The Oceanic Age (1200–1550) witnessed growing connectivity and conflict across the globe. By the sixteenth century, European commercial ambitions had opened up the Americas, inaugurating the massive “Columbian Exchange” of plants, animals, humans, and microbes. Seas and oceans became “intercontinental highways,” connecting economies and ecosystems as never before and generating profound crises in the form of colonial violence, epidemic disease, and the disruption of established production systems.

At the same time, people were not yet living in a fully globalized world, and market-based systems had not become hegemonic. The Earth's energy regime remained grounded in organic energy, and society was still overwhelmingly agrarian. The centuries between 1200 and 1550 were likely the last in which the environmental history of the world remained “open,” marked by enormous regional variation in conceptions of nature, in the mobilization of natural resources, in institutional and infrastructural arrangements, and in outcomes relating to human demographics, economic development, and biodiversity. This volume examines this turbulent period of change and transition, during which society–nature relations were reshaped in multiple and often sharply contrasting ways.

Drawing on both visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of the Environment in the Oceanic Age provides an overview of the period and explores key cultural case studies organized around the themes of earth; skies, climate, and the atmosphere; work, energy, and power; water; forests; animals; cities and settlements; war; and disasters and resilience.