The Sea Thalassography and Historiography

The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography By Peter N. Miller (editor)
2013 | 312 Pages | ISBN: 0472118676 | PDF | 4 MB
The Sea brings together a group of noted contributors to evaluate the different ways in which seas have served as subjects in historiography and asks how this has changed—and will change—the way history is written. The essays in this volume provide exemplary demonstrations of how a sea-based history-writing that focuses on connectivity, networks, and individuals describes the horizons and the potential of thalassography—the study of the world made by individuals embedded in networks of motion. As Peter N. Miller contends in his introduction, writing about the sea, today, is a way of partaking in the wider historiographical shift toward microhistory; exchange relations; networks; and, above all, materiality, both literally and figuratively. The Sea focuses not on questions of discipline and professionalization as much as on the practice of scholarship: the writing, and therefore the planning and organizing, of histories of the sea.