?this is a tour de force. Writing history on this scale is challenging and enormously impressive; the author deserves applause for a magisterial achievement.' - The Sunday Times Dr Johnson, J. Coswell, G. B. Hill (ed.), and L. F. Powell (rev.), Boswell’s Life of Johnson, (Oxford, 1936), vol. 3, 36, Boundless, 136.

To preserve the element of surprise, it is not stated in the cast that, unlike in the rest of the box set, Alexander Vlahos here voices a clone of Bertie Potts rather than Bertie himself. Apabullante: ese sería otro adjetivo adecuado para describir el inmenso proyecto que desarrolla Abulafia en "Un mar sin límites". Como seguro habrán leído en la descripción (no me gustan las reseñas que repiten lo que se puede leer en una contraportada) "Un mar sin límites" hace un recorrido por más de 170.000 años y, con toda seguridad - el autor no los contabiliza -, por más de 1 millón de kilómetros (que es solo la longitud conjunta de todas las costas de los continentes e islas de la Tierra); el increíble periplo histórico y espacial de la humanidad alrededor de los océanos y mares de la Tierra. Their arrival at the dig is marked by awkwardness when Colonel Lifford assumes that only a man can be a professor. River assures him that her gun gives her equal chances against any man. Turns out that most of the archaeologists have left in fear. Only Freeman Lifford and Archie Ferrers remain, the latter is desperately trying to dig a wider opening to save his beloved. Danish East India and West India companies being set up to compete with the Dutch and English (but being much less successful than their competitors). In the end Denmark did gain three Caribbean islands and even forts on the coast of Guinea to facilitate slave trade. Me complació muchísimo conocer con mucho detalles a través de los a veces interminables, más no insoportables, capítulos dedicados a esta parte de la geografía de los océanos, las regiones del suroriente de Asia: indonesia, indochina, las costas del mar meridional de la China o el archipiélago de Filipinas y de Japón. Para quiénes vivimos tan lejos de esos lugares, pero que al mismo tiempo no somos ajenos a la importancia que muchos de ellos han tenido en la historia pasada de la humanidad, pero más importante, el papel que están teniendo en la historia presente, conocer al fin la organización de esas geografías remotas es simplemente revelador.

Nothing less than a history of humanity written from the perspective of the sea." - Jerry Brotton, Financial Times He became a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College in 1974, was appointed to his first Faculty post in 1978, and was Professor of Mediterranean History, 2000-2017. David Abulafia’s 2011 The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean set a standard in middle sea scholarship, charting a course from 22,000BC to today, combining careful detail with epic sweep. This dazzlingly ambitious companion piece looks far beyond the Strait and Suez towards seaways older than those of Odysseus but less often explored.

Japanese medieval sailors send by the Nara emperor being notoriously bad at navigation beyond their own archipelago, with a Korean ship returning from China in three weeks versus nine months to a solely Japanese manned ship. This was followed by a period of Chinese navigator dominance and then a Japanese piracy riddled period. Horden and Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea made a big splash (forgive me) when it was published in 2000. Taking their cue from the seminal work of Fernand Braudel, Horden and Purcell modeled a historiography that could analyze regions like the Mediterranean holistically rather than as mere “containers” for the empires and nations that rose and fell within them. To do so, they built connections between ecology and history; across the ancient, medieval, and early modern periods; and among the entangled microecologies that, in their view, formed the foundation of Mediterranean history for three thousand years. The project was provocative and prescient, as evidenced by the continuing growth of environmental history as a field over the past two decades.David Abulafia's The Boundless Sea ... is a majestic and beautifully illustrated account of human interaction with the sea, ranging from the Polynesians of the Pacific in the 1st century to the supertankers and vast cruise ships of our own times. Abulafia writes fluently and with deep humanity across the vast expanse of his subject. (Ruth Scurr Spectator Books of the Year) M. Herzfeld, ‘Practical Mediterraneanism: Excuses for Everything, from Epistemology to Eating’, W. V. Harris (ed.), Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford, 2003), 45-63, P. Horden, ‘Mediterranean Excuses: Historical Writing on the Mediterranean since Braudel’, History and Anthropology, 16 (2005), 25-30; Boundless, 136. River scoffs that she is known as a psychopath. ( TV: Let's Kill Hitler, The Angels Take Manhattan) Horden, P. and Purcell, N., ‘The Mediterranean and ‘The New Thalassology’’, American Historical Review, Forum: ‘Oceans of History’, 111/3 (2006), 722-40. Bertie's invitation gave River coordinates to a port in the Magellan Cloud. ( AUDIO: The Last Voyage)