The historical uses of the oceans: the Anthropocene in the first global age (1500–1800)?

This paper covers three key scientific fields: Maritime Studies, Cultural Studies and Environmental Studies.Taking the 'Anthropocene' as a culturally and ideologically constructed concept, with worldwide political implications, it discusses to what extent an entire generation around the world is still elaborating on a well-known iniquity: Eurocentrism.The paper argues that oceanic connections were the core condition for building a globalized world.Worldwide dynamics of exchange had a significant impact on seas, coastal areas and continental territories.Additionally, there was an insoluble connection between the Europeans' use of the oceans and the global environmental impacts shaped by the European colonial settlements since the First Global Age.The oceans provided the means and the channels for these massive exchanges and depletion of resources on a scale until then unheard-of.This led to global processes of transfers, responsible for emerging syncretic biomes, for significant environmental distress, with an inevitable impact on local cultures, communal resources and even the resignificance of the uses and the cultural representations of riverine or oceanic water flows.