The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

Lincoln Paine

Oct 2013 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

A monumental retelling of world history through the lens of maritime enterprise, revealing in breathtaking depth how people first came into contact with one another by ocean and river, lake and stream, and how goods, languages, religions, and entire cultures spread across and along the world’s waterways, bringing together civilizations and defining what makes us most human. 

Lincoln Paine takes us back to the origins of long-distance migration by sea with our ancestors’ first forays from Africa and Eurasia to Australia and the Americas. He demonstrates the critical role of maritime trade to the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley. He reacquaints us with the great seafaring cultures of antiquity like those of the Phoenicians and Greeks, as well as those of India and Southeast and East Asia, who parlayed their navigational skills, shipbuilding techniques, and commercial acumen to establish thriving overseas colonies and trade routes in the centuries leading up to the age of European expansion. And finally, his narrative traces how commercial shipping and naval warfare brought about the enormous demographic, cultural, and political changes that have globalized the world throughout the post–Cold War era.

This tremendously readable intellectual adventure shows us the world in a new light, in which the sea reigns supreme. We find out how a once-enslaved East African king brought Islam to his people, what the American “sail-around territories” were, and what the Song Dynasty did with twenty-wheel, human-powered paddleboats with twenty paddle wheels and up to three hundred crew. Above all, Paine makes clear how the rise and fall of civilizations can be linked to the sea. An accomplishment of both great sweep and illuminating detail, The Sea and Civilization is a stunning work of history.

Ratings and reviews

It's tragic that this e-book is so cheap. I purchased the book in print and finished it in about a month, only because I forced myself to put it down to digest all of the information it was feeding me. Otherwise I would have finished it much sooner. Perhaps interest in maritime and/or naval history is simply too niche for most readers, but for all the research put into this work and all the valuable insight it offers into man's ingenuity when it comes to an environment as merciless yet invaluable as the sea, to see it so cheaply available is an insult to the authors, to the value of historical knowledge. This is such a beautifully informative text--or it was to me anyway--well worth more than one read. As I own a print copy, as I said, I am only adding this review so that potential readers might not consider the e-book's low price as a mark of it's quality. I'm just a stranger on the internet, so take my review for what it's worth, but I highly recommend this book for anyone fascinated by history.

About the author

 Lincoln Paine is the author of four books and more than fifty articles, reviews, and lectures on various aspects of maritime history. He lives in Portland, Maine, with his wife, Allison.