Our water world planet — two sweeping histories

The latest estimates suggest that by the end of the 21st century, a 3-5C increase in temperatures will cause the world’s waters rise by nearly a metre. As politicians and scientists debate the causes and devastating effects of climate change, historians are beginning to catch up by returning to the longue durée — or what is more fashionably called “big history” — to understand how the oceans’ climate and environment came to define our world.

David Abulafia and Sarah Dry each take very different approaches to the subject, one from the history of trade and exchange, the other scientific inquiry. Both are too shrewd to pin their arguments too closely to the current global climate emergency — yet both, in their own ways, offer compelling evidence for the need to change our approach to the waters that made us.

Maritime history isn’t new. Abulafia has been here before with The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, which he describes as a companion to his latest book The Boundless Sea — an even more epic achievement. At more than 1,000 pages, it offers nothing less than a history of humanity written from the perspective of the sea. Abulafia’s interest is in human rather than natural history, and the connections made between cultures in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans, driven primarily by trade and exchange. He starts in the Pacific around 1500BC, and ends with the “containerisation” of today, with vast ships transporting millions of tons of commodities around the globe.

The Boundless Sea opens with the prehistoric Pacific migrants known as the Lapita and their decision to sail eastward into the wind to settle and colonise Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, an extraordinary process that culminated in the peopling of Hawaii and New Zealand in the early 14th century. Perhaps rising sea levels inspired mass migration, or simply the restless urge to discover, but it was a systematic act — 3,000 miles of sea traversed over three millennia — combined with technological developments in shipbuilding and navigation. To explain how and why this happened involves trawling not just the historical archive but archaeology and physical geography, and throughout the book Abulafia amasses a vast amount of fascinating material to support his case, from pottery shards to epic poetry and even discarded merchants’ accounts discovered in ancient rubbish heaps.

Whereas the scattered islands of the Pacific created a culture of migration, the shores of the Indian Ocean and Red Sea inspired a network of traders: ancient Egyptians from the third millennium BC in pursuit of incense, and Greco-Roman merchants from the first century AD sending 120 ships a year to India exchanging clothing and pepper in what Abulafia identifies as the first “global maritime network”.

By the 12th century, Aden was a nodal point in a trade that saw Jewish merchants connecting Spain, east Africa and Indonesia. Japan and China were inevitably drawn into this convergence of oceanic trade, although they treated exchange as a matter of tribute and imperial policy. Abulafia sets the famous early 15th-century Ming voyages of Admiral Zheng He in contrast with later European discoveries.

In identifying the rise of the Atlantic Ocean as a site of exchange in the 15th century, Abulafia emphasises the desire for more prosaic goods such as timber and fish as drivers of change, most significantly with the rise of the “super league” of the Hanseatic merchants in northern Europe. At the southern end of the continent, Portugal, isolated from Hanseatic trade and under threat from the rise of Islam, set out southwards down the African coast in the first moment of the European “Age of Discovery” (a phrase, like other grand narratives, that is regarded with understandable suspicion by Abulafia).

Perhaps rising sea levels inspired mass migration — or simply the restless urge to discover

If the story of this era leaves little room for new discoveries, the author is alive to the horrors of slavery and sectarian violence that accompanied the early European maritime encounters with African, Muslim and Amerindian societies in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. The period post-1750 of joint stock companies, the age of empire and the rise of steam is crammed into the final 150 pages in something of a blur — but it suits Abulafia’s longer historical trajectory, which forgoes an easy Eurocentric approach. Still, it remains alive to some remarkable and forgotten elements: the role of piracy (nothing like as glamorous as might be imagined); the enduring role of the Jewish diaspora in the Portuguese maritime empire; the Omani maritime empire; and the role of the Panama Canal in creating a geopolitical vision of US imperialism that remains with us to this day.

This hardly does justice to the richness and phenomenal detail that drive The Boundless Sea: from lost commercial kingdoms in Sumatra to the rise of P&O and the victims of all these bravura maritime encounters. But Abulafia ends with a note of caution: as global warming opens up a new North-East Passage across the Arctic, China is pursuing a “Polar Silk Route”, threatening to trigger new geopolitical flashpoints and maritime environmental damage. Perhaps, as Abulafia suggests, it is time for Unesco to designate the world’s oceans as a world heritage site.

Where Abulafia delivers a deep history of the oceans, Sara Dry’s Waters of the World offers the big science of water. Her interest goes above and beneath the oceans to understand how the study of glaciers, vapour, clouds and rain over the past 150 years created the discipline of climate science and with it the ongoing attempt to understand not just how our planet works, but how humanity began and continues to affect it. Her book is a genealogy of current debates surrounding global warming and climate change, with six case studies of the scientific men and women whose discoveries established the reality of an interdependent global climate system.

She begins in the 1850s with John Tyndall and his fieldwork on Alpine glaciers and how heat acts on ice and water vapour. His experiments into how gases could absorb heat anticipated the “greenhouse effect”. Charles Piazzi Smyth travelled to Mount Teide on Tenerife in 1856 to locate a telescope above the clouds and, as Dry writes, saw “farther into the heavens than anyone had ever seen before”. It led him to develop the “rainband spectroscope” measuring light and the likelihood of rainfall.

Mathematician Gilbert Walker, director of meteorological observatories in colonial India, used statistics to understand monsoon rainfall and its devastating impact. Subsequent 20th-century scientists such as Henry Stommel, Joanne Simpson (the only woman of note discussed in either of these books) and Willi Dansgaard explored the ocean basins and ice cores against a backdrop of international conflict and national science agencies that were often reluctant to embrace their research.

Dry’s call to use her scientific history of the climate to “prepare us to see differently, to use the difference of the past to help us conceive of the future with more options in mind” is laudable, but seems unduly optimistic, acknowledging as she does (and I suspect Abulafia would agree) that it remains difficult to see changes in climate and the oceans in the same way we can with the landscape. The water that surrounds us will continue to sustain us: but for how long?

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans, by David Abulafia, Allen Lane, RRP£35, 1,088 pages

Waters of the World , by Sarah Dry, Scribe, RRP£25, 416 pages

Jerry Brotton is the author of ‘A History of the World in Twelve Maps’

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