The Sea and Civilization

Although more than 70 percent of the earth's surface is covered by water, it is generally neither realized nor accepted that the history of the world is very much a maritime history. Lincoln Paine's The Sea and Civilization seeks to rectify this: it is an ambitious work of more than 700 pages dense with facts and rich in detail that tells mankind's story from the perspective of our relation to the seas—as well as lakes, rivers and canals. The success of the effort is that by the end, the underlying idea seems self-evident: man's relation to the sea has been a driving force of human history; the interrelations and reciprocal influences are the prevalent condition in world history, and not the exception.