Weltmeere

This volume presents pathbreaking studies on diverse human approaches to the ocean. Focusing on the era from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, the authors explore numerous fields of the oceans' cultural history. They desribe in depth not only the process of scientification, but also the modern wish to domesticate and aestheticize the sea, to structure it and put it to economic use. To describe these processes also means to challenge a fundamental assumption of a general and almost universal human perception of the seas as other, different and empty. The chapters of this volume advocate a different and non-traditional approach to the history of the sea: An approach based less on the well-known myths of othering but rather on a genuine interest in a pluralistic concept of cultural history. This claim is supported by both systematic and empirical arguments. The range of topics explored in this volume includes, among others, the development of the aquarium, Japanese whaling, soundscapes of the polar seas, psychological theories on humans and the sea, the oceans in fiction, oceanography in late nineteenth-century and Russian maritime expansion.