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Shifting Currents: A World History of Swimming
A deep dive into the history of aquatics that exposes centuries-old tensions of race, gender, and power at the root of many contemporary swimming controversies.
Shifting Currents is an original and comprehensive history of swimming. It examines the tension that arose when non-swimming northerners met African and Southeast Asian swimmers. Using archaeological, textual, and art-historical sources, Karen Eva Carr shows how the water simultaneously attracted and repelled these northerners—swimming seemed uncanny, related to witchcraft and sin. Europeans used Africans’ and Native Americans’ swimming skills to justify enslaving them, but northerners also wanted to claim water’s power for themselves. They imagined that swimming would bring them health and demonstrate their scientific modernity. As Carr reveals, this unresolved tension still sexualizes women’s swimming and marginalizes Black and Indigenous swimmers today. Thus, the history of swimming offers a new lens through which to gain a clearer view of race, gender, and power on a centuries-long scale.
Shifting Currents is an original and comprehensive history of swimming. It examines the tension that arose when non-swimming northerners met African and Southeast Asian swimmers. Using archaeological, textual, and art-historical sources, Karen Eva Carr shows how the water simultaneously attracted and repelled these northerners—swimming seemed uncanny, related to witchcraft and sin. Europeans used Africans’ and Native Americans’ swimming skills to justify enslaving them, but northerners also wanted to claim water’s power for themselves. They imagined that swimming would bring them health and demonstrate their scientific modernity. As Carr reveals, this unresolved tension still sexualizes women’s swimming and marginalizes Black and Indigenous swimmers today. Thus, the history of swimming offers a new lens through which to gain a clearer view of race, gender, and power on a centuries-long scale.
472 pages, Hardcover
Published June 28, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 30, 2025
The more time I have spent in my chosen field – histories of sport and movement cultures – the more I have come to realise that it is more difficult to work on histories of things that seem ubiquitous than those that seem distinct: where do we draw the line? When it comes to something as ubiquitous as swimming that seems even more difficult – after all, here we have a sport, a leisure activity, a survival practice, for some a work requirement, and like an activity such as running a thing were it is nigh on impossible to identify when and why we started.
Yet, one to the things good historians – especially social and cultural ones – do is identify patterns, develop frameworks that allow us to make sense of the otherwise ubiquitous, and infer and interpret therefore what those activities mean. Drawing on an immense array of sources, Karen Eva Carr has done just that – discerned patterns in swimming practices in an analysis that sweeps from the Neolithic to the now, taking a global view, to build a compelling argument, while avoiding the geographical determinist trap that her patterns might suggest. In short, she argues, this long expansive view of the human practice of swimming – she is clear that this is swimming, both merely bathing: paddling in the shallows – reveals a shifting balance of cultural power between those across the north of Europe and Asia who tend not to swim, and those in central and southern regions of the populated world who tend to swim. This is a cultural tendency not a requirement, and woven through with racialized, classed and gendered distinctions.
Building such a case is always risky – the ‘lumpers’ as they’re known weave together material into big pictures, sweeping across cases and often detail, which leaves them open to the critique of ‘spliiters’, whose detail can find fault with the broad brush of the ‘lumper’ – as Carr’s brush is broad, and often the chapters with their specific focus quite brief. But Carr is also cautious, drawing on both primary and secondary sources, often supporting her analysis with the views of specialists in the specifics of the point – invoking the ‘splitters’ to sustain her case, while also making clear that she is discussing tendencies in cultural outlooks and orientations, not absolutes. She also makes very good use of visual sources from antiquity and more recent, maintaining a global reach, while also treating Indigenous and colonial subaltern oral sources (what others might call ‘myths and legends’) as informing those cultural orientations as much as the archival, written sources other historians might feel more comfortable with.
What I find more impressive is that Carr does all of these things well, and while keeping mind that she is writing for a ‘general’ – as in not specialist academic – audience. The tone is well pitched, the narrative interwoven well with allusions to trends, cases, and phenomena across time and context made clearly. Carr’s broad sweep has given us an inclusive text with an inclusive view of audience. That is all the more impressive when we consider how little rigorous scholarly work has been done on swimming histories. There has been a small upturn in recent years although much of the recent work on swimming is more towards the popular end of historical publishing. Carr has therefore had to draw on other sources where swimming is incidental, not central, to build her case: this is a challenge in all cultural history, but more so in studies of the ubiquitous. I’m editing a collection of work at the moment looking at aquatic, maritime, and riverine sports and getting a sense through this of just how impressive Carr’s work is.
This won the North American Society for Sports History award for monograph of the year in 2023: it is a worthy winner and deserves to be widely read. It’s engaging, informative, and elegantly produced.
Yet, one to the things good historians – especially social and cultural ones – do is identify patterns, develop frameworks that allow us to make sense of the otherwise ubiquitous, and infer and interpret therefore what those activities mean. Drawing on an immense array of sources, Karen Eva Carr has done just that – discerned patterns in swimming practices in an analysis that sweeps from the Neolithic to the now, taking a global view, to build a compelling argument, while avoiding the geographical determinist trap that her patterns might suggest. In short, she argues, this long expansive view of the human practice of swimming – she is clear that this is swimming, both merely bathing: paddling in the shallows – reveals a shifting balance of cultural power between those across the north of Europe and Asia who tend not to swim, and those in central and southern regions of the populated world who tend to swim. This is a cultural tendency not a requirement, and woven through with racialized, classed and gendered distinctions.
Building such a case is always risky – the ‘lumpers’ as they’re known weave together material into big pictures, sweeping across cases and often detail, which leaves them open to the critique of ‘spliiters’, whose detail can find fault with the broad brush of the ‘lumper’ – as Carr’s brush is broad, and often the chapters with their specific focus quite brief. But Carr is also cautious, drawing on both primary and secondary sources, often supporting her analysis with the views of specialists in the specifics of the point – invoking the ‘splitters’ to sustain her case, while also making clear that she is discussing tendencies in cultural outlooks and orientations, not absolutes. She also makes very good use of visual sources from antiquity and more recent, maintaining a global reach, while also treating Indigenous and colonial subaltern oral sources (what others might call ‘myths and legends’) as informing those cultural orientations as much as the archival, written sources other historians might feel more comfortable with.
What I find more impressive is that Carr does all of these things well, and while keeping mind that she is writing for a ‘general’ – as in not specialist academic – audience. The tone is well pitched, the narrative interwoven well with allusions to trends, cases, and phenomena across time and context made clearly. Carr’s broad sweep has given us an inclusive text with an inclusive view of audience. That is all the more impressive when we consider how little rigorous scholarly work has been done on swimming histories. There has been a small upturn in recent years although much of the recent work on swimming is more towards the popular end of historical publishing. Carr has therefore had to draw on other sources where swimming is incidental, not central, to build her case: this is a challenge in all cultural history, but more so in studies of the ubiquitous. I’m editing a collection of work at the moment looking at aquatic, maritime, and riverine sports and getting a sense through this of just how impressive Carr’s work is.
This won the North American Society for Sports History award for monograph of the year in 2023: it is a worthy winner and deserves to be widely read. It’s engaging, informative, and elegantly produced.
October 11, 2022
Couldn’t stop sharing swimming facts with everyone around me as I read it, which I feel like is a positive sign for a non fiction book
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews