Description
Book SynopsisAcross the 19th century, maritime globalization expanded at a hitherto unimaginable pace, transforming transport and communications over the seas into oceanic networks at a planetary scale. These networks shaped culture in its most expansive sense, affecting seafaring, warfare, empire, commerce, communications, passenger travel, leisure and science. Authors recover the sea experience of people and groups entangled with and yet neglected in an earlier generation of maritime history focused on conquest, empire, and knowledge. Thus, across a century when Britannia nominally ruled the waves, military control emerges as both opportunistic, harboring slavers, as well as partial, giving agency to mutineers and enslaved crew members, including on the Royal Navy's own fleet; the wreck of Arctic exploring voyages such as the Erebus and the Terror takes readers to PanInuit exploration over sea ice around the Arctic circle; colonial and mercantile transport in the Indian Ocea