Holbergprisen · CC BY 2.0

A historian who spent his career at Cambridge writing Mediterranean and medieval history against the grain of narrower national histories, arguing the sea itself, not any one empire, was the connecting thread. His 2011 book The Great Sea and 2019's The Boundless Sea, which won the Wolfson History Prize, extended that approach to the world's oceans; he was a Fellow of the British Academy and died in January 2026.