This section contains 773 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) |
![]() |
SOURCE: “Sea Changes,” in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 5, No. 222, October 2, 1992, pp. 48–49.
In the following review, Howe offers a positive assessment of In an Antique Land.
For most of recorded history, cultures, civilisations, and economies are better defined by oceans than by land masses. Until very recently the sea connected where mountains and deserts divided.
Historians learned from Fernand Braudel in the 1950s to think of the Mediterranean world as a unity. Soon after wards, the notion of an Atlantic world took hold: first an Atlantic “from above”; but increasingly, in the reconstructions of Marcus Rediker, Peter Linebaugh, Paul Gilroy and others, one criss-crossed by sailors, pirates, migrants, adventurers, religious and political rebels and visionaries, many of them of African descent. Ideas about what is “European,” what “American” and what “African” get dramatically shaken up in these perspectives.
Now the world of the Indian Ocean is being brought into...
This section contains 773 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) |
![]() |