Human history is certainly no longer presumed to be primarily terrestrial – with the oceans construed as blank spaces on the map. In contrast, in the last three decades, a rich literature (albeit often still siloed into regional containers including the “Atlantic”, “Indian”, and “Pacific”) has insisted that the ocean was also a space of political, cultural, economic, imperial, spiritual, and other connections. Moving beyond maritime history, oceanic histories have resuscitated transnational work and a sensibility to persons, objects, and ideas that moved across water. Despite this, oceanic histories have, by and large, remained profoundly anthropocentric and de-materialized.

In contrast to historian’s reticence about the material of the oceans, the blue humanities – an emerging field driven largely by anthropological, literary, and media studies of the sea – has offered more materially specific examinations of ocean space. For instance, scholars like Melody Jue and Stefan Helmreich have mobilized the unique qualities of seawater, sound, sediment, and pressure as conceptual frameworks and figures for thought. In part, these approaches are grounded in an urgency about the oceans’ futures: as Elizabeth DeLoughrey has suggested, anthropocene futures are submarine. Yet, these works also prompt us to re-think how we narrate the ocean historically.

In this roundtable, we ask what happens to histories below the water line when we add volumetric, sensory, infrastructural, multispecies approaches and methods. Situated between the “blue humanities” and oceanic histories, we bring tools from the history of science, animal studies, media and technology studies, and legal history to case studies ranging across Europe, the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian/Persian Gulf, and the North Atlantic. Speaking across oceans and methods, this panel will explore the future of writing the history of oceans, their bodies of water, seafloors, and marine subsurface.

The panel opens with Chris Pastore, who explores coastal clays, silts and sands in the early modern period across Africa, Europe and America. Then Tamara Fernando moves from mud to another kind of environment –the pearl-oyster bearing reef—in law and cartography, asking how the shallow reef-rich portions of the ocean fall into or out of oceanic history methods, asking if attention to the seafloor requires new kinds of histories. Moving up from the seafloor to the ocean itself and its non-human occupants, Anthony Medrano forwards a study of fish in the Bay of Bengal. These questions are explored further by Lisa Han, who delves into the history of antifouling techniques as a way of reflecting on the human and nonhuman coproduction of technological history. We envisage that the panel will be of interest to historians of environments (especially watery ones), historians of science, oceanic historians and historians of maritime labour.