Vast Expanses : A History of the Oceans

A history of humanity’s relationship with oceans across cultures and centuries

Vast Expanses is a cultural, environmental and geopolitical history of humanity’s relationship with oceans, stretching across geological and evolutionary time and across cultures. It traces ancient connections with the sea and shows how industrialization and globalization multiplied them, challenging Western depictions of the ocean as remote or immune to human influence. The book argues that knowledge of the ocean – discovered through work and play, scientific investigation and through the ambitions people have harboured for the sea – has been central to defining our relationship with this vast, trackless and opaque place. Ultimately, the story of the oceans is also the story of ourselves: what we have taken, what we have imagined and what we must now learn to protect.