Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans

by Helen M. Rozwadowski

Much of human experience can be distilled to tears, sweat, and an enduring connection to the sea. In Vast Expanses , Helen M. Rozwadowski weaves a cultural, environmental, and geopolitical history of that relationship, a journey of tides and titanic forces reaching around the globe and across geological and evolutionary time.

Our ancient connections with the sea have developed and multiplied through industrialization and globalization, a trajectory that runs counter to Western depictions of the ocean as a place remote from and immune to human influence. Rozwadowski argues that knowledge about the oceans—created through work and play, scientific investigation, and also through human ambitions for profiting from the sea—has played a central role in defining our relationship with this vast, trackless, and opaque place. It has helped us to exploit marine resources, control ocean space, extend imperial or national power, and attempt to refashion the sea into a more tractable arena for human activity.

But while deepening knowledge of the ocean has animated and strengthened connections between people and the world’s seas, to understand this history we must address questions of how, by whom, and why knowledge of the ocean was created and used—and how we create and use this knowledge today. Only then can we can forge a healthier relationship with our future sea.

Genres: History, Science, Nonfiction, Environment

264 pages, Hardcover

Published February 15, 2019

Reviews

[Jinjoo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book genuinely brought back all the affections I had for the Ocean and how I loved being raised in an island. The sea was vast and so understanding. And personally I really liked how the author tried to cover as many aspects of the Oceans as possible to connect them with us.

[mantareads · Rating 2 out of 5]

For a book that makes claims about the universality of human relationships with seas and oceans, it's profoundly disappointing and disquieting that this text seems to anchor itself in the histories, perspectives, and experiences of the Global North. After the initial chapters that provide quick summaries of older historical relationships with the sea shared by other civilizations and peoples, the narrative turns almost exclusively to developments in Europe and the Americas from the nineteenth century onwards.

I don't begrudge a historian their specific areas of research and expertise, but trying to talk about a history of Western relationships with oceans as if that was the only modern oceanic history worth talking about verges on the disingenuous. No caveat nor explanation is given for this scoping. There is a historiographical, technoscientific, and cultural myopia here that is rather distasteful, and far from the broad scope the book's title implies.

[Zadie Micajah]

Oceans

[Ollic Fuchs · Rating 2 out of 5]

For class. Whatever dude.