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Vast Expanses is a cultural, environmental and geopolitical history that examines the relationship between humans and oceans, reaching back across geological and evolutionary time and exploring different cultures around the globe.
Our ancient connections with the sea have developed and multiplied with industrialization and globalization, a trajectory that runs counter to Western depictions of the ocean as a place remote from and immune to human influence. Vast Expanses argues that knowledge about the ocean – discovered through work and play, scientific investigation, and also through the ambitions people have harboured for the sea – has played a central role in defining our relationship with this vast, trackless and opaque place. It has helped people exploit marine resources, control ocean space, extend imperial or national power, and attempt to refashion the sea into a more tractable arena for human activity.
An understanding of the ocean has animated and strengthened connections between people and their seas. To comprehend this history we must address 16 questions of how, by whom and why knowledge of the ocean was created and used, in both the past and the present; through this, we can forge a healthier relationship with the sea for the future.
Founder of the University of Connecticut's Maritime Studies programme, Helen M. Rozwadowski teaches history of science, environmental history and public history as well as interdisciplinary and experiential maritime-related courses. She is the author of Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (2008) and co-editor of Soundings and Crossings: Doing Science at Sea, 1800-1970 (2016).
"A timely and useful oceancentric natural history of the ocean–human relationship. Human understanding of the oceans, which cover much of the surface of the earth, is historically weak. Rarely curious about the waters from which life on earth rose, humans have long exploited the seas for food, transport, mining, recreation, and war. Until recently, it was assumed that ocean resources were inexhaustible, especially the bounty of fish and marine mammals, and that garbage and chemical waste dumped into oceans would just disappear. The idea that burning fossil fuels could raise ocean temperatures was unthinkable. Some forward-thinking individuals recognized warning signs centuries ago, but marine business and industry continued and grew with the exploding world population. Much bad science continued to support uncontrolled exploitation of the seas, even after the rise of the ecological movement of the latter half of the twentieth century. Rozwadowski thoroughly brings readers up-to-date on these essential issues of marine exploration and research and the environment."
– Booklist
"Vast Expanses is thought-provoking, intelligent, entertaining, and yet still compact. It could be read in a graduate seminar or on a beach holiday. Professor Rozwadowski has written a great book on an important subject, and it is anything but a dry history!"
– Kurk Dorsey, Associate Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire and author of Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas
