A World at Sea sharpens and expands our understanding of how the maritime world contributed to global transformations in the early modern world, from inventing knowledge-making practices to pioneering new ways of organizing labor to legal experiments that spanned land and sea.

Contents
Introduction. Making Maritime History Global
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal and Lauren Benton
Part I. Currents
Chapter 1. Why Did Anyone Go to Sea? Structures of Maritime Enlistment from Family Traditions to Violent Coercion
Carla Rahn Phillips
Chapter 2. Between the Company and Koxinga: Territorial Waters, Trade, and War over Deerskins
Adam Clulow and Xing Hang
Chapter 3. "The Law Is the Lord of the Sea": Maritime Law as Global Maritime History
Matthew Taylor Raffety
Part II. Dispatches
Chapter 4. Reading Cargoes: Letters and the Problem of Nationality in the Age of Privateering
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
Chapter 5. Sailors, States, and the Creation of Nautical Knowledge
Margaret Schotte
Chapter 6. Indigenous Maritime Travelers and Knowledge Production
David Igler
Part III. Thresholds
Chapter 7. Maritime Marronage in Colonial Borderlands
Jeppe Mulich
Chapter 8. Sovereignty at the Water's Edge: Japan's Opening as Coastal Encounter
Catherine Phipps
Chapter 9. Working Women Who Got Wet: A Global Survey of Women in Premodern and Early Modern Fisheries
Lisa Norling
Afterword. Land-Sea Regimes in World History
Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
Notes
Index
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments

Edited by Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal