Neither East nor West, Border nor Breed, nor Birth: From Ocean to Globe and Back Again

Over the past decades, the “sea” has emerged as a critical unit of historiographical analysis, both as a means of challenging dominant historical perspectives (such as national, imperial, or continental histories) and as a way of opening new subjects, particularly stressing mobility, crossings, and trans-regional exchanges.  Of course, these “oceans of history” may at the same time have become the victims of their own meteoric success, as they have converted (rather rapidly and somewhat unwittingly) from a contest of rigid discipline into a self-policing, institutionalized historical discipline unto itself.  This paper will reflect on the simultaneous development of Indian Ocean and the Atlantic historiographies, as well as a growing impulse to link the two, as a way of highlighting the stresses placed on the discipline and methodology of “oceanic” history by its own becoming as a discipline and a methodology.  Moreover, it will suggest that “global” history poses the same challenge to “oceanic” histories that the history of the sea once posed to the land, with perhaps the same potential destiny.  This paper concludes with some speculations as to how oceanic and global histories can co-exist, and what kinds of syntheses a détente between the two might yield.