The Strategic Earth Vol V: The Oceanic Turn (1450–1648)

By: GEW Social Sciences and Humanities Group

Hichem Karoui (Editor)

The Strategic Earth, Volume V: The Oceanic Turn (1450–1648) presents a strategic history of the transition from a predominantly continental world of routes and empires toward an increasingly interconnected oceanic system.

Part of a twelve-volume geopolitical history from antiquity to the digital age, this volume examines how maritime access became a source of wealth, coercion, information, diplomacy, and sovereignty. It moves from the Atlantic frontier to the Indian Ocean and from Iberian expansion to the emergence of Dutch and English challenges to Portuguese and Spanish monopolies.

The book combines historical narrative with strategic analysis. It explores the technological convergence of astronomical navigation, cartography, ship design, naval artillery, and logistical organisation, showing why no individual innovation was sufficient to create maritime power. Ships required ports, supplies, intelligence, finance, repair facilities, trained personnel, and political authority.

The volume covers the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Iberian overseas systems, the extraction and circulation of silver, the Portuguese Estado da Índia, privateering, joint-stock companies, and the competing doctrines of mare clausum and mare liberum. It also examines the commercialisation of the Atlantic and the transatlantic slave trade as fundamental components of early modern imperial economies.

The narrative ultimately returns to Europe, where confessional conflict and strategic competition produced the Thirty Years’ War. The Congress of Westphalia becomes a major case study in diplomacy, territorial adjustment, religious settlement, alliance-making, and the changing conception of sovereignty.

The volume occupies a strong interdisciplinary position at the intersection of world history, geopolitics, maritime strategy, international relations, empire, economic history, and diplomacy.

Its appeal extends from general readers fascinated by the making of the modern world to students, educators, researchers, and readers of strategic history.

As Volume V, The Oceanic Turn, marks a decisive transition within The Strategic Earth, geography remains fundamental, but the strategic map is becoming maritime, global, commercial, and increasingly interconnected.

Available in Print and Ebook

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