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Introduction
Oceans in global history and culture 1400â1800: expanding horizons
Claire Jowitt, Craig Lambert, and Steve Mentz
A fourteenth-century Augustinian monk, John Mirk, thought the sea attracted evil, considering it a chaotic and violent place where devils did their work. He wrote of these marine devils, âThey rearith wars: they makyth tempests in the sea, and drownyth ships and menâ.1 Johnâs ideas about the sea were not peripheral. Across the period of history the essays in this collection discuss, writers and commentators, as well as those traversing oceans, or whose livelihoods were based on extracting resources from the seas, frequently portrayed oceans and seas as dangerous spaces.2 Ocean depth and seasâ sheer vastness have throughout history, challenged human abilities to safely navigate and exploit them, and even to conceptualize their extent and abundance.3 With 75 per cent of the globe covered by oceans, and while potentially hazardous, between the years 1400â1800 the seas provided seemingly limitless food and resources, and formed sea-lines for diplomatic contacts, trade, communication, and cross-cultural engagements. During the early modern period, the desire to exploit the resources of the sea â often expressed in overconfident and gendered terminology â was believed by many European rulers and polities to be crucial to their survival and enrichment. The very phrase âmaster the oceansâ, often used by writers from this period of history, as well as about the ambitions of the age by later commentators, lays bare these imperial, colonial, and patriarchal assumptions. The period 1400â1800 is particularly pivotal in the development and articulation of European aspirations to exploit and understand oceans and seas, as well as control and own them, their flora and fauna, and the lands and peoples they connect.4 At the same time, non-European maritime nations and peoples, particularly from China and the Arab world had long-standing traditions of seafaring and distinctive maritime experience. Taken together, the essays in The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400â1800 seek to provide authoritative, fresh assessments of these traditions, as well as new understandings of the interconnections between them, in order to explore marine and maritime worlds in global contexts.5
For Europeans, the years 1400â1800 literally marked a sea change in the tenor and extent of marine and maritime engagements. Through advances in navigation, ship technology, and commercial organization, Europeâs burgeoning real-and-imagined ocean dominance permitted its polities and emerging nation states to expand their global reach. Nation building went hand-in-hand. Indeed, long before the development of modern digital technologies and systems, Europeansâ ambitions to explore and exploit the oceans were crucial to the development of the conception of a globalized, hence modern, world.6 Visions of the global have been essential to human thinking since antiquity as the Greeks sought to expand their oikoumĂ©neË, but tangible globalization had to wait until the sixteenth century. Maritime expansion resulted in changes to the ways sovereignty through law was established, demands for better welfare for men (sic) at sea,7 and original ways of culturally representing the changing horizons and vistas that were opened. However, control over the sea never was and never could be secure, and violence and exploitation are the keystones of Europeâs maritime expansion. At any moment, mariners could find themselves fighting for survival either against forces of nature or against harmful human action. The aim to use oceanic presence to project cultural power was also part of colonial and imperial ideologies that enabled one culture or society to dictate over others. Dominance of the seas permitted European states and monarchs to project their power to faraway places with often devastating results.
This volume of 24 essays addresses aspects of human contact with and experience of the oceans across the globe in this transformative phase in seaborne activity by asking a number of inter-related research questions. How does access to oceans and waterways shape and impact cultures? How did seafarers and other members of maritime societies live and work? What advancements in shipbuilding occurred over this period? How did navigational instruments develop, and how did mariners use them on board ships? How did notions of the sea affect the material, visual, and textual cultures of the societies that had most contact with oceans? What can maps reveal about European expansion and ambitions? How did governments and rulers use the sea and ships to project power and convey splendour? What impact did the development of sea power have on a stateâs fiscal and social structures? How did governments react to more complex trading relationships and interstate conflict that often produced diplomatic and legal problems? What role did privateering and piracy play in maritime economies and state rivalries, and how did this impact on the development of legal frameworks? As European powers expanded their global reach, what systems did merchants develop to handle longer and more expensive trading voyages, and what effects did this have on indigenous societies? These important questions are explored by a group of world-leading scholars at all career stages, with cross-cutting research specialisms in economic, social, political, legal, naval, and cultural aspects of marine and maritime studies.
Maritime trade created commercial networks, but as so often cultural exchange was the bedfellow of economic contact. The commercial links between the English port of Bristol and Seville, for example, led to a large English Ă©migrĂ© community of merchants. Links between Bristol traders and the Casa de ContrataciĂłn also led to the spread of knowledge of maps. English merchants such as Robert Thorne the Elder and Robert Thorne the Younger pored over the maps and accounts of navigational achievements of Spanish sailors in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In collaboration with Dr John Dee and Sebastian Cabot, they started to formulate ideas as to how England might extend its reach to new lands by exploiting the seas to the north, lands outside the purview of the Treaty of Tordesillas, whereby the Pope had reserved for the Iberian nations the wealth and ownership of the New World.8 Bristol merchants had previously invested in so-called âvoyages of explorationâ,9 and John Cabot, Sebastianâs father, had sailed to North America in the 1490s.10 Trade brought the younger Thorne to Seville, but inhabiting such places developed his intellectual curiosity, which ultimately provided the impetus of the English voyages to Russia and the far north.
The experiences and intellectual curiosities of people like the Thorne merchants were one point on a journey that, for Western Europeans, began centuries earlier. Earlier merchants had also been attracted eastward in a search for new markets and riches. The rapid expansion of the Mongols in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries encouraged Western Europeans to meet them in order to create alliances against expanding Muslim powers.11 Rumours circulated around Europe of Prester John, a mythical and wealthy Christian ruler in Africa who might aid Western Europe in its struggle against Muslim states.12 In 1246, a Franciscan friar Giovanni di Plano Carpini journeyed to the Mongol court, under instruction by Pope Innocent IV, in order to create an alliance, and after his return he wrote his Historia Mongalorum. A further Franciscan friar, William of Rubruck, soon followed Carpini, and he too wrote an account of his travels.13 In combination, these works provided detailed descriptions of the character of the Mongols, their beliefs and ways of life, and other cultural practices. Marco Polo, perhaps the most famous late medieval traveller, also operated within the commercial world of the Mediterranean. His father and uncle were traders in Constantinople and before Marcoâs famous journey to Cathay (China), they had attempted to venture east to find what lay at the end of the Silk Road. Poloâs travel narrative was not only widely disseminated but was important to late medieval Europeans because he describes in great detail Chinese cities and their trades, and compares them with European cities so readers could conceptualize the scale and richness of China.14
The potentially violent nature of the sea, however, was never far away from the minds of mariners or the communities that faced or interacted with the sea. In medieval England, for example, churches often featured images of ships as a votive device. Some of these images depicted Noah and the flood, but many reflected the importance of the sea to local communities. Ian Friel, for example, has pointed out that Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, located 50 miles away from the nearest important estuary, features a wall painted in the 1420s to show St Nicholas calming the sea and rescuing shipwrecked mariners.15 Most likely, such images were produced to reassure people who might have either already travelled by sea for the purposes of pilgrimage or were considering such a journey. Medieval ship-naming practices generally favoured the use of saintsâ names, no doubt intended to ease the minds of seafarers who looked to divine protection as they voyaged.
The sea was also important as a marker of national identity. Andrew Lambert argues that only a few places developed into what he calls âSeapower Statesâ,16 and that Athens, Carthage, Venice, the United Provinces, and Britain constructed sea power as part of their national identities, not just because of their naval strategy. Sometimes external threats impelled âSeapower Statesâ to create powerful navies that underpinned the creation of seaborne empires, which then provided the capital to sustain and further develop maritime infrastructure. National culture became infused with images, words, and artefacts borrowed from maritime activities. âSeapower Statesâ, Lambert argues, constantly redefined themselves, usually against other powers; those sea powers that failed to adapt lost their âsea identityâ. Their formation and expansion in early modern Europe represents an important shared narrative in many of the chapters in this book.
The collection is structured as four interlocking parts, âHistoriography and the Premodern Seaâ, âMaterial Seasâ, âSocial and Political Seasâ, and âCultural Seasâ. Some chapters provide an authoritative overview of key topics, providing readers with an understanding of critical debates and terms, and the major shifts in historiography, while others offer new research through in-depth examinations of important topics designed to set agendas for future study. They unite, however, in being written by world-leading experts in their respective fields, including informative bibliographies relating to the topic or theme under discussion, and in communicating their insights in concise but comprehensible language.
Part I: Historiography and the premodern sea
Part I of The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400â1800 begins with a number...
