Abstract
World archipelago means all past, present and future land masses. However, this book will focus on the smallest fragments of the archipelago - the islands, as Frank Lestringant calls them. Within this geohistorical framework, there are facts of nature, the environment in the broadest sense, and human facts, particularly since the Anthropocene, but not only. The phenomena linking geography to historical processes is so strong that we must speak of a geohistorical entanglement whose miscellanies tell the story of our planet's evolution in interaction with the living world, particularly humanity in recent times. Functionally, “everything is an island, everything is an archipelago”, in the sense that every place is both isolated and linked to its neighbors, whatever the process, era or scale considered. The guiding thread is that of the community of scientists from all disciplines working on Island Studies, for whom the term “insularity” implies that specific or paradigmatic qualities are attributed to islands, that “the island” is thus elevated to the rank of a category of place in its own right, essentially distinct from non-island places. This work follows in the wake of the École des Annales and the serial history of Pierre Chaunu in particular, from the "Îléité" of geographer Joël Bonnemaison, to the science of islands or Nissology desired by anthropologist Grant McCall. Finally, the work and reflections on the world-archipelago are intended as a contribution to the geohistory of Christian Grataloup, who constantly reminds us that “History has a Geography”. As far as methods and concepts are concerned, the research is based on Jaromir Korcak's area-number law, Mac Arthur and Wilson's Island Theory, Pierre-Gille de Gennes' percolation theory, Ilka Hanski's concept of metapopulations, Roger Brunet's chorematics, Mark Lomolino's species-area relationship, and so on. These various elements will serve as a basis for study and reflection on the Dispersal-Diffusion-Migration (DDM) processes at work across the insular puzzle of the world archipelago. Analyses will be based on the Global Island Database (Base de données Insulaires Mondiale BIM) of the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD). The first part evokes “miscellanies” of reflection and experience on Island Studies and nissology in its various variants. The second explores the world archipelago in minute detail, a world of islands with such varied environments: geography, geology, tectonics, climate, biology. The third part takes the form of an essay on the geohistory of Homo sapiens across the world archipelago from the out of Africa, followed by its expansion onto island peripheries outside the realm of the old world. Last but not least, Julien Gracq must be credited with inspiration - secular, but oh so fertile - when he evokes the imaginary island of Vezzano in his book The Opposing Shore.