"The Boundless Sea" by David Abulafia is a sweeping, all-encompassing account of the history of the world, considered from the perspective of the oceans rather than from the perspective of the land masses. It's a socio-economic analysis of all the complex, interconnecting ties among maritime nations across the centuries: the explorers, the fishermen, the transoceanic traders...
The writing style is so perfectly polished that the book reads like a novel, and don't let the size of the volume turn you off: it's a real pageturner!
The only thing that disappointed me was how quickly the book dealt with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Caribbean history: I'd been hoping that the Golden Age of Piracy would get far more attention!
Anyway, this was overall a very fascinating read. I'm looking forward to reading the author's other works!

Wow. What a book! I genuinely cannot believe that I finished it. It is, without a doubt, one of (if not the) longest books I've ever read. This book is so rich -- it's full of hilarious and intriguing anecdotes and paints pictures of magical trading ports around the world. I especially learned a lot about the old trading ports on Sri Vijaya and about how trade developed in the Indian Ocean. The first part on the Pacific really is the stuff of novels in its fantasticalness. This book is not for someone who likes history books to have a "theme" that guides them through its entirety, and it's also not for the faint of heart. David Abulafia really takes no prisoners, and doesn't try to lure you in with literary tricks -- this book requires you to be antecedently interested in history (and the history of human movement and exploration in particular), not worry if you don't see an overarching theme (I still haven't decided whether there was one, but I don't mind), and not get flustered trying to remember every particular detail. However, if this is you (or if this can be you just for the purposes of this book), you really will not find a better book. I don't remember the last time I read a book that was this full and complex, and that gave me this rich of a sense of what is no less the history of the world. This book was a fantastic feat, and I loved every anecdote, all of which really gave me a sense of what life might have been like during the different time periods. I plan to read Abulafia's first book as well! It is amazing to me that it is even possible to achieve scholarship of this magnitude. We are quite lucky to be alive at the same time as David Abulafia.

This book is majestic in vision, and heft. It can understandably only give an overview of any particular period, but the goal is to trace the development of connections over thousands of years and this is entirely successful. Abulafia deliberately challenges the common euro-centric narrative.

In so far as I have any criticism, some of the chapters jump back and forth rather than flowing chronologically. The maps also don't work so well when the points of interest are squashed into the centre-fold of the pages where you can't see them.

A sprawling, mind-boggling, occasionally unwieldy but ultimately awe-inspiring human history of the oceans. Contains everything from the earliest exploration of Polynesia (back in the 1000s BC) and nascent maritime trade between Egypt, Arabia and Persia, through Asian thalassocracies and the European mapping of the seas, right on up to how the world wars changed the balance of power at sea and the birth of container shipping. How Abulafia has managed to synthesise information that incorporates the history and geography of regions across the globe into a cohesive book is just insane.