Introducing liquid worlds: Historical geographies and cartographies of the sea

Resulting from a multi-paper session organized by the International Geographical Union/Division of History of Science and Technology (IGU/DHST) Commission History of Geography, this virtual special issue engages with the challenges that waters and spaces characterized by liquid/solid hybridity pose to geographic thought and mapping practices since the antiquity. The places of the earliest experimentations of ‘rational’ geographical knowledge—as exemplified by the cases of the ancient Mediterranean Sea or the modern Atlantic Ocean—seas and oceans have been later key spaces for imperial and colonial expansion, and for heterogeneous geopolitics of emerging nation states in the last couple of centuries. Today, critical scholarship deconstructs imperial representations of seas and oceans and rediscovers the roles of spaces of oppression and racial exclusion, but also of subaltern connections that the seas played as diasporic spaces for the enslavement of non-white bodies. This led to current understandings of seas as insurgent spaces, including the Black (or Red and Black) Atlantic, the Black Pacific and the Black Mediterranean among other compelling definitions. Some of these scholarly trends also draw upon geopoetic and geopolitical ideas of relational ontologies. While the papers that follow can account only for a part of these rich debates, namely from the standpoint of historical geography and histories of geography/cartography, they open new and promising research avenues for critical and anticolonial scholarship in these ‘sub-disciplinary’ fields that have been too long characterized by (political or epistemic) conservatism. • Introduces the VSI ‘Liquid Worlds- Historical Geographies and Cartographies of the Sea’. • Engages with decolonial and relational ontologies in representations of seas and oceans. • Pleads for critical and anticolonial histories of geography and cartography. • Argues for historical geographies compellingly committed with current intellectual challenges.