This is a bold and ambitious book. One can only admire an author who sets out to write a maritime history of the world that seeks to explore long-running interactions between ‘the sea’ and ‘civilization’. Most historians would shy away from such a challenge in view of the enormous range of knowledge that is required to offer even a summary of maritime history that extends over several thousand years, as well as over every ocean and continent. But Lincoln Paine, whose many and varied previous publications equip him well for projects such as this, wants to do more than simply offer an outline history to his readers. In his very first sentence he tells them that ‘I want to change the way you see the world’. By this he means that he wishes to shift the focus of attention and analysis away from the land to the sea. In doing this, he is, of course, drawing inspiration from the recent emergence of oceanic history as an important historical subdiscipline. But he is extending its scope of analysis yet further in a book that is described emphatically and self-consciously as a ‘world history’ (rather than global history), which he defines as being ‘the synthetic investigation of complex interactions between people of distinct backgrounds and orientations’ (p. 4).

There are many obvious dangers in taking such an approach, not least of which is the Eurocentricism that privileges the successes of Europe's maritime powers in the four centuries after 1500 as lying behind the emergence of the modern world and its integrated global maritime economy. It is thus much to the author's credit that he does not fall into this trap. Maritime Asia is well to the fore in the first half of the book, and Christopher Columbus does not put in a meaningful appearance until two-thirds of the way into Paine's story. Indeed, to my mind the strongest and most engaging chapters are the early ones, where the sweep of the analysis is broad and a range of maritime interactions between peoples is explored with great skill in a very readable manner. Thereafter, however, one has the sense that Paine has been almost overwhelmed by the multiplicity of themes and volume of materials at his disposal, so much so that imposing order on it all has proved difficult, if not impossible. His chosen solution, as explained in the Introduction, is to select a few themes centred on, or arising from, maritime enterprise, which is especially evident for the period after 1600. As a result, the spine that runs through the book is discussion (and illustration) of how maritime enterprise stimulated broad levels of interaction and connection between peoples and the lands they inhabited.

The problem with this mode of organization is that it serves to create a teleological narrative that moves remorselessly towards the creation of a modern world economy shaped by ‘globalizing’ processes of maritime enterprise that, in retrospect, first crystallized in the seventeenth century. In this scheme, much has had to be left out: just as we are left with little sense of the sea as facilitating leisure, pleasure, or sporting activity over many centuries, so too, for example, there is nothing much said about fishing or the significant annual movements of people that have taken place by sea for religious purposes, as in the Hajj, which is only mentioned in passing. It might also be the case that readers are left wondering how the ‘civilization’ invoked in the title of the book has represented the sea in art, literature, music, and popular culture over the centuries.

There is also a marked change of style in the post-1700 chapters when (almost inevitably, it has to be said) the reader is assaulted by a blizzard of detail and dates relating to wars, battles, treaties, and the like. The author's strategy in this part of the book is to organize material into short sections with subheadings such as ‘The American revolution’ (which receives three-and-a-half pages of coverage), ‘The French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars’ (three pages), or ‘Peter the Great and Russian maritime ambition’ (two pages). As a result, the contents of Chapters 16–20 feel similar to a succession of encyclopaedia entries. It is also a pity that the book lacks a conclusion to tie together the major threads.

To be fair to the author, he acknowledges at the outset the ‘greater risks’ than usual carried by his project, and, for all the arguable omissions or misplaced emphases in the book, it is important to note the great range and diversity of what is included in its sweeping narrative. There are many surprises, not least of which is the author's insistence on pursuing maritime activity into the interior of continents through examination of river- and lake-borne transport and commercial systems. Such subject matter adds to the rich texture of a book that readers will find accessible, informative, and entertaining. And those coming to maritime history for the first time will be indebted to the author for successfully rising to a challenge that is deemed too forbidding by most scholars and writers in the field.