David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University, an Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sydney and an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. He is the author or editor of sixteen books, among them Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017), The History Manifesto (co-author, 2014), Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (co-editor, 2014), Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge, 2013), The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (2nd edition, co-editor, 2009), The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007) and The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000). Alison Bashford is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, fellow of Jesus College and currently Trustee of Royal Museums Greenwich. Author and editor of many books on world history, environmental history and the history of science, her most recent are The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus (2016) with Joyce E. Chaplin and Quarantine: Local and Global Histories (2016, editor). Sujit Sivasundaram is Reader in World History at the University of Cambridge and researches both the Pacific and Indian Oceans, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is the author of Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the bounds of an Indian Ocean colony (2013) and Nature and the godly empire: Science and evangelical mission in the Pacific, 1795-1850 (Cambridge, 2005). In 2012, he won a Philip Leverhulme Prize for History, awarded for outstanding contributions to research by early-career scholars in the UK. He is co-editor of The Historical Journal and Fellow and Councillor of the Royal Historical Society.

• List of maps; Abbreviations; Notes on contributors; Introduction: writing world oceanic histories Sujit Sivasundaram, Alison Bashford and David Armitage; Part I. Oceans: 1. The Indian Ocean Sujit Sivasundaram; 2. The Pacific Ocean Alison Bashford; 3. The Atlantic Ocean David Armitage; Part II. Seas: 4. The South China Sea Eric Tagliacozzo; 5. The Mediterranean Sea Molly Greene; 6. The Red Sea Jonathan Miran; 7. The Sea of Japan/Korea's East Sea Alexis Dudden; 8. The Baltic Sea Michael North; 9. The Black Sea Stella Ghervas; Part III. Poles: 10. The Arctic Ocean Sverker Sörlin; 11. The Southern Ocean Alessandro Antonello; Further reading; Index.

'This is the book oceanic scholars have been waiting for. Five oceans, six seas, eleven top scholars and a dozen magisterial essays that map the contemporary state of oceanic historiographies. With a rambunctious 'cast' of wind, wave, whale, ship and sailor, the volume probes the surface and depth of the ocean, the historical and the environmental, extending our sense of world history, both vertically and horizontally.' Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand and New York University