"The Boundless Sea reminds us brilliantly of once brand-new landfalls - times when endless oceans glittered with primordial possibilities." - Derek Turner, Irish Times "Nothing less than a history of humanity written from the perspective of the sea." - Jerry Brotton, Financial Times Abulafia's masterpiece has the potential to alter the way we understand the human story and our place within it." - Horatio Clare, Spectator After reading this book your horizons will be wonderfully expanded, and you'll be as eager as the Ancient Mariner to retell its stories. "The Boundless Sea is a work of immense scholarship, a forensic tribute to human enterprise. Writing history on this scale is challenging and enormously impressive the author deserves applause for a magisterial achievement." - Peter Frankopan, Sunday Times "His grasp of the material is not so much encyclopaedic as breathtaking. From Morocco to Hawaii, Australia to the Persian Gulf, he delivers an intense and thrilling tour de force, filled with pirates, kings, scholars, monsters, conquerors, sailors, merchants, adventurers, slavers and slaves, taking us from the age of triremes and longships, hulks and cogs, dhows and junks, galleons and dreadnoughts, all the way up to the container ship." - Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Daily Telegraph "In its mixture of supreme storytelling, beautifully drawn characters, fearless scope and rigorous scholarship, it ranks with the very best of world histories. "Were my caravel ever to be becalmed, lost in some hot oceanic doldrum, I would hope to have David Abulafia's grand book on hand, both to remind me of sailors who braved wilder and colder seas in centuries past, thereby linking continents and archipelagos and civilizations together - but also in the hope that just one of its vast multitude of pages might eventually catch the faint breath of a tropical breeze, and waft me up onto a shipping lane, and back onto my unwittingly abandoned course." - Simon Winchester, author of Atlantic and Pacific, as well as The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World By any standard, this is a brilliant historical achievement that leaves one in awe of the author's intellectual breadth." - Brian Fagan, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Beyond the Blue Horizon: How the Earliest Mariner Unlocked the Secrets of the Oceans This is history on a grand scale that is destined to become a standard work, written with a vivid clarity that ranges from dodos to Aztec lords, Rapa Nui to cod fishers in Newfoundland waters. "David Abulafia takes us on an epic journey through the open (ocean) spaces of the earth, tracing interconnections that brought together people, religions, and civilizations.
Why he ranks as one of the world's greatest storytellers. Abulafia, whom The Atlantic calls superb writer with a gift for lucid compression and an eye for the telling detail, proves again History on the grandest scale and scope, written with passion and precision, this is a project few could have undertaken. Taken daily by supertankers in the thousands. Working chronologically, Abulafia moves from the earliest forays of peoples taking hand-hewn canoes into uncharted waters, to the routes Linking irrevocably the economies and cultures of Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas.įar more than merely another history of exploration, The Boundless Sea shows how maritime networks gradually formed a continuum of interaction and interconnection.
These waterways carried goods, plants, livestock, and of course people-free and enslaved-across vast expanses, transforming and ultimately Over time, as passage through them gradually extended and expanded, linking first islands and thenĬontinents, maritime networks developed, evolving from local exploration to lines of regional communication and commerce and eventually to major arteries. The main protagonists are the three major oceans-the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian-which together comprise the majority of the earth's water and cover over half of its surface.
radiates scholarship and a sense of wonder and fun, Simon Sebag Montefiore Book of the Year, The Economist), David Abulafia's new book guides readers along the world's greatest bodies of water to reveal their primary role in human Description From the beginning of history to the present, a sweep of the world's oceans and seas and how they have shaped the course of civilization.įrom the author of the acclaimed The Great Sea, (Magnificent.