Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás, Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World, Verso, 2021; hbk £20.
RATING: 90
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Buy this book?
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Yes
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Note: at the time of writing, Verso is offering the hardback for £16, with a free ebook.
What difference does the sea make? Capitalism, after all, is capitalism, whether on land or at sea. That is to say, the driving forces behind it (its 'immanent laws') still apply. Arising in the context of the global processes of appropriation, long-distance trade and accumulation central to merchant or commercial capitalism, industrial capitalism introduced a new dynamic focused directly on the 'capital relation' - the extraction of surplus value from proletarianised workers, in which the constant need for competitive advantage on the part of individual capitalists or capitalist concerns drives the search for increased productivity through the ever more refined division of labour and incessant scientific and technological revolutions, under changing regimes of national and global governance increasingly oriented directly towards sustaining and extending the authority or hegemony of capital over labour. Campling and Colás (hereafter CC) are mindful of Marx's observation that capital 'by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier' (Grundrisse, Penguin, 1973, p. 536, cited p. 214), and they introduce their account of Capitalism and the Sea as follows:
'the historical specificity of capitalist social formations, with their inherent drive for the competitive accumulation of surplus value, has bestowed them with a special relationship with the oceans. The distinctive features of capitalism as a mode of production continuously seek to transcend the land–sea binary in an incessant quest for profit, thereby engendering new articulations of terraqueous [consisting of land and water] territoriality – that is, uniquely capitalist alignments of sovereignty, exploitation and appropriation in the capture and coding of maritime spaces and resources. Although various human societies have through time engaged in different conceptions and practices of terraqueous territoriality, it is capitalism – particularly in its industrial form – which has intensified the relationship between land and sea, incorporating the oceans into the law of value, extending maritime commodity frontiers and attempting in the process to ‘flatten’ the geophysical division between solid ground and fluid water' (3).
This approach makes sense. The sea is materially different to the land, in ways that impinge directly on 'uniquely capitalist alignments of sovereignty, exploitation and appropriation': in the distinctive resources it contains; in the processes of production and circulation proper to it, whether in terms of the relative ease of travel across it, or the specific challenges its exploitation poses; in the inherent difficulty of asserting sovereignty over it, currently stretched to a 200-mile limit; in its huge significance as the primary heat sink in our biosphere; and in the particular problems of governance stemming from this and other related issues such as over-fishing. CC do not fall into the trap of offering us a 'maritime variety of capitalism'. Rather, they present, in the six core chapters of this excellent monograph, a comprehensive, wide-ranging and thoroughly researched analysis of the 'maritime factor' in the development of capitalism over time and space. These six chapters - 'Circulation', 'Order', 'Exploitation', 'Appropriation', 'Logistics', and 'Offshore', are conceived as 'three broadly spatial phenomena (order, appropriation, offshore) and three mainly temporal processes (circulation, exploitation, logistics)', although, as the authors add, 'plainly this division is a matter of relative emphasis, rather than absolute contrast'. Their principal objective, they say, is 'to offer an analytical framework through which to understand [the] various settings [in concrete social formations across different geographical and historical contexts] where capitalism interacts with the sea. Underlying this is an argument regarding the centrality of the "maritime factor" in the origins and development of capitalism while simultaneously making a case for the reciprocal impact of the law of value upon the salt-water world' (4).
The perspective they adopt, focused on 'the creative destruction that accompanies the reproduction of a social system like capitalism in its interaction with a natural force like the sea' (2) embraces coasts and coastal installations as well as the sea itself, and ranges from the earliest annihilation of space by time through voyages by sea to the issue of global warming. Each chapter explores, enriches and extends our understanding of the nature of capitalism as an historical phenomenon, identifying empirically and theoretically both 'generic' features, and specificities of the 'salt-water world'; the extensive endnotes provide a rich secondary bibliography; and the whole volume is very well produced. I think they intend 'distance', not 'distanced', in the last line of page 95, but if so, it is the only lapse I spotted.
A brief summary reveals the scope of the analysis and its relevance to issues central to the origins of capitalism and its reproduction over time. 'Circulation' documents not only the accumulation of capital but also the development of insurance and finance in merchant-dominated long-distance appropriation and exchange, concluding that capitalist social relations were 'born in the countryside but nurtured through international trade' (60); 'Order' explores the specific challenges arising from securing trade flows and value-producing assets, and providing for the legal governance of the sea and its riches, in a context where by and large states could assert sovereignty over coastal waters, but not over the deep ocean; 'Exploitation' compares maritime labour regimes past and present, in the specific circumstance that the ship, whether a 'factory engaged in the production of movement of commodities by capitals-in-competition' or a mobile platform for appropriating food from the sea, is a place that combines the labour process and daily reproduction of seafarers' (111-3, emphasis mine). 'Appropriation', with its focus on capital-intensive surface and deep-sea fishing, hinges on the fact that it was only in 2013 that industrial production (aquaculture) overtook wild-caught fish for direct human consumption (166) - more than 10,000 years, as it happens, after that the same point was reached with meat on land (Vigne, 2011: 177). 'Logistics' addresses the 80 per cent by volume of merchandise trade that crosses the oceans, rendering the 'annihilation of space by time', or the imperative to find faster and more efficient means of transport, as 'the 'annihilation of time by sea'; and 'Offshore' goes beyond the familiar story of financial centres and secret tax havens to address both the issue of global warming, and the use of the oceans and distant shores as sites for 'the disposal of unwanted excess, be it in the form of convicts or of contaminants' (269).
So, 'Circulation' shows that the rise in the late seventeenth century of shipping, insurance, and finance in Amsterdam and London was increasingly centred and dependent upon 'the development of human trafficking on an industrial scale across the Atlantic' (45): the risk of insurrection by slaves could be estimated, and insured against (Rupprecht, 2016). It also addresses the infrastructure required to sustain a maritime presence, in shipyards, dockyards and armouries, the significant scale of production and employment involved, and the developments in labour markets and 'factory' discipline that this entailed. The chapter reflects on rival versions of the origins of capitalism (53-63), initially by reference to the Wallerstein-Brenner (non)-debate (Arrighi, 1998), and, as noted, CC 'think of capitalist social relations as being born in the countryside but nurtured through international trade' (60); they align themselves particularly with Jairus Banaji (2020) on the significance of merchant or commercial capitalism.
'Order' explores an 'economic system premised on long-distance exchange of goods' (67) and the means by which it has been governed, with a primary focus on 'the military–juridical order supporting the sea as a location of capitalist reproduction in two senses: in a geopolitical guise securing trade flows and value-producing assets, and in the shape of the legal governance of the sea and its riches' (68). It takes us from the period of British naval hegemony to the late nineteenth 'new imperialism' that saw the Royal Navy challenged by Germany, Japan and the United States, then to the post-WW2 global maritime order dominated by US expansionism and massive global investment in naval bases, and the third UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III), signed in 1982. The US declined to sign it, despite the fact that it codified, through recognition of exclusive economic zones (EEZ), the extension of sovereign claims to the ocean floor that President Truman had announced unilaterally in 1945. Imperialism casts a long shadow, evident in patterns of deep-sea fishing, the creation and exploitation of 'offshore', and the mitigation of global warming, as discussed in subsequent chapters.
'Exploitation' compares maritime labour regimes in two periods: in the British merchant navy in the era of the British Empire (predominantly, 1793-1914), and in global seafaring in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Everything connects, of course, and in merchant shipping some issues introduced here are developed further in the chapter on logistics and the 'annihilation of time by sea' (213). The juxtaposition of a period in which capitalism was emergent with one when it is globally dominant makes for a comparison which is both historically and theoretically illuminating. Competition, which is intense, has revolved around changing calculations of speed, efficiency and cost: the merchant ship, CC suggest, 'can be seen as a factory engaged in the production of movement of commodities by capitals-in-competition, each of which is seeking to exploit labour in doing so, including by investing in technologies to competitively intensify [the] rate of exploitation', understood in the technical Marxist sense as the extraction of surplus value from workers (111). Along with the significant fact that when at sea, 'the ship as a place combines the labour process and daily reproduction of seafarers' 113, emphasis original), this dictates the character of the workforce and the way it is exploited. Situating themselves initially at a middle point in time, CC summarise the situation as of the late 19th century, when Britain accounted for close to half the world's merchant tonnage, 'propelled by a world-leading productivity (or rate of exploitation) of its maritime workforce', and shaped the competitive conditions of other merchant fleets:
'A disciplined, reliable, and skilled yet economical multinational crew of wage earners tending to the most technologically advanced ships under a London-centred administrative network with legal–diplomatic and commercial–infrastructural backing in all corners of the world became the dominant form of maritime labour regime, the standard bearer and model to emulate. In order to realise
and reproduce this ideal type, the British merchant navy (the Royal Navy in different ways) had during its nineteenth-century
heyday to reconcile often contradictory requirements: nationalist protectionism with a reliance on foreign labour, nominally free contracts with the brutal imposition of order on board, strict turnover schedules under changing and testing environmental conditions. Out of such efforts emerged a labour regime particularly oriented to the challenges of recruiting, retaining and managing a multinational workforce on a "worksite in motion". Mobility, containment, segmentation and isolation thus became the hallmarks of ocean-going labour' (114-5).
A century earlier, in the midst of a period of rapid expansion (numbers grew from 49,000 in 1770 to 174,500 in 1820), the average seafarer first embarked between the ages of 5 (yes, five) and 12, and spent 15 to 20 years at sea, with the working day for most based on 'the watch' - four hours on and four hours off. Merchant shipping involved continual technological innovation, and a strict technical division of labour, in which skills had to be developed and continually up-dated, with improved productivity the constant goal. So the 'acceleration of the exploitation of crew was a major structuring dynamic' (115-6). The Dutch were leading innovators in the 1500s, but by the early 18th century the British 'East Indiaman' was dominant - built for maximum load not for speed, and able to carry 8 tons of cargo per crew member in 1686 and 15 by 1766. The most durable, built from teak at world-leading shipyards on the banks of the Tapi river in Surat, Gujurat, had a life of forty years - but the Navigation Acts (in force from 1651 until their abolition in 1849) denied them access to British waters.
The account of the labour regime in the earlier period is frankly horrifying. One in five mariners could expect to die at sea, whether from drowning, disease or malnutrition (124). Wrecks were commonplace, often as a result of overloading or lack of seaworthiness, in circumstances where ships could be insured for much more than their value. At the same time, the requirement in the British Navigation Acts that a majority of a crew should come from Britain or its colonies led to persistent shortages of hands, exacerbated by 'pressing' (forcible seizure), frequently of merchant sailors, if not of the 'dispossessed, propertyless and unemployed', to serve in the Royal Navy: the practice was discontinued only after 1815, as the demands of trade began to predominate over those of naval warfare. Recruitment to the merchant navy often involved induced debt peonage, brought about by the offer of wages in advance, or managed by 'crimpers' who provided food, drink and accommodation on credit in port taverns. In addition, a 1704 Act gave parish officials the right to offer up children to work for captains for free for up to nine years, while the 'philanthropic' Marine Society, set up in 1756 by a merchant, took destitute boys off the streets of London and sent them to sea (134-6). Crews were cosmopolitan from the start, with large numbers, known generically as 'lascars', from various parts of South Asia; and the degree of cosmopolitanism increased sharply, after the repeal of the navigation Acts, as shipowners, freed from the need to employ expensive British labour, began to shift to recruitment on a global scale.
The last third of the nineteenth century saw significant developments in technology (steam power, screw propulsion and iron hulls), and the organisation of maritime labour (leading to the founding in 1887 in Sunderland of what would become the National Union of Seamen). A century on, merchant shipping is truly global, based on huge vessels and containerisation for manufactured goods (enabling quick turn-around times in ports generally distant from urban centres), and shaped overall by 'the pressures of tight competition among shipowners to maximise labour productivity per tonne of commodities shifted on schedule': 'Seafarers are increasingly prisoners of maritime logistics networks as ports move away from urban centres' (145-6). The majority of ships use 'flags of convenience' (now offered by France and Germany among any others, which was news to me) to avoid both tax, and labour regulations; the labour market on which they draw is genuinely global, but the workforce is still hierarchical and racially stratified; the top five supply countries for ratings (of whom there is a global surplus) are the Philippines, China, Indonesia, Russia and Ukraine (152); contracts are generally per voyage, and crew recruitment agencies police any sign of militance or discontent and exclude those identified. Working conditions are regulated by the ILO's 2006 Maritime Labour Convention; the ITF (International Transport Workers Federation) has achieved some success in representing maritime workers, but as a consequence of competitive pressures wages (still significantly varied by ethnicity) fell by a quarter between 1992 and 2009 (151).
'Appropriation' addresses the fish and seafood industry, from the perspective of the various mechanisms of commodification over time, with a focus on 'the distinctive political institutions, spatial forms and legal frameworks that facilitate market forces appropriating labour for exchange': the primary focus is on the 'industrial deep-water fisheries wholly subsumed by capital that dominate in terms of capture volume' (168). 'Industrial fisheries,' CC note, 'are capital-intensive, proletarianised, often vertically integrated and, importantly for our purposes, organised purely for the transformation of nature into exchange-value' (168), existing alongside varied patterns of fishing inland and in relatively shallow coastal waters. Two contrasting forms of commercial tuna fishing are addressed - canning (for workers) and fresh fish (for the bourgeoisie). Canning originated in 1812-13, and the first fish to be canned were sardines and salmon; the first US tuna canning factory opened in 1902-3, and today 215 tuna canneries process approximately 3 million tons of fish per year (172). Technological developments in the 1960s (purse-seining, which traps a whole school of fish in a circular net as much as 600 meters across, with the catch processed on board ships that each cost around US$ 30 million) made for a huge production of low-grade meat for canning. In such processes, tuna suffer stress and crushing, and die slowly of suffocation, and this along with lengthy storage in brine at sea leads to deterioration in the quality of the meat (174). Also in the 1960s, 'slick promotion by central wholesale market middlemen' in Tokyo's Tsukiji Market, along with technological changes in freezing, led to blue-fin tuna being up-graded from catfood to an ultra-luxury product with prices and auction records to match (177). Such fish are line-caught - but with lines of up to 120 nautical miles in length, fishing 300 metres deep, with thousands of hooks (178). CC develop nicely the argument that over-fishing is not a 'tragedy of the commons', but a 'tragedy of the commodity' (182, cf. Longo et al, 2015), applying Jason Moore's theorisation (2015) of complementary processes of 'deepening' and 'widening' commodity frontiers to increase the competitive extraction of relative surplus value (182-3).
'Logistics' explores the dynamics of capitals-in-competition in ocean transport, with a focus on 'the contingent relationships between speed, reliability and costs' (215). Competition between capitals in this area reflects the processes of concentration and centralisation that are common to capital accumulation in general, but takes its particular form over time from the singularity of its objective, its manifestation in the single variable of freight rates, and the resulting constant drive to bring them down. So 'while an ever smaller
number of multinational corporations control more of the world economy and capture a greater share of surplus value – a dominant tendency in both late nineteenth- and early twenty-first-century merchant shipping – it must also be remembered that competitive countertendencies remain, as new technologies are unleashed, states intervene and crises unfold' (216). The story is to an extent familiar. What comes out strongly, as with maritime labour, is that this is an area where the world market really is world-wide: shipping 'is a global and globalising industry in the sense that it is simultaneously a conduit and enabler of the production of new spaces for capitalist accumulation', and 'a "catalyst" for global production through the cheapening of transport costs'. At the same time, there is no stopping the drive towards 'cost-cutting, tight margins, and just-in-time market volatility across the supply chain', with the risks and reversals that this necessarily entails (217-8). The scope for capitalist firms to plan their production, CC argue, was transformed by the emergence of specialised steam shipping and marine telegram cable networks in the 1860s. Shipping companies could publish and keep to timetables; communications were virtually instantaneous, especially with the advent of the telephone; dockside elevators speeded the process of loading and unloading; an ancillary system of 'tramp shipping' carried less valuable or time-sensitive cargos, extending networks outward from major port hubs; and in short, 'integrated maritime logistics was born' (225). British dominance in shipping and ship-building, based in the first instance on its virtual monopoly over empire trade, peaked at the end of the century, giving way to 'relative insignificance' in the 1950s, as the carrying trade in coal declined, and competitors earlier to adopt new technology such as oil-fired engines emerged. By the 1970s, Japanese yards were building around half the world's merchant fleet. Japan would be overtaken in turn by South Korea around the turn of the century, with China emerging as the major producer barely a decade later (247).
Containerisation, significant as it undoubtedly is, is only one of 'a wide repertoire of modes of seaborne transport available in the world today' (242). Two other technological advances, purpose-built bulk carriers and huge oil tankers, were equally important in the revolution in world merchant shipping between the 1950s and the 1970s. There is little use for containers, self-evidently, in the shipping of oil, or of bulk goods such as iron ore (the leading dry bulk shipping commodity in the post-war era), coal, cement or most grains. So container shipping mostly carries manufactures, and accounts for less than 20 per cent of seaborne freight by volume, though more than half by value. No fewer than six of the top ten container ports by volume are in mainland China, rivalled only by Busan (South Korea), and Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai - the latter three to varying degrees intermediate hubs, off-loading and consolidating cargos en route. This gives rise to
'ongoing processes of exclusion and uneven development in global manufacturing – ports in Africa, Latin America, Oceania and South Asia are not included in the top twenty throughout the twenty-year period [1997-2016] despite accounting for over half of the global population. The structural problem for seaward-facing capital accumulation in these regions is that, given the often low rates of profit
in the global competition to articulate with manufacturing supply chains, relative freight costs can undermine manufacturing in entire regions, contributing, along with a variety of other factors, to ongoing processes of economic exclusion' (262).
'Offshore', the final substantive chapter, takes us into the juridically and politically differentiated land-and-sea world of tax havens, flags of convenience, 'superyachts' that double as luxuries and floating business headquarters, and the like. CC present 'offshoring', especially since the mid-nineteenth century, as 'a device in furthering particular class and state interests', in the 'unfettered concentration of wealth, the conduct of opaque political and commercial transactions, ... practices of labour arbitrage ..., and the disposal of unwanted excess, be it in the form of convicts or of contaminants', and hence 'a domain anchored in, and authored by, the most political and territorial expressions of modern power: state sovereignty' (269). That is to say, they usefully extend the concept beyond offshore financial centres and 'secrecy jurisdictions' to embrace 'both the social processes that are physically discharged at sea, or displaced overseas, and the particular maritime and island imaginaries that accompany such practices' (271). The contrast between the 'offshore sublime' of floating palaces and exclusive island retreats and the history of convict settlements and slave plantations in distant parts of the 'offshore world' is a sharp one; there is an illuminating account of the varied histories of transportation and overseas imprisonment - to North America and the Caribbean for close on two centuries before Sydney and Tasmania took over the role for Great Britain, to the Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca and Singapore (where the East India Company mobilised 20,000 South Asian felons to drain marshlands, fortify shorelines, and build and maintain roads, piers, embankments, bridges, lighthouses and squares, 284), and to French Guiana and New Caledonia (where among others thousands arrested in the wake of the failed Paris Commune of 1870-71 were exiled, 286); and the point that today's Anglosphere 'fiscal paradises' are largely the 'residues of a vanished maritime empire which have repurposed much of their colonial heritage - language, law, governance systems and communications infrastructure - to service global finance in a post-colonial setting' (293) is well made. CC then turn briefly to the contamination of the seas (294-306), first with a reference to the millions of metric tons of plastic waste that finds its way into it every year. This, though, 'remains a minor concern compared to ocean acidification, warming, and overfishing' (298). Following Andreas Malm (2016), they find the roots of the role of the oceans as 'the primary heat sink in our biosphere' in 'the class antagonism of capital seeking to wield greater power over labour through the control of mobile energy (coal) in industrialising Britain': 'Put directly, the underlying social relations producing 1,500 billion tons of carbon by the twenty-first century from the burning of fossil fuel were always socially and spatially unequal, as will be the consequences' (297). Warming, acidification and deoxygenation are rapidly destroying the capacity of the oceans to save us, and more importantly, marine life and motion, from ourselves. At the same time, the opening up of the Arctic for seasonal sea passage and the mining of hitherto inaccessible minerals offers more short-term opportunities for capital, and, ironically, the wherewithal in terms of oil and gas to continue to burn the planet. In a dramatic example of the drive of capital for self-valorisation come what may, 'companies like Unilever have genetically modified antifreeze proteins present in Arctic eels for the commercialisation of low-fat ice-cream' (303). Finally, schemes such as the designation of marine protected areas, aimed at preserving biodiversity, follow a general pattern of palming responsibility off to distant overseas countries and territories that are 'imperialist and Cold War geopolitical legacies'; they may generate opportunities for private finance, but they will not arrest the devastation wrought by global warming. 'Crises, let us remember,' the chapter concludes, 'always present a business opportunity for different sectors of capital, and the shipwreck, in all its cataclysmic, irreparable material destruction, has, through insurance, trade and finance in particular, been at the heart of capitalist value creation from the beginning' (310).
So, a fine book, and very well worth reading. Astute readers, the authors included no doubt, may have noticed that I have made no reference to either the introduction or the conclusion. The introduction is primarily concerned with situating the approach adopted here in relation to a range of post-structural, post-colonial, decolonial and new materialist approaches, while the conclusion turns from a useful summary of some key points to a brief insistence on the need to incorporate the maritime factor into anti-capitalist politics. No great harm is done in either case, but the concluding insistence that: 'Democratic emancipation must be terraqueous in its ambition to combine freedom and stability, mobility and permanence, innovation and regulation' (322) reads more like a gesture than a basis for a programme of any kind, while the introduction engages with theoretical perspectives that are not taken up in the rest of the book. The authors review the work of Elizabeth Deloughrey (2010), Marcus Rediker, and Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters (2015) and others, in what reads to me like an exercise in pre-emptive self-defence: they go on to announce their intention to 'avoid a blithe transnationalism that sometimes seeps into conceptions of the maritime world as a hybrid, indeterminate space of aleatory flows, chaotic cross-currents and horizontal networks', to insist that they do not 'wish to romanticise the sea, nor to hide the fact that, in analysing the origins and development of capitalism from a maritime perspective we may inadvertently privilege some peoples’ histories and regions over those of others', and to advise that 'insofar as our narrative sometimes concentrates on the lives and travails of men, this is by way of reflecting on the material reality of a masculinised sphere, not its political justification' (19-20). The account that follows is indisputably capital-centric. It is also global from the outset, and constantly attentive to the history and reality of imperialism, the centrality of racial difference to patterns of exploitation and accumulation, and the lop-sided gendered structures of work at sea. So on balance I would rather they had engaged throughout with alternative perspectives, or let their own account speak for itself, spelling out more directly perhaps their own perception of the contribution of a capital-centric approach to such issues as transnationalism, race and gender, and its limits.
No matter. They have produced a superb analytical account of the development of capitalism, in which the 'maritime factor' sets the emergence of industrial capitalism in a triple context of earlier circuits of exchange, the role of merchant capital and the emergence of the world market. They manage to follow Marx on the significance of the separation of direct producers from their means of social subsistence, and, particularly on the 'expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil' as the 'basis of the whole process' (25, where unfortunately the commas on either side of 'of the peasant' have been dropped), without reducing capitalism to this, because they do follow through on their commitment to 'constantly probe the changing articulation between maritime circulation, mobility and exchange, and terrestrial accumulation, authority and production', and to historicise 'the dynamic connections between maritime flows and terrestrial authority' (27). So in the end I only part company with them fundamentally on one small point - this being their invocation of the 'modern world' in the title, and of 'modernity' or 'capitalist modernity' throughout the introduction, after which it too disappears from view (thank goodness). As a concept, it has caused nothing but grief, and we would do well to strike it from our vocabulary.
References and further reading
Arrighi, Giovanni. 1998. Capitalism and the Modern World-System: Rethinking the Non-debates of the 1970s, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 21, 1, 113–129.
Banaji, Jairus. 2020. A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism, Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Christopher, Emma. 2006. Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1750-1807. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Also see (if you can) the documentary 'They Are We': http://icarusfilms.com/if-taw.
Deloughrey, Elizabeth. 2010. Heavy Waters: Waste and the Atlantic Modernity. PLMA, 251, 3, 703-12.
Hessler, Stefanie, ed. 2018. Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Longo, Stefano B., Rebecca Clausen and Brett Clark. 2015. The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso.
Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism and the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso.
Rediker, Marcus. 1987. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See also 'Ghost of Amistad', https://www.ghostsofamistad.com.
Rediker, Marcus. 2004. Toward a People’s History of the Sea’, in David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby (eds), Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, pp. 195-205.
Rupprecht, Anita. 2016. “Inherent Vice”: Marine Insurance, Slave Ship Rebellion and the Law’, Race & Class, 57, 3, 31–44.
Steinberg, Philip, and Kimberley Peters. 2015. Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking, Environment and Planning D, 33, 2, 247-264.
Vigne, Jean-Denis. 2011. The origins of animal domestication and husbandry: A major change in the history of humanity and the biosphere. Comptes Rendus Biologies, 334, 171-81.
What difference does the sea make? Capitalism, after all, is capitalism, whether on land or at sea. That is to say, the driving forces behind it (its 'immanent laws') still apply. Arising in the context of the global processes of appropriation, long-distance trade and accumulation central to merchant or commercial capitalism, industrial capitalism introduced a new dynamic focused directly on the 'capital relation' - the extraction of surplus value from proletarianised workers, in which the constant need for competitive advantage on the part of individual capitalists or capitalist concerns drives the search for increased productivity through the ever more refined division of labour and incessant scientific and technological revolutions, under changing regimes of national and global governance increasingly oriented directly towards sustaining and extending the authority or hegemony of capital over labour. Campling and Colás (hereafter CC) are mindful of Marx's observation that capital 'by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier' (Grundrisse, Penguin, 1973, p. 536, cited p. 214), and they introduce their account of Capitalism and the Sea as follows:
'the historical specificity of capitalist social formations, with their inherent drive for the competitive accumulation of surplus value, has bestowed them with a special relationship with the oceans. The distinctive features of capitalism as a mode of production continuously seek to transcend the land–sea binary in an incessant quest for profit, thereby engendering new articulations of terraqueous [consisting of land and water] territoriality – that is, uniquely capitalist alignments of sovereignty, exploitation and appropriation in the capture and coding of maritime spaces and resources. Although various human societies have through time engaged in different conceptions and practices of terraqueous territoriality, it is capitalism – particularly in its industrial form – which has intensified the relationship between land and sea, incorporating the oceans into the law of value, extending maritime commodity frontiers and attempting in the process to ‘flatten’ the geophysical division between solid ground and fluid water' (3).
This approach makes sense. The sea is materially different to the land, in ways that impinge directly on 'uniquely capitalist alignments of sovereignty, exploitation and appropriation': in the distinctive resources it contains; in the processes of production and circulation proper to it, whether in terms of the relative ease of travel across it, or the specific challenges its exploitation poses; in the inherent difficulty of asserting sovereignty over it, currently stretched to a 200-mile limit; in its huge significance as the primary heat sink in our biosphere; and in the particular problems of governance stemming from this and other related issues such as over-fishing. CC do not fall into the trap of offering us a 'maritime variety of capitalism'. Rather, they present, in the six core chapters of this excellent monograph, a comprehensive, wide-ranging and thoroughly researched analysis of the 'maritime factor' in the development of capitalism over time and space. These six chapters - 'Circulation', 'Order', 'Exploitation', 'Appropriation', 'Logistics', and 'Offshore', are conceived as 'three broadly spatial phenomena (order, appropriation, offshore) and three mainly temporal processes (circulation, exploitation, logistics)', although, as the authors add, 'plainly this division is a matter of relative emphasis, rather than absolute contrast'. Their principal objective, they say, is 'to offer an analytical framework through which to understand [the] various settings [in concrete social formations across different geographical and historical contexts] where capitalism interacts with the sea. Underlying this is an argument regarding the centrality of the "maritime factor" in the origins and development of capitalism while simultaneously making a case for the reciprocal impact of the law of value upon the salt-water world' (4).
The perspective they adopt, focused on 'the creative destruction that accompanies the reproduction of a social system like capitalism in its interaction with a natural force like the sea' (2) embraces coasts and coastal installations as well as the sea itself, and ranges from the earliest annihilation of space by time through voyages by sea to the issue of global warming. Each chapter explores, enriches and extends our understanding of the nature of capitalism as an historical phenomenon, identifying empirically and theoretically both 'generic' features, and specificities of the 'salt-water world'; the extensive endnotes provide a rich secondary bibliography; and the whole volume is very well produced. I think they intend 'distance', not 'distanced', in the last line of page 95, but if so, it is the only lapse I spotted.
A brief summary reveals the scope of the analysis and its relevance to issues central to the origins of capitalism and its reproduction over time. 'Circulation' documents not only the accumulation of capital but also the development of insurance and finance in merchant-dominated long-distance appropriation and exchange, concluding that capitalist social relations were 'born in the countryside but nurtured through international trade' (60); 'Order' explores the specific challenges arising from securing trade flows and value-producing assets, and providing for the legal governance of the sea and its riches, in a context where by and large states could assert sovereignty over coastal waters, but not over the deep ocean; 'Exploitation' compares maritime labour regimes past and present, in the specific circumstance that the ship, whether a 'factory engaged in the production of movement of commodities by capitals-in-competition' or a mobile platform for appropriating food from the sea, is a place that combines the labour process and daily reproduction of seafarers' (111-3, emphasis mine). 'Appropriation', with its focus on capital-intensive surface and deep-sea fishing, hinges on the fact that it was only in 2013 that industrial production (aquaculture) overtook wild-caught fish for direct human consumption (166) - more than 10,000 years, as it happens, after that the same point was reached with meat on land (Vigne, 2011: 177). 'Logistics' addresses the 80 per cent by volume of merchandise trade that crosses the oceans, rendering the 'annihilation of space by time', or the imperative to find faster and more efficient means of transport, as 'the 'annihilation of time by sea'; and 'Offshore' goes beyond the familiar story of financial centres and secret tax havens to address both the issue of global warming, and the use of the oceans and distant shores as sites for 'the disposal of unwanted excess, be it in the form of convicts or of contaminants' (269).
So, 'Circulation' shows that the rise in the late seventeenth century of shipping, insurance, and finance in Amsterdam and London was increasingly centred and dependent upon 'the development of human trafficking on an industrial scale across the Atlantic' (45): the risk of insurrection by slaves could be estimated, and insured against (Rupprecht, 2016). It also addresses the infrastructure required to sustain a maritime presence, in shipyards, dockyards and armouries, the significant scale of production and employment involved, and the developments in labour markets and 'factory' discipline that this entailed. The chapter reflects on rival versions of the origins of capitalism (53-63), initially by reference to the Wallerstein-Brenner (non)-debate (Arrighi, 1998), and, as noted, CC 'think of capitalist social relations as being born in the countryside but nurtured through international trade' (60); they align themselves particularly with Jairus Banaji (2020) on the significance of merchant or commercial capitalism.
'Order' explores an 'economic system premised on long-distance exchange of goods' (67) and the means by which it has been governed, with a primary focus on 'the military–juridical order supporting the sea as a location of capitalist reproduction in two senses: in a geopolitical guise securing trade flows and value-producing assets, and in the shape of the legal governance of the sea and its riches' (68). It takes us from the period of British naval hegemony to the late nineteenth 'new imperialism' that saw the Royal Navy challenged by Germany, Japan and the United States, then to the post-WW2 global maritime order dominated by US expansionism and massive global investment in naval bases, and the third UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III), signed in 1982. The US declined to sign it, despite the fact that it codified, through recognition of exclusive economic zones (EEZ), the extension of sovereign claims to the ocean floor that President Truman had announced unilaterally in 1945. Imperialism casts a long shadow, evident in patterns of deep-sea fishing, the creation and exploitation of 'offshore', and the mitigation of global warming, as discussed in subsequent chapters.
'Exploitation' compares maritime labour regimes in two periods: in the British merchant navy in the era of the British Empire (predominantly, 1793-1914), and in global seafaring in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Everything connects, of course, and in merchant shipping some issues introduced here are developed further in the chapter on logistics and the 'annihilation of time by sea' (213). The juxtaposition of a period in which capitalism was emergent with one when it is globally dominant makes for a comparison which is both historically and theoretically illuminating. Competition, which is intense, has revolved around changing calculations of speed, efficiency and cost: the merchant ship, CC suggest, 'can be seen as a factory engaged in the production of movement of commodities by capitals-in-competition, each of which is seeking to exploit labour in doing so, including by investing in technologies to competitively intensify [the] rate of exploitation', understood in the technical Marxist sense as the extraction of surplus value from workers (111). Along with the significant fact that when at sea, 'the ship as a place combines the labour process and daily reproduction of seafarers' 113, emphasis original), this dictates the character of the workforce and the way it is exploited. Situating themselves initially at a middle point in time, CC summarise the situation as of the late 19th century, when Britain accounted for close to half the world's merchant tonnage, 'propelled by a world-leading productivity (or rate of exploitation) of its maritime workforce', and shaped the competitive conditions of other merchant fleets:
'A disciplined, reliable, and skilled yet economical multinational crew of wage earners tending to the most technologically advanced ships under a London-centred administrative network with legal–diplomatic and commercial–infrastructural backing in all corners of the world became the dominant form of maritime labour regime, the standard bearer and model to emulate. In order to realise
and reproduce this ideal type, the British merchant navy (the Royal Navy in different ways) had during its nineteenth-century
heyday to reconcile often contradictory requirements: nationalist protectionism with a reliance on foreign labour, nominally free contracts with the brutal imposition of order on board, strict turnover schedules under changing and testing environmental conditions. Out of such efforts emerged a labour regime particularly oriented to the challenges of recruiting, retaining and managing a multinational workforce on a "worksite in motion". Mobility, containment, segmentation and isolation thus became the hallmarks of ocean-going labour' (114-5).
A century earlier, in the midst of a period of rapid expansion (numbers grew from 49,000 in 1770 to 174,500 in 1820), the average seafarer first embarked between the ages of 5 (yes, five) and 12, and spent 15 to 20 years at sea, with the working day for most based on 'the watch' - four hours on and four hours off. Merchant shipping involved continual technological innovation, and a strict technical division of labour, in which skills had to be developed and continually up-dated, with improved productivity the constant goal. So the 'acceleration of the exploitation of crew was a major structuring dynamic' (115-6). The Dutch were leading innovators in the 1500s, but by the early 18th century the British 'East Indiaman' was dominant - built for maximum load not for speed, and able to carry 8 tons of cargo per crew member in 1686 and 15 by 1766. The most durable, built from teak at world-leading shipyards on the banks of the Tapi river in Surat, Gujurat, had a life of forty years - but the Navigation Acts (in force from 1651 until their abolition in 1849) denied them access to British waters.
The account of the labour regime in the earlier period is frankly horrifying. One in five mariners could expect to die at sea, whether from drowning, disease or malnutrition (124). Wrecks were commonplace, often as a result of overloading or lack of seaworthiness, in circumstances where ships could be insured for much more than their value. At the same time, the requirement in the British Navigation Acts that a majority of a crew should come from Britain or its colonies led to persistent shortages of hands, exacerbated by 'pressing' (forcible seizure), frequently of merchant sailors, if not of the 'dispossessed, propertyless and unemployed', to serve in the Royal Navy: the practice was discontinued only after 1815, as the demands of trade began to predominate over those of naval warfare. Recruitment to the merchant navy often involved induced debt peonage, brought about by the offer of wages in advance, or managed by 'crimpers' who provided food, drink and accommodation on credit in port taverns. In addition, a 1704 Act gave parish officials the right to offer up children to work for captains for free for up to nine years, while the 'philanthropic' Marine Society, set up in 1756 by a merchant, took destitute boys off the streets of London and sent them to sea (134-6). Crews were cosmopolitan from the start, with large numbers, known generically as 'lascars', from various parts of South Asia; and the degree of cosmopolitanism increased sharply, after the repeal of the navigation Acts, as shipowners, freed from the need to employ expensive British labour, began to shift to recruitment on a global scale.
The last third of the nineteenth century saw significant developments in technology (steam power, screw propulsion and iron hulls), and the organisation of maritime labour (leading to the founding in 1887 in Sunderland of what would become the National Union of Seamen). A century on, merchant shipping is truly global, based on huge vessels and containerisation for manufactured goods (enabling quick turn-around times in ports generally distant from urban centres), and shaped overall by 'the pressures of tight competition among shipowners to maximise labour productivity per tonne of commodities shifted on schedule': 'Seafarers are increasingly prisoners of maritime logistics networks as ports move away from urban centres' (145-6). The majority of ships use 'flags of convenience' (now offered by France and Germany among any others, which was news to me) to avoid both tax, and labour regulations; the labour market on which they draw is genuinely global, but the workforce is still hierarchical and racially stratified; the top five supply countries for ratings (of whom there is a global surplus) are the Philippines, China, Indonesia, Russia and Ukraine (152); contracts are generally per voyage, and crew recruitment agencies police any sign of militance or discontent and exclude those identified. Working conditions are regulated by the ILO's 2006 Maritime Labour Convention; the ITF (International Transport Workers Federation) has achieved some success in representing maritime workers, but as a consequence of competitive pressures wages (still significantly varied by ethnicity) fell by a quarter between 1992 and 2009 (151).
'Appropriation' addresses the fish and seafood industry, from the perspective of the various mechanisms of commodification over time, with a focus on 'the distinctive political institutions, spatial forms and legal frameworks that facilitate market forces appropriating labour for exchange': the primary focus is on the 'industrial deep-water fisheries wholly subsumed by capital that dominate in terms of capture volume' (168). 'Industrial fisheries,' CC note, 'are capital-intensive, proletarianised, often vertically integrated and, importantly for our purposes, organised purely for the transformation of nature into exchange-value' (168), existing alongside varied patterns of fishing inland and in relatively shallow coastal waters. Two contrasting forms of commercial tuna fishing are addressed - canning (for workers) and fresh fish (for the bourgeoisie). Canning originated in 1812-13, and the first fish to be canned were sardines and salmon; the first US tuna canning factory opened in 1902-3, and today 215 tuna canneries process approximately 3 million tons of fish per year (172). Technological developments in the 1960s (purse-seining, which traps a whole school of fish in a circular net as much as 600 meters across, with the catch processed on board ships that each cost around US$ 30 million) made for a huge production of low-grade meat for canning. In such processes, tuna suffer stress and crushing, and die slowly of suffocation, and this along with lengthy storage in brine at sea leads to deterioration in the quality of the meat (174). Also in the 1960s, 'slick promotion by central wholesale market middlemen' in Tokyo's Tsukiji Market, along with technological changes in freezing, led to blue-fin tuna being up-graded from catfood to an ultra-luxury product with prices and auction records to match (177). Such fish are line-caught - but with lines of up to 120 nautical miles in length, fishing 300 metres deep, with thousands of hooks (178). CC develop nicely the argument that over-fishing is not a 'tragedy of the commons', but a 'tragedy of the commodity' (182, cf. Longo et al, 2015), applying Jason Moore's theorisation (2015) of complementary processes of 'deepening' and 'widening' commodity frontiers to increase the competitive extraction of relative surplus value (182-3).
'Logistics' explores the dynamics of capitals-in-competition in ocean transport, with a focus on 'the contingent relationships between speed, reliability and costs' (215). Competition between capitals in this area reflects the processes of concentration and centralisation that are common to capital accumulation in general, but takes its particular form over time from the singularity of its objective, its manifestation in the single variable of freight rates, and the resulting constant drive to bring them down. So 'while an ever smaller
number of multinational corporations control more of the world economy and capture a greater share of surplus value – a dominant tendency in both late nineteenth- and early twenty-first-century merchant shipping – it must also be remembered that competitive countertendencies remain, as new technologies are unleashed, states intervene and crises unfold' (216). The story is to an extent familiar. What comes out strongly, as with maritime labour, is that this is an area where the world market really is world-wide: shipping 'is a global and globalising industry in the sense that it is simultaneously a conduit and enabler of the production of new spaces for capitalist accumulation', and 'a "catalyst" for global production through the cheapening of transport costs'. At the same time, there is no stopping the drive towards 'cost-cutting, tight margins, and just-in-time market volatility across the supply chain', with the risks and reversals that this necessarily entails (217-8). The scope for capitalist firms to plan their production, CC argue, was transformed by the emergence of specialised steam shipping and marine telegram cable networks in the 1860s. Shipping companies could publish and keep to timetables; communications were virtually instantaneous, especially with the advent of the telephone; dockside elevators speeded the process of loading and unloading; an ancillary system of 'tramp shipping' carried less valuable or time-sensitive cargos, extending networks outward from major port hubs; and in short, 'integrated maritime logistics was born' (225). British dominance in shipping and ship-building, based in the first instance on its virtual monopoly over empire trade, peaked at the end of the century, giving way to 'relative insignificance' in the 1950s, as the carrying trade in coal declined, and competitors earlier to adopt new technology such as oil-fired engines emerged. By the 1970s, Japanese yards were building around half the world's merchant fleet. Japan would be overtaken in turn by South Korea around the turn of the century, with China emerging as the major producer barely a decade later (247).
Containerisation, significant as it undoubtedly is, is only one of 'a wide repertoire of modes of seaborne transport available in the world today' (242). Two other technological advances, purpose-built bulk carriers and huge oil tankers, were equally important in the revolution in world merchant shipping between the 1950s and the 1970s. There is little use for containers, self-evidently, in the shipping of oil, or of bulk goods such as iron ore (the leading dry bulk shipping commodity in the post-war era), coal, cement or most grains. So container shipping mostly carries manufactures, and accounts for less than 20 per cent of seaborne freight by volume, though more than half by value. No fewer than six of the top ten container ports by volume are in mainland China, rivalled only by Busan (South Korea), and Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai - the latter three to varying degrees intermediate hubs, off-loading and consolidating cargos en route. This gives rise to
'ongoing processes of exclusion and uneven development in global manufacturing – ports in Africa, Latin America, Oceania and South Asia are not included in the top twenty throughout the twenty-year period [1997-2016] despite accounting for over half of the global population. The structural problem for seaward-facing capital accumulation in these regions is that, given the often low rates of profit
in the global competition to articulate with manufacturing supply chains, relative freight costs can undermine manufacturing in entire regions, contributing, along with a variety of other factors, to ongoing processes of economic exclusion' (262).
'Offshore', the final substantive chapter, takes us into the juridically and politically differentiated land-and-sea world of tax havens, flags of convenience, 'superyachts' that double as luxuries and floating business headquarters, and the like. CC present 'offshoring', especially since the mid-nineteenth century, as 'a device in furthering particular class and state interests', in the 'unfettered concentration of wealth, the conduct of opaque political and commercial transactions, ... practices of labour arbitrage ..., and the disposal of unwanted excess, be it in the form of convicts or of contaminants', and hence 'a domain anchored in, and authored by, the most political and territorial expressions of modern power: state sovereignty' (269). That is to say, they usefully extend the concept beyond offshore financial centres and 'secrecy jurisdictions' to embrace 'both the social processes that are physically discharged at sea, or displaced overseas, and the particular maritime and island imaginaries that accompany such practices' (271). The contrast between the 'offshore sublime' of floating palaces and exclusive island retreats and the history of convict settlements and slave plantations in distant parts of the 'offshore world' is a sharp one; there is an illuminating account of the varied histories of transportation and overseas imprisonment - to North America and the Caribbean for close on two centuries before Sydney and Tasmania took over the role for Great Britain, to the Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca and Singapore (where the East India Company mobilised 20,000 South Asian felons to drain marshlands, fortify shorelines, and build and maintain roads, piers, embankments, bridges, lighthouses and squares, 284), and to French Guiana and New Caledonia (where among others thousands arrested in the wake of the failed Paris Commune of 1870-71 were exiled, 286); and the point that today's Anglosphere 'fiscal paradises' are largely the 'residues of a vanished maritime empire which have repurposed much of their colonial heritage - language, law, governance systems and communications infrastructure - to service global finance in a post-colonial setting' (293) is well made. CC then turn briefly to the contamination of the seas (294-306), first with a reference to the millions of metric tons of plastic waste that finds its way into it every year. This, though, 'remains a minor concern compared to ocean acidification, warming, and overfishing' (298). Following Andreas Malm (2016), they find the roots of the role of the oceans as 'the primary heat sink in our biosphere' in 'the class antagonism of capital seeking to wield greater power over labour through the control of mobile energy (coal) in industrialising Britain': 'Put directly, the underlying social relations producing 1,500 billion tons of carbon by the twenty-first century from the burning of fossil fuel were always socially and spatially unequal, as will be the consequences' (297). Warming, acidification and deoxygenation are rapidly destroying the capacity of the oceans to save us, and more importantly, marine life and motion, from ourselves. At the same time, the opening up of the Arctic for seasonal sea passage and the mining of hitherto inaccessible minerals offers more short-term opportunities for capital, and, ironically, the wherewithal in terms of oil and gas to continue to burn the planet. In a dramatic example of the drive of capital for self-valorisation come what may, 'companies like Unilever have genetically modified antifreeze proteins present in Arctic eels for the commercialisation of low-fat ice-cream' (303). Finally, schemes such as the designation of marine protected areas, aimed at preserving biodiversity, follow a general pattern of palming responsibility off to distant overseas countries and territories that are 'imperialist and Cold War geopolitical legacies'; they may generate opportunities for private finance, but they will not arrest the devastation wrought by global warming. 'Crises, let us remember,' the chapter concludes, 'always present a business opportunity for different sectors of capital, and the shipwreck, in all its cataclysmic, irreparable material destruction, has, through insurance, trade and finance in particular, been at the heart of capitalist value creation from the beginning' (310).
So, a fine book, and very well worth reading. Astute readers, the authors included no doubt, may have noticed that I have made no reference to either the introduction or the conclusion. The introduction is primarily concerned with situating the approach adopted here in relation to a range of post-structural, post-colonial, decolonial and new materialist approaches, while the conclusion turns from a useful summary of some key points to a brief insistence on the need to incorporate the maritime factor into anti-capitalist politics. No great harm is done in either case, but the concluding insistence that: 'Democratic emancipation must be terraqueous in its ambition to combine freedom and stability, mobility and permanence, innovation and regulation' (322) reads more like a gesture than a basis for a programme of any kind, while the introduction engages with theoretical perspectives that are not taken up in the rest of the book. The authors review the work of Elizabeth Deloughrey (2010), Marcus Rediker, and Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters (2015) and others, in what reads to me like an exercise in pre-emptive self-defence: they go on to announce their intention to 'avoid a blithe transnationalism that sometimes seeps into conceptions of the maritime world as a hybrid, indeterminate space of aleatory flows, chaotic cross-currents and horizontal networks', to insist that they do not 'wish to romanticise the sea, nor to hide the fact that, in analysing the origins and development of capitalism from a maritime perspective we may inadvertently privilege some peoples’ histories and regions over those of others', and to advise that 'insofar as our narrative sometimes concentrates on the lives and travails of men, this is by way of reflecting on the material reality of a masculinised sphere, not its political justification' (19-20). The account that follows is indisputably capital-centric. It is also global from the outset, and constantly attentive to the history and reality of imperialism, the centrality of racial difference to patterns of exploitation and accumulation, and the lop-sided gendered structures of work at sea. So on balance I would rather they had engaged throughout with alternative perspectives, or let their own account speak for itself, spelling out more directly perhaps their own perception of the contribution of a capital-centric approach to such issues as transnationalism, race and gender, and its limits.
No matter. They have produced a superb analytical account of the development of capitalism, in which the 'maritime factor' sets the emergence of industrial capitalism in a triple context of earlier circuits of exchange, the role of merchant capital and the emergence of the world market. They manage to follow Marx on the significance of the separation of direct producers from their means of social subsistence, and, particularly on the 'expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil' as the 'basis of the whole process' (25, where unfortunately the commas on either side of 'of the peasant' have been dropped), without reducing capitalism to this, because they do follow through on their commitment to 'constantly probe the changing articulation between maritime circulation, mobility and exchange, and terrestrial accumulation, authority and production', and to historicise 'the dynamic connections between maritime flows and terrestrial authority' (27). So in the end I only part company with them fundamentally on one small point - this being their invocation of the 'modern world' in the title, and of 'modernity' or 'capitalist modernity' throughout the introduction, after which it too disappears from view (thank goodness). As a concept, it has caused nothing but grief, and we would do well to strike it from our vocabulary.
References and further reading
Arrighi, Giovanni. 1998. Capitalism and the Modern World-System: Rethinking the Non-debates of the 1970s, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 21, 1, 113–129.
Banaji, Jairus. 2020. A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism, Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Christopher, Emma. 2006. Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1750-1807. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Also see (if you can) the documentary 'They Are We': http://icarusfilms.com/if-taw.
Deloughrey, Elizabeth. 2010. Heavy Waters: Waste and the Atlantic Modernity. PLMA, 251, 3, 703-12.
Hessler, Stefanie, ed. 2018. Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Longo, Stefano B., Rebecca Clausen and Brett Clark. 2015. The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso.
Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism and the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso.
Rediker, Marcus. 1987. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See also 'Ghost of Amistad', https://www.ghostsofamistad.com.
Rediker, Marcus. 2004. Toward a People’s History of the Sea’, in David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby (eds), Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, pp. 195-205.
Rupprecht, Anita. 2016. “Inherent Vice”: Marine Insurance, Slave Ship Rebellion and the Law’, Race & Class, 57, 3, 31–44.
Steinberg, Philip, and Kimberley Peters. 2015. Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking, Environment and Planning D, 33, 2, 247-264.
Vigne, Jean-Denis. 2011. The origins of animal domestication and husbandry: A major change in the history of humanity and the biosphere. Comptes Rendus Biologies, 334, 171-81.