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This essay rethinks Pearson’s formulation of littoral society in two essays he wrote in 1985 and 2006. While the first made a case for coastal history, the second continued the theme into the littoral, the strip between land and sea. Pearson foregrounded the universality of a clearly discernible littoral culture on coastlines along and across the Indian Ocean. This translated consequently into a shared history and a common heritage across the ocean’s diverse shores. At a time when maritime historians were writing what were essentially land-based histories on ocean spaces, Pearson’s social history of the littoral over a longue duree was a significant intervention.

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Escape from Terracentrism' traces the shifts in writing a history of the seas/oceans from maritime history, to oceanic histories and finally to a water history. In the process it pleads for a transnational approach to the study of regions, arguing that there is a fundamental disconnect between our present-day lives and water. Finally, the article discusses whether a history of the sea can be a theatre for world history or an arena for a new, de-centred regional history, yielding thereby a fresh perspective on regions.Water dominates our lives. Almost 70 per cent of the earth's surface is covered by water; islands and continents make up the rest. Within continents, lakes and rivers occupy still more space. Although ours is a water world, it is easy to lose sight of this fact as we mostly live out of sight of oceans, seas, rivers and lakes. Consequently, the relationship between water and human history has not been adequately studied.Unlike us, the ancients did not make a distinction between land and water. Strabo wrote over two thousand years ago that: 'We are in a certain sense amphibious, not exclusively connected with the land, but with the sea as well…The sea and the land in which we dwell furnish theatres for action…'. 1 Unfortunately, we have lost the sense of amphibiousness and with it, much of our history. What remains of that history has been poorly understood; and a history of water has yet to be attempted. Can water history be a transnational or even a world historical category? With what tools can we write its history or construct a water archive? These are the concerns that this essay addresses.