The Seas and Shores of Human History

There has been a widespread general perception that, until recent times, the vast oceans and seas that cover so much of our planet were largely unchanging over long epochs and were scarcely affected by human depredation. There is also still a prevailing residual temptation, when considering the longer-term cultural and human geography of coasts, to emphasize elements of continuity and stability. In both cases, significant disturbance of natural or traditional human maritime or littoral patterns has often been considered to be a product of the industrial age, of mechanization and urbanization. Continuity rather than change has usually been seen as the norm in the pre-industrial age. The authors of these well-argued, wide-ranging, and perceptive books would, however, beg to differ.

There have been perhaps many good reasons for the perpetuation of a myopic view of aquatic and coastal change. In the first place, as John R. Gillis would probably argue, for a long time many Western historians generally have taken a rather terra-centric view of historical change and found it difficult to find an appropriate context for salt water, even shores, in their landed geographical or historical hypotheses. Such a view has ancient roots, and the seas were seen by many as alien environments—wild oceanic wildernesses. Moreover, our natural coastal margins tend to lack straight lines and even sharp boundaries between land and water, whilst our oceans have not been appropriated in quite the conventional landed sense of the term; the seabed also lacked the property divisions so important and prevalent on land. In other words, our coasts and seas defied the landed territorial logic so beloved of those who seek certainty and clarity; a study of the history of the tortured evolution of fishing limits, territorial waters, and Exclusive Economic Zones provides some indication of this. Fishing provides perhaps the best example of the difficulty of applying landward classifications to the sea, for the occupation cannot be described as conventional industry, agriculture, or transport but contains aspects of all three. Yet fishermen themselves are, at heart, hunters deploying all the skills of the hunter to pursue and take a wild and fugitive prey across a vast marine wilderness. Yet for all that, fishing was not often, as Gillis points out, a full-time occupation across the North Atlantic until the early-modern period, but it was carried out in combination with the seasonal round of landed agricultural activities.

For much of human history, oceans have been seen as enormous, unpredictable, untameable desolate places with wild weather and wild creatures, sometimes the resort of oceanic outlaws or pirates. Everything about them seemed marginal from many landward perspectives. They were considered a threat to those who ventured on them or dwelt by their shores, and they had the potential to inundate, either physically or metaphorically, what passed for landed order. Many of the sea’s mineral resources, if considered at all, were seen as out of human reach, whilst the stocks of marine creatures were often considered to be so immense and the waters they inhabited so great that it was impossible for people to have much adverse impact upon their numbers—at least until the onset of the modern mechanized and industrial era.

It is no wonder they attracted little attention from many land-orientated observers; certainly, for much of recorded history, there was a lamentable lack of scientific interest or understanding of our vast oceans. As Gillis reminds us, oceanography was the last-born of earth sciences. There were few attempts to gain a proper understanding of our vast oceans until the late nineteenth century. Indeed, the systematic and scientific collection of data relating to catches and so forth only really commenced at the end of the nineteenth century, and this...