The salty pleasures of the doorstopper history of an ocean

If you read the better class of these ocean books, you might soon find yourself convinced of the considerable historical merits of this angle of approach. None of the authors of the histories of seas I read for this piece are suggesting that the oceanic is the most important lens for history, but it’s an invaluable accentuation to our tendency to find terra firma the only thing that really matters. The fixations of most histories are firmly terrestrial, with oceans figuring largely as boundaries. This largely makes sense — excepting Kevin Costner, humans don’t live on the ocean. But there are excellent cases to be had as to why specific oceans have shaped not just individual states, but numerous states around them in common ways differently from locations not far inland. You tend to find Ishmaels and Queequegs, Bildads and Pelegs not just in New Bedford, Massachusetts, but in most ports in history.

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It’s no surprise that the Mediterranean is the subject of most books of this type. It’s much nicer than, say, the Sea of Ohotsk, and has hosted more memorable empires. It’s also relatively manageable in scale. Only the Romans achieved Mare Nostrum, taking all of the shores of the Mediterranean, but most oceans haven’t been surrounded by a single polity for even a single minute. Trans-Atlantic history is a real thing, but centripetal forces tend to assert themselves very quickly over larger and even smaller oceans. And, just as the Mediterranean sits at the center of a world, the center of this world of a very particular genre of books is Fernand Braudel’s two-volume, 1949 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, which asserted the role of the sea as “liquid plane,” as a generative space for history and not merely one in between those spaces. It was the first substantial launch for a subsequent fleet of such works.

David Abulafia’s 2011 The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean is a work of great scholarly heft, brimming with endless interest. Defining the rocky but fertile Mediterranean by the farmable habitat of the olive, Abulafia shifts his focus back more squarely to coastal spaces along the Mediterranean, and the manner in which they shaped each other. Numerous processes of conquest or migration were essentially anchored to the shores. As Abulafia explains, “Without access to friendly ports where supplies could be taken on and ships could be careened, no power, however many warships it possessed, could lord itself over sea routes.” The Greeks drifted all over the Mediterranean, sometimes by conquest, sometimes by opportunity, but they tended not to venture too far inland. Conquest by the Greeks, Genoese, Venetians, or others was often modest. Frequently, they just wanted an outpost. Many of these ancient communities were still around a century ago.

To say that travel by sail or oar was often easier than overland isn’t to say that it was easy. Seasonal currents and winds weren’t easily worked around before the age of steamships. Cartographic knowledge of the seas was also spotty. Seasoned seafarers knew how to avoid perilous rocks — usually. Others did not. The distribution of knowledge in society is always uneven, it was once even more so. The Venetians and the Genoans prospered in part due to knowing these things when others didn’t. The Judeo-Spanish community was vital, with links across the Mediterranean and a commercially useful liminal status between Christians and Muslims.

It wasn’t always the largest city or the perfect harbor that flourished. The Genoese tower in Istanbul is the remnant of a trading outpost whose revenues in the mid-fourteenth century, Abulafia writes, “dwarfed those of Greek Constantinople, by a ratio of about seven to one.” Political shifts were important. After the Ottomans conquered Chios from the Genoans, Smyrna on the mainland rose in consequence. Portuguese Jews were a crucial commercial class there, trading most often with French merchants.

Egidio Ivetic, in his History of the Adriatic: A Sea and its Civilization, calls the Adriatic rather plummily “the Mediterranean of the Mediterranean,” for good reason. Fissures often ran right through even this small sea — Rome divided itself along its shores. It was surrounded by Italian, Slavic, Greek, and Ottoman populations. Ivetic pithily details the Adriatic as “an entirety of peripheral cultures, and cultures that are on the border of something.”

Geography remains ever important here. Ivetic notes that the long Italian coast is fairly lousy for port uses — the shores are shallow and channels would frequently silt up. The Dalmatian coast, along present-day Croatia, is comparatively ideal, but mountains provide a steep hike to almost anything else. They’ve remained a border of some sort between populations and polities for centuries.

No mountain will ever quite stop trade. “For centuries, mule caravans came down to Trieste from Carinthia and Carniola; flocks and herds traveled from the Venetian Pre-Alps to the lagoons; herds were brought by the Morlachs from Herzegovina to the islands of Korcula and Mljet.” The sea was still the simplest way to get anywhere.

Adriatic populations generally bore no relationship to contemporary ethno-nationalism. Ivetic defines the Venetian commonwealth as “a set of relations and interactions which do not fit the center-periphery concept.” He notes, “A Dalmatian ship from Split was considered Venetian when it was outside the Republic of Venice.” He cites a request to the Doge from the Croatian-speaking outpost of Sibenik for protection from other Croats nearby.

Life on the edge does involve real risks. Trade would abruptly stop at points, and positions would change. Venice had already been declining as a city when the Habsburgs’ annexation fractured the commercial relationships that kept it relatively consequential.

A circuitous trip east leads to another exceptionally bounded sea, with an entrance less than 1 mile wide at the Bosporus. Our guide in this case is Neal Ascherson’s Black Sea. The Ottomans controlled the Black Sea for a while, but it didn’t last. A recurrent feature of nearly all of these bodies of water is that no one can seem to hold on to them for long. A recurrent peril is that you might end up with a Russia across the waves.

Ascherson takes more of the tone of the erudite travelog, visiting Khazar tombs, Genoan castles, and all sorts of other fascinating relics. But there’s plenty of substance for the historically minded. We meet Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, a Habsburg soldier-scientist from Bologna, and learn of his discovery that the surface current at the Bosporus flows into the Mediterranean but that a deeper current flows the other way.

The Black Sea provides a comparatively unique setting of sea-bordering steppe lands and a dynamic of successively different waves of semi-nomads, from Scythians to Tatars to Cossacks, trading with generally sea-based merchant communities, from Greeks to Genoans to Ottomans. Looking at the cities on its coasts, there is often a clear stamp of foreignness to these explicitly imperial projects from the age of nation-states. Odesa was designed by Italian architects and governed first by Cardinal Richelieu’s great-great nephew. The population was half Russian at its demographic peak.

Asherson takes a bleaker view of the multiethnic tapestries that surrounded these seas, for the good reason that most of them have been murdered or expelled. As Ascherson writes, “All multi-ethnic landscapes … are fragile. Any serious tremor may disrupt them, setting off landslides, earthquakes and eruptions of blood.” The Pontic Greek community on the Black Sea coast, once larger than that in the Peloponnese south of Athens, is now all but gone. The Tatar community of Crimea is a similar shadow of itself.

North of the Black Sea laps another narrowly entranced sea, well-encompassed in Michael North’s The Baltic: A History. The Hanseatic League achieved seafaring dominance for a while but with another light touch. These Germans scattered to ports and generally just stayed there. Here is another Settlers of Catan-like network of goods and sources: pelts from Novgorod, flax and hemp from Livonia, wax from Lithuania, and grain and timber from Poland.

The league was eclipsed by the various rises of Denmark, Sweden, Russia, and Prussia, but the sort of links they forged remained even as it ebbed. Their tastes endure: Netherlandish architecture and art predominated for a long time and still do. Even communist Poland, whose fidelity to history was dubious, didn’t reconstruct Gdansk to look like Warsaw — the rebuilt old city is full of Dutch gables today.

Spinning the globe quite a lot, we come to Michael Pearson’s The Indian Ocean. That ocean is comparatively enormous, but Pearson succeeds well at its task of escaping “the land/political borders which have shackled traditional history for so long.” Currents and monsoons dictate much, rendering larger trading networks all the more vital for purposes of resupply and sale. Remnants of this are all over. Chinese fishing nets remain in Kerala, Gujarati populations in Zanzibar. The Portuguese, Dutch, and English went everywhere.

The importance of having a man on the ground was vital in these far-flung trading networks. Ships would get stranded by monsoons, not exactly a great bargaining position. But as Pearson writes, “someone there permanently could buy when the market was low, and sell when it was high, throughout the year.” Hence, the ever-appealing merchant quarters were once a standard feature of every port city worth its salt.

Armenians were another strategically placed community, Pearson points out. “They spoke Persian, and so could operate all over the Muslim world, yet were Christian, an advantage when dealing with Europeans.” Languages spread in this fashion. Portuguese, Arabic, and then English loanwords circulated. There was also the spread of ideas. A recurrent pattern in nearly all of these volumes is the rapid appeal of religions with some pretense of universality over extremely local faiths — plus all sorts of odd syncretic results. There are many strange bedfellows. The land-oriented Mughals traded briskly with the Portuguese. European empires soon became hugely enmeshed in local trading networks, with inter-Asian trade generally more important than exports to Europe. The Portuguese bought Indian cloth to trade for African gold and ivory to then sell in exchange for spices to cart back to Lisbon.

One can continue spinning the globe. Carrie Gibson’s Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day is, in many ways, a gradual tale about how extremely rigid and distant trade relationships were shaken up and of how local links came to assert themselves over distant ones. Spanish efforts to control all trade to their colonies were soon unsettled by illicit bargains from the Dutch and English. Migration between islands happened frequently. Single income sources would dry up. Slaves could often escape over rather small distances. Populations shift subsequently. Some 40,000 Barbadian and Jamaican laborers moved to Panama to work on the canal. Similar migration occurred to Central America to work growing bananas.

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What is to be gained from the briny library? The overwhelming lesson is the sheer and inescapable pull of commerce. Populations needn’t care for one another to like their wares. The Ottoman Empire was frequently at war with Venice — in the interim, it was its largest trading partner for centuries. The corollary, for essentially all of these locations, is that trade is never just an exchange of products. It is inevitably an exchange of ideas as well. Before the telegraph cable, radio, aviation, and the internet, the entrée for the new was generally a port. Some of these trends would sweep societies — caffeine or tobacco or the potato. Foreign newspapers or books would arrive and circulate. Diverse populations would gather in these port cities, often very different from larger waves of migration.

The nature of many locations along shores has changed dramatically over the last century. The working urban waterfront is likely to have become a container port somewhere else. Various residents of multiethnic port cities have often been executed or expelled. Distant shores, if the weather is any good, are now often fully lined with vacationers from Surrey, England, or the Rhineland who tend to be a good deal less interesting than spice merchants and brigands — and are likely arriving by jet.

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Some things remain the same, however. The Baltic states have tightly embraced the sea and pursuit of ever-closer links with Scandinavia, mindful of how relations with their eastern neighbor have gone. Commerce continues in other forms — there is brisk ferry traffic from Helsinki to Tallinn, Estonia, to avoid usurious prices from the Finnish alcohol monopoly. Still, it’s a fairly long journey.

If you’re ever in a position to take that trip, I have a few books in mind for you.

Anthony Paletta is a writer living in Brooklyn.