Abstract
Human interactions with the sea date back millennia. But until a few decades ago historical information did play a negligible role in the analysis, conservation and management of marine ecosystems. Similarly, marine issues hardly played a role in historical research. This changed from the late 1990s on with marine sciences taking a historical turn, while historians began to become involved with the sea in a new, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary manner. Also driven by the increasing public awareness of marine resource depletion, marine environmental history developed as an own discipline with distinct topics and methods. This development has greatly promoted the systematic research of historical marine resource exploitation.