Between the end of the Seven Years war in 1763, and the abolition of slavery within its Empire in 1833, Britain's maritime engagement with the wider world was transformed. The essays in this book explore different aspects of that transformation, and in so doing assess the significance and complexities of Britain's maritime world in this key period, which was characterized by the contradictory and competing forces of revolution and reaction, 'liberty' and imperialism, war and peace, enlightenment and enslavement. They were originally delivered as lectures in a series jointly sponsored by the Institute of Historical Research and by the Centre for Imperial and Maritime Studies at the National Maritime Museum.

A wide-ranging new survey of the role of the sea in Britain's global presence in the 19th century. Mostly at peace, but sometimes at war, Britain grew as a maritime empire in the Victorian era. This collection looks at British sea-power as a strategic, moral and cultural force.

A wide-ranging new survey of the role of the sea in Britain's global presence in the 19th century. Mostly at peace, but sometimes at war, Britain grew as a maritime empire in the Victorian era. This collection looks at British sea-power as a strategic, moral and cultural force.

Empires of the Sea brings together studies of maritime empires from the Bronze Age to the Eighteenth Century. The volume aims to establish maritime empires as a category for the (comparative) study of premodern empires, and from a partly ‘non-western’ perspective. The book includes contributions on Mycenaean sea power, Classical Athens, the ancient Thebans, Ptolemaic Egypt, The Genoese Empire, power networks of the Vikings, the medieval Danish Empire, the Baltic empire of Ancien Régime Sweden, the early modern Indian Ocean, the Melaka Empire, the (non-European aspects of the) Portuguese Empire and Dutch East India Company, and the Pirates of Caribbean.

"Per the UK publisher William Collins's promotional copy: "There is a quarter of this planet which is often forgotten in the histories that are told in the West. This quarter is an oceanic one, pulsating with winds and waves, tides and coastlines, islands and beaches. The Indian and Pacific Oceans constitute that forgotten quarter, brought together here for the first time in a sustained work of history." More specifically, Sivasundaram's aim in this book is to revisit the Age of Revolutions and Empire from the perspective of the Global South. Waves Across the South ranges from the Arabian Sea across the Indian Ocean to the Bay of Bengal, and onward to the South Pacific and Australia's Tasman Sea. As the Western empires (Dutch, French, but especially British) reached across these vast regions, echoes of the European revolutions rippled through them and encountered a host of indigenous political developments. Sivasundaram also opens the door to new and necessary conversations about environmental history in addition to the consequences of historical violence, the extraction of resources, and the indigenous futures that Western imperialism cut short"--

The author of The End of the British Empire traces the rise and fall of large-scale empires in the centuries after the death of the emperor Tamerlane in 1405, in an account that challenges conventional beliefs about the rise of the western world and contends that European ascendancy may be a transitory event.

The past twenty-five years have brought a dramatic expansion of scholarship in maritime history, including new research on piracy, long-distance trade, and seafaring cultures. Yet maritime history still inhabits an isolated corner of world history, according to editors Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. Benton and Perl-Rosenthal urge historians to place the relationship between maritime and terrestrial processes at the center of the field and to analyze the links between global maritime practices and major transformations in world history. A World at Sea consists of nine original essays that sharpen and expand our understanding of practices and processes across the land-sea divide and the way they influenced global change. The first section highlights the regulatory order of the seas as shaped by strategies of land-based polities and their agents and by conflicts at sea. The second section studies documentary practices that aggregated and conveyed information about sea voyages and encounters, and it traces the wide-ranging impact of the explosion of new information about the maritime world. Probing the political symbolism of the land-sea divide as a threshold of power, the last section features essays that examine the relationship between littoral geographies and sociolegal practices spanning land and sea. Maritime history, the contributors show, matters because the oceans were key sites of experimentation, innovation, and disruption that reflected and sparked wide-ranging global change. Contributors: Lauren Benton, Adam Clulow, Xing Hang, David Igler, Jeppe Mulich, Lisa Norling, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Carla Rahn Phillips, Catherine Phipps, Matthew Raffety, Margaret Schotte.