A World at Sea

Reviewed by: A World at Sea: Maritime Practices and Global History ed. by Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal Michael Dove Benton, Lauren and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, eds. – A World at Sea: Maritime Practices and Global History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 280 p. The latest volume in the Early Modern Americas series edited by Peter Mancall, A World at Sea explores several neglected aspects of the period while also refreshingly venturing outside of the series’ traditional geographic focus on the Atlantic World. In their shared aim of placing maritime practices at the centre of world history, the contributors to this fine collection of essays propose a useful and convincing conceptual framework for maritime world history based on the study of land-sea regimes. [End Page 672] Nine chapters are grouped into sections corresponding to the three sets of especially formative processes spanning land and sea as identified by the editors. The first section, “Currents,” traces the institutional connections across the commonly assumed divide that existed between these spaces. A welcome beginning to this study is Carla Rahn Phillips’s response to the oft-asked question of why anyone engaged in such a dangerous activity as going to sea. Based largely on her notable work examining recruitment within the Spanish empire, her findings point to several main reasons for maritime enlistment, ranging from positive inducements to violent physical coercion. Regardless of whether these impetuses were related to proximity to the sea, family tradition, economic incentive, legal requirements, or forced recruitment, they were ultimately linked to life ashore and can inform our understanding of labour mobilization quite broadly. The focus quickly narrows in the second chapter, devoted to tracking how two Southeast Asian polities with limited maritime domains, Cambodia and Ayutthaya (Siam), attempted to navigate the seventeenth century regional rivalry between the Dutch East India Company and the Chinese maritime network led by Koxinga. Albeit a more specialized subject than the others in this section, Adam Clulow and Xing Hang’s much appreciated study reveals how this rivalry triggered a process of legal improvisation and innovation on land as local rulers sought to exert state jurisdiction over maritime spaces and the composition of ship’s crews. Closing out this section is Matthew Raffety’s excellent examination into the roots of European maritime law and regulation and how nationalist and internationalist impulses intersected and were negotiated by states in efforts to seek greater legal coherence across the globe. Of particular value is Rafferty’s discussion of piracy, privateering and the regulation and eventual suppression of the Atlantic slave trade as three of the most internationalized aspects of maritime law during the early modern period. The three chapters making up the section “Dispatches” examine how maritime forms of knowledge gradually came to inform societal understandings more broadly within the massive political and scientific changes experienced during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In an intriguing piece, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal considers how, in the absence of reliable nationality documentation at sea, the captured private letter was used by states to develop knowledge about national identities of crews, including their origins and political affiliations. Privateersmen and admiralty courts, as extensions of the state, relied quite heavily on the “testimony” revealed in these letters in order to deem vessels, cargoes, and crews as the enemy and therefore validate prizes. Margaret Schotte delves into the creation of navigational knowledge by mariners and explores the growing role of the state in nautical training and practice through harnessing early modern period advances in mathematics and science. Commercial navigational knowledge was integrated into state bureaucratic systems, including England, France, The Netherlands, and Russia, though the most effective navigational approach combined technical and theoretical expertise with the practical experience of sailors. Also concerned with knowledge production and transmission is David Igler’s superb analysis of a cross-cultural interaction between two shipmates—one, a Pacific Islander and navigator, and the other, a European artist—during a Russian exploratory voyage in 1817. Igler deftly explains how the [End Page 673] land-based technologies of illustration and ethnographic description underwent a process of experimentation once implemented aboard ship, the knowledge that resulted being the product of mutual connections and exchanges

Ancient history · Sociology · World history · Asian Studies and History · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History