Past & Present has published a supplemental issue, Ordering the Oceans, Ordering the World: Law, Violence, and European Empires, edited by Jeppe Mulich and Renaud Morieux:
Once the primary domain of naval and social historians, the field of maritime and oceanic history has become in the last decade part of larger and ongoing conversations in the historical discipline. Rather than simply riding the wave of global and transnational history, maritime and oceanic history has been contributing decisively to the recent inflexions of these fields. It has brought attention to issues of disconnection, power asymmetry, frictions, and material and environmental factors. It has questioned the capacity of European empires to control distant spaces, by focusing on legal geography and zones of blurred sovereignty, and by foregrounding the experience of non-European people. It has offered new methods, reflecting critically on how to combine scales of analysis and challenge inherited framings. What all these approaches share is a concern with the relationship between global processes and issues of governance.
Oceanic history is a particularly good laboratory in which to think about order-making in a global context. Many oceanic histories now share the premise that the oceans were governed and not lawless spaces. Yet many authors still focus, on the one hand, on governance and regulatory frameworks, and on the other, on forms of resistance. The concept of ‘ordering’ enables historians to bypass a dichotomy that is, in many ways, unsatisfactory. Focusing on oceans allows us to explore the unstable nature of any order in a more dynamic way than would be possible if confined only to studying the land. The processes taking place on and around the oceans were not always distinct from those on land — but they were often heightened, more experimental and in some cases pre-dated their terrestrial counterparts. Oceans rarely feature in classic accounts of the emergence of the modern state and international order, tied as these are to notions of territorialization and centralization. Focusing on oceans and oceanic contact zones underlines that the structural changes that took place between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, with respect to state formation, empires, global trade and migrations, were inherently the product of inter-imperial and interpolitical dynamics. Furthermore, a focus on the water margins and the polyglot peoples inhabiting them shows how much these changes were shaped from below and from the peripheries. State and social transformation was caused as much by actions at the margin of empires as it was by policies coming from their centres.
--Dan Ernst. H/t: KR
