THE GREAT WINDSHIPS

A remarkably thorough but concise history of sailing ships and how they brought the world into modernity.

Stafford astutely observes that sailboats, even though largely replaced by faster, more efficient vessels, remain a fixture of modern life; these days, we turn them into restaurants and museums and use them to stage significant national celebrations. Stafford asks: “Is it nostalgia for a bygone era, or is it that this concept—which played such a key role in driving civilisation along the path to modernity—has somehow become part of our DNA?” The author seems to favor the latter option and pursues its defense by virtue of a panoramically sweeping but equally granular account of the development and decline of the wind ship. Stafford’s history reaches back to the Egyptian use of sailing ships in the third millennium B.C.E. and tracks its evolution through a dizzying array of permutations—all explained with self-assured expertise. The demands of both exploration and commerce made wind ships absolutely crucial; they were the principal instruments in history’s first foray into globalization. Of course, with the heights of exploration came the grim depths of exploitation—the author furnishes an impressively edifying account of the relationship between sailing and the slave trade. Ultimately, sailing ships were replaced by stream-driven boats—the latter were capable of keeping an exact schedule and amounted to a triumph of “need for a level of certainty about the future and the perceived necessity to do things as soon as possible.” Stafford’s study is magisterially synoptic—one can hardly imagine a single detail has been neglected. The unfortunate side of this virtue is that the reader can feel swallowed up by a massive wave of minutiae. However, this remains a marvelous history of not only the sailing ship, but also of the larger story of global seafaring throughout the centuries.

A fascinating, rigorous, and dramatically engrossing historical study.