Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World

by Liam Campling, Alejandro Colás

The global ocean has through the centuries served as a trade route, strategic space, fish bank and supply chain for the modern capitalist economy. While sea beds are drilled for their fossil fuels and minerals, and coastlines developed for real estate and leisure, the oceans continue to absorb the toxic discharges of our carbon civilisation—warming, expanding, and acidifying the blue water part of the planet in ways that will bring unpredictable but irreversible consequences for the rest of the biosphere.

In this bold and radical new book, Campling and Colás analyse these and other sea-related phenomena through a historical and geographical lens. In successive chapters dealing with the political economy, ecology and geopolitics of the sea, the authors argue that the earth’s geographical separation into land and sea has significant consequences for capitalist development. The distinctive features of this mode of production continuously seek to transcend the land-sea binary in an incessant quest for profit, engendering new alignments of sovereignty, exploitation and appropriation in the capture and coding of maritime spaces and resources.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, Economics, Geography, Ecology

432 pages, Hardcover

First published January 28, 2021

Reviews

[Hayley]

chapters i gained the most from is Exploitation (ch.3), Logistics (ch.5), and Offshore (ch.6). highly researched read on maritime capitalism and the sea as a position with which to understand capitalism’s development and perniciousness. some key words/ideas: underwater network cables, the difficulty of organised labour within maritime and maritime adjacent industries, offshore, cosmopolitanism (both anti and pro), state funded ship building to counter the insane amounts of debt created by shipping companies.

learnt a lot about tuna and imperialism with this one too

[Ryan Denson · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Contrary to the common perception of the sea as a smooth horizon of opportunity which simply connects one market to another, merely acting as a surface in the realisation of the masculinist reveries of adventure and enrichment, the ocean seabeds - not just of the Atlantic - can also be seen as the underwater resting place, both real and imagined, of lives sacrificed and destroyed at sea."

"Since the ocean surface occludes physical traces of that which has passed through it, the sea becomes a favored depository of much which the terrestrial world wishes to discard and conceal - a forgotten space . . . which is out of sight and therefore out of mind, submerged under the waves."

In a year impacted by supply chain disruptions in shipping lanes, we have all already become somewhat more aware of the maritime factor in global capitalism. The current neoliberal system, premised on exploitation and overconsumption is, after all, sustained by a complex network of transporting goods primarily across the sea. Campling and Colás, though, extend their analysis beyond merely examining this twenty-first system dominated by container shipping. They seek to understand global capitalism as itself being a fundamentally seaborne phenomenon, arising from the early modern period. In this way, they direct attention towards the spatial dimension underpinning modern capitalistic structures. The sea, at least initially, serves as a surface upon which people and goods can be exported and imported, not without danger, but as an expedient for merchants of all periods, from those of the earlier modern period to the present.

This book, thus, offers up a historicist approach on the "maritime factor" of global capitalism, surveying a wide array of topics from the early modern world onward, from logistics to the extraction of the sea's own biomass. Yet, the focus is not solely on the sea itself, but rather how the oceanic world interacts with terrestrial aspects of human society, crafting a specifically terraqueous analysis. The sea is understood by Campling and Colás as both a vehicle for and a victim of global capitalism. It simultaneously functions as the means through which such networks function in transportation and communication, while the effects of capitalism concerning pollution, overfishing, and climate change have caused widespread harm to the maritime world itself. The human costs of global capitalism in this context are touched on with regard to the Atlantic slave trade as well, wherein this body of water bridging space between three continents was one factor that made such an amoral practice possible. Perhaps the most interesting chapter, though, concerns the offshore world, highlighting the effects utopian fantasies concerning the isolation of islands, and the modern exploitations such as their use as tax havens.

Campling and Colás conclude their detailed analysis of this "maritime factor" by cautioning that there is no inherent quality of the sea that makes it necessarily bound to global capitalism, pointing to rare historical flashes of "saltwater cosmopolitanism" that serve to show alternative potentials. The fundamental instability of the sea also serves to characterize it as a realm that natural seems to resist human control, particularly that of the profit motive of capitalism. Thus, they encourage a revaluation and reorientation of the possibilities for the maritime world, beyond the usual romanticized portrayals of the sea as a realm of ambiguous "freedom." The sea, after all, should be understood and imagined as a realm, whose flourishing and health is integral to the stability of human societies, even if those societies remain predominately terrestrial, rather than merely as a disconnected space to be exploited for easy shipping and natural resources.

[Hannah Dickinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really ambitious book in terms of scope, both historical and geographical. Learned a lot, but I'm not sure it always delivered. Some big gaps/omissions in focus for me - around gender, nonhumans, subaltern/indigenous voices. I liked the decision to order the book thematically rather than chronologically. Highlight chapters for me were Exploitation, Appropriation and Offshore.
Gives a different take on the history of capitalism and traditional Marxist perspectives r/e the agrarian roots of capitalism on land. Anyone who's big into Marxist theory or historical-materialism will enjoy the book for the way in which it theorises the 'terraqueous' nature of capital - i.e the links between land and sea. The most compelling part of the book for me was the explanation and demonstration of the 'terraqueous predicament' in action - both historically and in the present and across different geographies.

[Josh Reid · Rating 2 out of 5]

Structural approach to the topic that removes the contingent nature of the rise and consequences of capitalism. Many noticeable gaps, especially the human element. And for all their claims of how capitalism's terraqueous territoriality shapes and is shaped by natural forces of the ocean, the sea seemed surprisingly absent, particularly as a historical agent.

[Differengenera · Rating 4 out of 5]

stronger when its working in empirical history rather than doing the obligatory dovetailing with structuralist historiography. the working through of distinct juridical regimes or legal theories gives certain sections a bit of a polsci feel and there's a lot of the sign-posting ('this chapter will', 'as this chapter has shown') you'd associate with PhD theses. each chapter is resultantly a bit thematic and segmented, working at distinct levels rather than as A Totality, but still very informative and interesting

[dana · Rating 3 out of 5]

i should just read stepford

[Nicolas Biggs]

would recommend to anyone who hates capitalism but loves wooden sailing ships or following marinetraffic.

[Mike Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting deep dive into many aspects: maritime mercantilism, transatlantic slave tag, colonialism, environment, overfishing, to name but a few