A Cultural History of the Sea (6 vols.)

Margaret Cohen, general editor

Note: We are on the precipice of harrowing times, and I hope to address that when it seems like I have something relevant to say, as in the past couple of weeks. But the first reason for the A Sea of Words Substack is to write about maritime history, often in the form of book reviews. What follows appeared in Sea History 184 (Autumn 2023), but I don’t get out much and didn’t see the published version until a few days ago. Come what may, we all have our lives to live, and all history is maritime history, so now back to our regularly-scheduled programming.

Multivolume collections of essays present unique challenges to editors and readers alike. Editors—whether of the series or of individual volumes, or the publishing house editor—struggle to translate what sounds like a good idea into a coherent whole, while managing multiple authors is like herding cats. Coming at such a project as a reviewer poses its own difficulties. Do you focus on the set as a whole, the individual volumes, or on the fifty-four individual essays? As in photography, zooming in and out on the subject yields dramatically different results.

Before diving in, it would be helpful to know what cultural history is. Series editor Margaret Cohen offers little guidance, apart from noting that the eight thematic chapter titles "address culture understood in its expansive, anthropological sense: as designating the diverse realms of practices organizing the structure of a society."' Merriam Webster defines it as "history that especially by contrast with narrative political history concentrates upon the social, intellectual, and artistic aspects or forces in the life of a people or nation."

All of the Bloomsbury Cultural History series have the same organization: six volumes, chronologically sequenced, each with an introduction and seven "themes (and chapter titles)" that provide a framework for understanding particular "social, intellectual, and artistic aspects or forces." In the Cultural History of the Sea, these chapters are "Knowledges," "Practices," "Networks," "Conflicts," "Islands and Shores," "Travelers," "Representations," and "Imaginary Worlds." The idea is that "thematic coverage is consistent across all periods so that users can either gain a broad overview of a period or follow a theme through the ages." Curiously, each volume has a table of contents with these headings and the authors' names, but only at the start of each chapter do we learn its actual title. Some are quite straightforward. Volume 1, chapter 4 is Jorit Wintjes's "Conflict at Sea in the Ancient World," which examines a wide range of warlike encounters on and over the sea from the Persian Gulf to the English Channel through the seventh century. His approach to technological and operational change is ably handled, but, according to the above definitions, neither are cultural history.

In volume 2, Elizabeth Lambourn’s corresponding chapter, “Connected Histories of Maritime Violence in the Western Indian Ocean” engages more directly with cultural understanding. Her insights reveal as much about how historians have changed their comprehension of naval conflict in the medieval Indian Ocean as they do about the cultural aspects of naval warfare in the medieval period itself. She also offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how the chapter title began as “War” and was “renegotiated by the premodernists among us to ‘Conflicts’.” This change reflects “the various ways in which violence in a maritime context has been framed within different disciplines and methodologies” (4.96).

So far, so good. But in volume 5, chapter 4 is William Boelhower’s “Reframing Oceanic Violence: The Pax Britannica and Wild Weather during the Nineteenth Century.” Given the monumental changes in propulsive technology, hull materials, and weaponry in the 1800s, the editorial decision to allow such a stark departure from the established understanding of conflict undermines the claim that one can “follow a theme through the ages.” Framing heavy weather sailing as a type of conflict is an interesting conceit, but not one that conforms to expectations.

More troubling is the collection’s Eurocentric orientation. An almost laughable instance is found in James Seth’s “Representations: The Maritime Visual Arts in the Global Early Modern Period” (volume 3). Chinese and Indian “paintings, scrolls, and decorative objects,” he informs us, “often allude to places that many Asian artists had never visited, people they likely had never visited with, and events that they had not seen for themselves” (3.186). One could say the same of Rembrandt, who managed to paint Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee without leaving either the Dutch Republic or the seventeenth century.

Despite the vast pool of historians, maritime, cultural and otherwise, from the global south and east, all but four or five of the authors in this collection are of European, North American, or Australian origin, and fewer than 10 percent of the essays focus on non-Western subjects. Introducing volume 2, Lambourn offers an apology for the lack of coverage of non-Western subjects, although she writes thoughtfully about the role of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain interaction with, writings on, and artistic traditions of the sea, and her choice of illustrations demonstrates a deep familiarity with the material. Her chapter, “Connected Histories of Maritime Violence in the Western Indian Ocean,” is a fine introduction to the history of maritime warfare and other forms of violence in the Indian Ocean at the time of Europe’s Middle Ages.

Cannon Schmitt’s first-rate “Sea of Ink” (vol. 5) offers a close reading of the ship’s library aboard the Dulcibella, the nine-meter yawl that is “the hero” of Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands. “The gambit of this chapter,” Schmitt writes,

will be to assume that [the narrator] Carruthers’s mention of a title brings with it the entirety of the book in question as it exists outside the novel…. Inverting the usual procedure whereby historical context is invoked to interpret fiction, I take the fictional ship’s library in the Riddle of the Sands as material for a cultural history of the sea in the age of empire (5.207).

It is a brilliant play and Schmitt carries it off with aplomb. Whether this chapter fits in “Imaginary Worlds” rather than “Representations” is debatable. One could easily swap it with Charne Lavery’s “Lascars, Drifters, Aquanauts,” the subject of which is “canonical writing of the sea” in the nineteenth century, chiefly Conrad, with some reference to Melville, Verne, and others. (Note that across the series, “Representations” can be either visual or literary.) While Lavery is attentive to scientific advances and other broad historical trends of the period, she reads these authors through a literary critical lens rather than a cultural-historical one.

None of the essays in this series focuses on the Americas south of the United States. This is a missed opportunity, not least because Cohen’s general editor’s preface, which appears in each volume, invokes Derek Walcott’s “The Sea is History” (1979). Yet while Walcott’s poem presents a cultural gloss on the sea in the guise of an abbreviated Caribbean Bible— “Then came from the plucked wires / of sunlight on the sea floor / the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage … but the ocean kept turning blank pages” —no one engages here with the outsize impact of these verses on the culture of maritime historiography in recent decades.

Criticism is easy, but there are gems here. Mirella Romero Recio’s essay, “Religious Practices at Sea in Antiquity,” covers sacred spaces, sacrifices, gods and heroes, and magic, which were among the “myriads of elements involved in the religious practices … that responded to an inner logic derived from the practice of a professional activity that constantly called for divine intervention” (1.58).

The Age of Empire includes Siobhan Carroll’s imaginatively conceived microhistory. “The Awful Prospect of Eternity: Ocean Networks and the Wreck of the Kent” examines networks in different registers—across the empire, transatlantic, and even within individual ships—through the story of an East Indiaman lost to fire in the Bay of Biscay in 1825, beginning with the retrieval of a passenger’s message in a bottle, which washed ashore in Barbados the following year. “In the stories of individual ships and people,” she observes, the British Admiralty “learned to glimpse the movements of much larger forces: winds and currents, trade and warfare, and the migrations, forced and otherwise, of human and nonhuman populations.” Here, Carroll “restages” the process to allow us to “view the story of this wreck as a window onto the scale, power, and actions of the oceanic networks of the nineteenth century” (5.103). In so doing, she models how to conceptualize and write cultural history.

Volume six, The Global Age, brings the series to a strong finish. Simone Müller’s “Conflicts: Underneath the Quiet Waves” is a harrowing investigation of the sea as dumping ground, particularly for ordnance, chemical weapons, and radioactive waste, including sixteen Soviet “nuclear reactors from submarines and icebreakers, some still with nuclear fuel, most of them in water less than one hundred meters deep” (6.102), as well as industrial waste from mine tailings to PCBs. It is noteworthy (if unsurprising) that as late as 1971, Congressional subcommittees could report that “questions on the effects of ocean dumping had ‘scarcely’ been asked and ‘then only by an obscure group of scientists, known as ecologists’” (6.106).

The environmental theme continues in Rebecca Hofmann’s “War in the Pacific,” which traces the legacy of war and imperial rivalries on the islands of Oceania. As she notes, these “continue to bear the scars of nuclear tests, while struggling with the neocolonial exploitation of their natural resources or the current issue of the Great Garbage Patch that marks the transition from the Nuclear into a Plastic Ocean” (6.138), to say nothing of the impact of climate change. John Crylen’s “Representations: On Undersea Filmmaking” offers a new way of understanding the ocean depths and how the overwhelming majority of us perceive it. His juxtaposition of how we view underwater film and aquariums is instructive, and his history of the development of underwater cinematography fascinates. The illustrations run the gamut from a 1901 cartoon from Punch captioned “‘Catching a Mermaid!’ [Submarine Photography is now possible]” to a still showing the cartoon figures Tom and Jerry swimming with Esther Williams, from the 1953 movie Dangerous When Wet, and a photograph of the underwater set for Disney’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954).

Ariane Tanner’s “Imaginary World: The Human-Ocean Relation in Fantastic Futures of Affluence and Formidable Visions of Unsettledness” drops us firmly but reflectively in the midst of our shared ecological crisis. She begins obviously enough with a discussion of Rachel Carson, a non-swimmer whose work “exemplifies the crucial role of imagination for the understanding of the ocean” (6.183). The focus shifts to plankton, which “represents many aspects of an imagined scientific, technical and geopolitical solution to the problems faced by the Western world” (6.184). People began to understand the importance of plankton to food chains and human welfare more than a century ago, and attempts to cultivate phytoplankton for human consumption began in the 1950s. The failure of this effort underlies the plot of the dystopian movie Soylent Green (1973), in which humans became a substitute for plankton chips, which were virtually the sole source of nutrition for an overpopulated world. Tanner ties this to other understandings of the oceanic environment and its exploitation, and quotes Naomi Oreskes’ observation that the shift in our perception of the ocean from an all but inaccessible realm out of sight and mind to “a vast abode of life … and a place on which all life, both marine and terrestrial, depends is one of the most important cultural and scientific shifts of the twentieth century” (6.198).

It is rare that such a collection of essays ends as powerfully as this, but Tanner’s essay leaves no doubt about the importance of environmental understanding to the present and future of maritime history and world culture.

A Cultural History of the Sea, 6 vols., general editor, Margaret Cohen (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021; $610hc).
•Vol. 1, A Cultural History of the Sea in Antiquity, edited by Marie-Claire Beaulieu
•Vol. 2, A Cultural History of the Sea in the Medieval Age, edited by Elizabeth A. Lambourn
•Vol. 3, A Cultural History of the Sea in the Early Modern Age, edited by Steve Mentz
•Vol. 4, A Cultural History of the Sea in the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Jonathan Lamb
•Vol. 5, A Cultural History of the Sea in the Age of Empire, edited by Margaret Cohen
•Vol. 6, A Cultural History of the Sea in the Global Age, edited by Franziska Torma