Books that occur on the high seas are fairly common. Books about specific seas are rather less so. There are extremely dry books on these damp subjects, on, say, resource management in the Barents Sea. You don’t need to read those. Oceanic histories always at least contain anecdotal deckchair delights. There are tales of Trollope’s time in Jamaica or the Khedive’s son’s wild enthusiasm for macaroni. Many of these accounts of specific oceans are basically travelogues — generally sunny and full of excellent cuisine. These can be rather shallow but, even then, hard to put down, books of the Tyrrhenian: Bathtub of Civilization variety. The right narrator can ensure a pleasant voyage. Who knew that George Gissing of New Grub Street wrote a book By the Ionian Sea? Naturally, he had a good time. But I’m thinking of titles such as The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, History of the Adriatic: A Sea and its Civilization, and The Baltic: A History. Unless you’re a Njarl-tier Viking Cruises passenger, you likely haven’t been reading that many of these. And likely not even then. But I have, and the habit becomes difficult to shake.

If you read the better class of these ocean books, you might soon find yourself convinced of the considerable historical merits of this angle of approach. None of the authors of the histories of seas I read for this piece are suggesting that the oceanic is the most important lens for history, but it’s an invaluable accentuation to our tendency to find terra firma the only thing that really matters. The fixations of most histories are firmly terrestrial, with oceans figuring largely as boundaries. This largely makes sense — excepting Kevin Costner, humans don’t live on the ocean. But there are excellent cases to be had as to why specific oceans have shaped not just individual states, but numerous states around them in common ways differently from locations not far inland. You tend to find Ishmaels and Queequegs, Bildads and Pelegs not just in New Bedford, Massachusetts, but in most ports in history.