The Ocean in Global History

Catalog description

This course examines how the ocean and its denizens have influenced and been shaped by diverse social, material, political, and cultural factors across different spaces and chronologies. We will consider how historical actors across global history have approached the ocean and its creatures as sources of sustenance and power, cosmology and knowledge, conveyance and death. We will weigh, too, how adopting an oceanic perspective can open new ways of understanding the past, present, and future of our planet and its inhabitants. Topics considered include contemporary and historic Indigenous seafaring traditions and maritime subjectivities across Moana/Pacific and other oceanic basins; Atlantic seaborne empires, piracy, human trafficking in the age of sail; the establishment of oceanography as a scholarly discipline; the evolution of maritime transportation infrastructure under global capitalism; the political ecology of a warming ocean in the era of climate crisis.