Civilisation’s watery superhighway

The clue is in the title: this is not about the blue-grey-green wet stuff that covers 70 per cent of our planet’s surface. Rather, it’s about how the sea and our use of it have influenced us economically, culturally, religiously and politically:

Much of human history has been shaped by people’s access, or lack of it, to navigable water …. Life on the water — whether for commerce, warfare, exploration or migration — has been a driving force in human history.

Admitting that he wants to ‘change the way you see the world’, Lincoln Paine also claims that ‘The past century has witnessed a sea change in how we approach maritime history.’

He adduces a deal of evidence from times ancient and modern to show how the sea has at once protected and exposed, enabled and frustrated, attracted and repelled us. Nowadays, with more sea cruises annually than before the jet age and with the proliferation of leisure sailing, we have made a pleasure out of what was once a peril, yet 90 per cent of the world’s freight is still sea-borne.

For some civilisations the sea was formative. Five thousand years ago the Nile and the Mediterranean brought to the early Egyptians their vision of the afterlife, a conception of the state, political stability, a degree of domestic tranquillity, and economic and cultural intercourse with distant peoples. It also enabled them to perform useful tricks, such as moving 330-ton stone obelisks hundreds of miles. (They would bring the stone to the water’s edge on rollers, dig a channel beneath it to let the water in, load a barge with smaller stones, float it in beneath the obelisk, then unload the smaller stones until the barge had risen sufficiently in the water to bear the obelisk.