Un mar sin límites

For most of human history, the seas and oceans have been the main form of long-distance exchange and communication between peoples, both for trade and for the expansion of ideas. This book traces the history of human interaction through the main bodies of water on the planet and analyzes our relationship with the oceans going back to the time of the first travelers. David Abulafia begins with the first maritime community, the Pacific Polynesians, who possessed intuitive navigational skills long before the invention of the compass and were trading among their distant islands by the 1st century. In the 7th century, trade routes stretched from the coasts of Arabia and Africa to southern China and Japan, thus connecting the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific and half of the planet through the international spice trade. In the Atlantic, centuries before the small kingdom of Portugal erected its mighty maritime empire, many peoples sought new lands across the ocean: the Bretons, the Frisians, and especially the Vikings, the first Europeans to reach North America. When Portuguese supremacy collapsed in the late sixteenth century, the Spanish, the Dutch, and later the British were willing to ride the waves with success. On the trail of merchants, explorers, pirates, cartographers and travelers in their search for spices, gold, ivory, slaves, land to settle or new horizons, Abulafia has created an extraordinary narrative about humans and the oceans. From the first forays of villages with hand-carved canoes into uncharted waters to the routes now followed daily by thousands of supertankers, Un Boundless Sea shows how maritime networks have come to form a continuum of interaction across the planet: 90% of global trade is done through the sea. This book approaches history on a large scale and from a very different perspective: not from land, like most world histories, but from the infinite sea.