How Oceans Become
Histories and Futures of the High Seas and Deep Oceans
How Oceans Become
Histories and Futures of the High Seas and Deep Oceans
An anthology grounded in the idea that oceans are human realities, shaped by human interests, interactions, and technologies.
Historically and geographically diverse, oceans exist in the plural. Oceans become oceans through how they are represented, what resources they are deemed to hold, and the regulatory governance to which they are subjected. These are the three key components of “ocean making” this volume employs to shed light on the complex issues facing ocean governance today.
The anthology reaches back to the oceans of the early modern European expansion and up to the current concerns of anthropogenic changes and resource depletion. Chapters address activities and regulatory concerns regarding maritime transport, fisheries, deep-sea mining, wave energy, and whaling, and span from the southern oceans around Antarctica to the current shedding of the icy mantle of the Arctic Ocean. By drawing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines—including history, comparative literature, media studies, political science, law, and anthropology—How Oceans Become opens a multi-layered, interdisciplinary approach to studying the oceans’ entanglements with human cultures and societies.
424 pages | 2 halftones | 6 x 9
Earth Sciences: Environment
History: Environmental History, History of Technology
Table of Contents
Series Editors’ Preface
Katharine Anderson and Helen M. Rozwadowski
Introduction: Oceans Become
Thomas Brandt, Knut Ove Eliassen, Mats Ingulstad, and Gard Paulsen
1: The Representations, Resources, and Regulations of the High Seas, the Deep Oceans, and the Oceans We Need
Thomas Brandt, Knut Ove Eliassen, Mats Ingulstad, and Gard Paulsen
I: The High Seas
2: “Over the Seas da Gama Had Opened”: Spices, Waterways, and Divine Law, the Making of a World Ocean
Knut Ove Eliassen
3: Ordering the Ocean in Old Regime France: Freedom, Risks, and Riches in L’ordonnance de la marine 1681–1760
Ellen Krefting
4: Whaling and Statistics in the Southern Ocean
Gard Paulsen
5: The EU’s Emergence as a Maritime Safety Regulator
Ketil Djønne
II: The Deep Oceans
6: On the Plausibility of the Sea Serpent
Peder Roberts
7: Deep-Sea Mining in the Oceanic Resource Space: The Cornucopian Problem
Mats Ingulstad
8: Becoming a Cultural Treasure of the Ocean: From Gaze to Resource and the Politics of Imaginaries
Lucas Lixinski
9: The Poetics of Ocean Technocracy: Natural Formations and the Remaking of Portugal
João Afonso Baptista
III: The Oceans We Need
10: Compiling the Pacific: Islands of Media History
John Durham Peters
11: Circular Seas: Cultivating the Ocean for Food, Energy, and Climate, 1970–2000s
Terje Finstad
12: A Wave That Never Breaks? Representing Ocean Waves as an Energy Resource
Thomas Brandt
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Index