Like so many other of the world’s waterways, the Mediterranean basin is a zone of contact and conflict, of perpetual exchange where economic, cultural, and political currents meet. It was also home to more maritime empires than any other region in premodern history. For that reason, historians continue to study the ancient Mediterranean world by tracking the empires that crisscrossed its central sea. And yet it is much less common for ancient historians to study ancient maritime empires within the broader, comparative perspective of other world empires that developed on a similar tack, with comparable imperialists, merchants, and entrepreneurs who also sailed other seas. Empires of the Sea does exactly that. With contributions from thirteen historians whose fields span much of premodern Eurasia, this ambitious volume has done a great service for ancient historians. By broadening our historical field of vision to consider maritime empires across Eurasia, Empires of the Sea challenges us to rethink what was unique and what was not so unique about maritime power and coercion in the Mediterranean.