"The Shores of Different Lands": The Common History of Coasts

Historical ecology and a fashion for bridging the traditional gap between scientific and humanisitic disciplines have helped to make historians increasingly sensitive to the way environments condition or perhaps even determine what happens within them. Beaches, waterfronts, small islands and port cities are examples of coastal environments that now have substantial amounts of historical literature devoted to them. I have proposed coastal societies as a discrete unit of study and treated coast as if it were a sort of biome, like rain forest or arid desert. But the approach begs serious conceptual problems. Contiguity with the sea is a weak common feature. In every case, the orientation of the coast, its location in climatic bands, its relationship to the hinterland, its dimensions, its soils, its weather patterns, its habitability, the technology at its people's disposal, its distance from zones of settlement and production are all variable features that make generalization unappealing. I will review a wide range of cases in an attempt to establish not so much a definition as a profile of what sort of places, peoples, and experiences the historical study of coastal societies might encompass, and to suggest how contrasts and comparisons might help to identify and illumine historical problems not accessilbe to or elusive to other approaches. The paper will array examples from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas and will embrace periods from remote antiquity to the early modern.