The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

“All history is maritime history.”In the world of academics and the study of history or any other aspect of our humanity, that is a radical statement. In virtually every field of study, maritime and nautical matters are given something of the short shift, if not ignored. A look at any world map makes that seem a curious fact. About 70% of that world map is blue. To quote the author’s introduction, “I want to change the way you see the world map, by focusing your attention on the blues that shade 70 percent of the image before you, and letting the earth tones fade.” In our global economy over 90% of commerce moves over water sometime in its travels from raw materials to final disposition. Commerce over the seas is not new, or a sudden change, or a development of the last millennia; evidence of trade between ancient Mesopotamia and the civilization of the Indus River valley exists from 4,000 years ago. It isn’t by accident that the first civilizations arose alongside navigable rivers. It isn’t just commerce and trade, warships and explorers, disease and calamity that traveled (travel?) those seas and rivers. Art, religion, language, and concepts of law, even human populations themselves, all moved across the globe on water, born by watercraft big and small. Our world would look very different (and vast areas would still be unpopulated) if human beings had remained bound to only the land masses.Lincoln Paine’s previous books hint at the direction his thinking was going, and include a maritime history of Maine, a history of warships before 1900, a history of the ships used in exploration and discovery, and, best known, “Ships of the World: A Historical Encyclopedia”. Paine has had predecessors who have examined various regions or periods or both from a decidedly maritime viewpoint, but all of the most acclaimed studies of world history or civilization in recent years have ignored, or barely mentioned, the enormous influence of the maritime world on humanity. It is small exaggeration to say that The Sea & Civilization represents the first comprehensive attempt at telling the story of humanity from a maritime perspective, from the viewpoint of travel, trade, and communications over seas and oceans, along rivers and lakes.The coverage, both as to geography and time periods, is comprehensive; the whole world, and the whole of history, is covered. Things move fast. The period from the beginning of human migration, to peopling of the Americas and Oceania, the rise of Egypt and Mesopotamia, Bronze Age seafaring, and trade from East Asia to the Western Mediterranean covers only some two hundred pages. By the time another two hundred pages have past Magellan is on his way on the first recorded circumnavigation. The end of six hundred pages of text brings us to the present day, with a better understanding of how we got to where we are. At least I did, and I’m supposed to be pretty well read on this sort of thing. (Yes, at one time I was an academic, but I saw the error of my way, and lived an honest life instead.)The stuff at the end, the sort of thing most folks never bother with, Notes, Bibliography, and Index, are actually better than most you see, especially now days. The notes are in a form that allows you to determine what the author was taking from the source, and how it influenced how he presented it in this volume (you can’t believe how rare that kind of detail is in author’s notes).Criticisms of the book seem to come, so far, from those who have a particular personal interest that is, of necessity in a single volume of this scope, not given the length of coverage that the critic wants to demand. I’m sorry, but the Age of Nelson is not the linchpin of history, and World War 2, as important as it is in our immediate memory, is seven years out of the last six thousand years of civilization, so you only get eight pages. Far more important to me is that the author has avoided the pathologies that plague modern academic writing and research.The author claims that, “. . . while ships are integral to the narrative that unfolds here, this book is less about ships per se than about the things that they carried-people and their culture, their material creations, their crops and flocks, their conflicts and prejudices, their expectations for the future, and their memories of the past.” All those things seem inseparable from the boats and ships. In the chapter The Silk Road of the Seas, Paine discusses a ship and its cargo that illustrates for me the intellectual cost of ignoring our maritime past. The archeological find was off Belitung Island in the Java Sea. Believed sunk in the year 826, the ship was built in the Persian/Arabian Gulf region of wood from India and Africa, with the keel imported from the region of Zaire, far inland. The hull is stitched or lashed together with palm fiber cordage. The cargo is no less amazing. Ballast is lead ingots, but sixty thousand pieces of Chinese ceramics, many still intact, make up the cargo. Dates on the ceramics are 826, and coins are all older. The ceramics are packed in jars from Vietnam, and spices onboard are native to China or Southeast Asia. The ceramics are from Hunan province, which is inland. The colors and motifs on the ceramics indicate they were destined for the Abbasid Caliphate (Arabian Peninsula, Tigris and Euphrates valleys). World trade is not a modern invention.It will be some time before we know if The Sea & Civilization changes the way historians or the public looks at our nautical world. I hope it changes yours.Copywrite 2015, John C. Nystrom

This is a huge, ambitious book with a sweeping point of view. If you believe that maritime trade had a lot to do with making human civilizations more prosperous, indeed, that it was the main reason why the standard of living has risen so dramatically over time, you will find evidence in this book. If you don’t believe that yet, this book might change your mind.Very early on, humans discovered that they could improve their lot by trading with other humans who lived in different locations, and therefore had access to different products. Exactly when this happened is disputed, but remains of trade goods certainly date from before the Neolithic Revolution introduced farming as the main means of feeding humanity, rather than hunting and gathering. Transporting things to be traded was probably first done in a backpack. Later, pack animals were used, and when the wheel was invented, animals could be used to pull carts with the trade products on or in them.However, moving trade items by land had drawbacks. Every minute the pack was on the back of a human or pack animal, the creature had to expend energy to hold it up – above and beyond the energy it had to expend to hold itself up. Once it started walking, the creature also had to deal with terrain. Going uphill is harder than on the level, and then there are bodies of water barring the path. Owners of the land can help by preparing commonly used routes ahead of time, smoothing out the ground, building bridges over smaller streams, and providing ferries over larger ones. While this would help commerce, it doesn’t come for free – the landowner would generally have to charge a toll or take a fee out of the profits to allow traders to use these prepared routes, now known as roads. Even worse, in spite of what scientists have to say about energy, the energy expended going uphill does not all return when going back downhill. Going downhill it is easy to fall, and you fall further because gravity is “helping” compared to a stumble when going uphill. In a wheeled vehicle, energy needs to be expended to prevent the vehicle from gaining too much speed and becoming uncontrollable. Accordingly, land transport requires ample labor to carry relatively small cargoes.The ocean has no terrain, nor is it helpful to prepare the route in advance. Historically, no one “owns” it and can have a right to levy tolls on it (although many have tried). Furthermore, once you’ve erected a more or less watertight hull, or provided enough buoyancy in objects like logs or reeds to stay afloat even if it leaks, buoyancy, the “magic” force holding up the vessel and everything in it, is free and requires no expenditure of energy. Ships can be built very large, larger than any other mobile structures, without losing their ability to carry cargo. Even better, so long as low speeds can be accepted, a vessel on water requires very little force to move it. Accordingly, ships can transport much larger, heavier cargoes than carts or pack animals, and with a comparatively trifling effort on the part of their crews. Even one person rowing can transport more weight than in a backpack! This is the physics of maritime trade and why it has always been, and continues to be, less expensive to move goods by sea than any other way. Of course the sea has waves, and the weather that creates them can be more of a problem than on land, but that’s another story.Mr. Paine, the author, has taken the broadest possible view of his subject. He has not confined himself to any time period, nor any civilization in particular. With such an enormous subject he has chosen, wisely I think, to approach it in the simplest way possible: chronologically from the beginning to the present. While this does call for jumping around to tell the story of each civilization in time periods (most of the time) when more than one civilization was making progress at sea, it is a familiar feature in literature, and in most places is not confusing.This sweeping character is both a strength and a weakness of his work. It’s a strength in that it transmits the true depth and wealth of maritime tradition, but it’s a weakness in that it leads to a monumental work that can be tedious to read, as well as not being entirely trustworthy at all points because one individual simply can’t master the entire sweep of maritime history in all periods.The author does not confine himself to what has often been considered the main line of nautical history, starting with the Mediterranean civilizations and moving into Northern and Western Europe, following the spread of Atlantic seafaring to include the rest of the world. Indeed, he spends quite a bit of ink on the fact that this is an ethnocentric view that shortchanges many civilizations that have also achieved a great deal in the annals of seafaring. To his credit, however, that discussion is relegated to the introduction and the reader may draw his own conclusions from the text. He does not harp on the achievements of any particular culture or civilization, not even to stake out a “contrarian” position compared to the Eurocentric view; he lets the facts speak for themselves. I think that is the correct line to take, and another great strength of the book. I expect this book is going to be a classic that no history enthusiast should be without, and probably the definitive general, world maritime history for years to come.The book is not without weaknesses. Mr. Paine avoids any discussion of the physical principles I have outlined in my third paragraph. Therefore, readers unaware of the economic reasons for using ships, rather than other transportation devices, may feel the entire text is poorly motivated. It is easy for a modern person to imagine that airplanes will soon take over all the transportation roles currently held by ships. In reality, for cargoes that don't go bad, don't have to be fed, and won't write nasty letters or file lawsuits if they don't get to their destinations on time, the ship still has an inherent advantage. Until such time as lift can be obtained without expenditure of energy, the additional speed of aircraft, while a convenience from the passenger’s point of view, does not threaten the ship as the main instrument of world commerce.

Well written.

This work is amazingly broad and complete, covering thousands of years and the entire globe. It is engagingly written and well edited. My one complaint is that it lacks a thesis; it is just a catalog of historical facts, with no argument as to how use of the sea affected the evolution of the world's civilizations. The result is that it can get a bit dry (heh), when it spends page after page on things like "King Muckamuck sent a trade delegation to Tyre in the 8th century BCE. Two centuries later, cedar was used to build ships in Egypt. By then, the Syracusans had used papyrus for caulking for over 600 years, which allowed them to sail against the monsoon and reach Iceland as early as 1100 BCE." Nevertheless, this is a fact-filled and fun read, with many interesting tidbits to lighten the way. Who knew that the word "average" comes from the method used by ancient Arab voyagers to apportion losses due to jettisoning cargo to save a sinking ship, for example?