Shorter Pieces

Elements of Sea Power, Past and Present

In The Return of Geopolitics: Perspectives from the Engelsberg Seminar 2016, edited by Kurt Almqvist, Alexander Linklater, and Andrew Mackenzie. Stockholm: Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, 2017.

One of the more pressing but unspoken geopolitical issues of our time has to do with the role of the United States as the world’s preeminent military power—or as Americans like to think of it, its role as the global policeman and leader of the free world. And any consideration of that question leads inevitably, if not immediately, to a discussion of American sea power and the U.S. Navy. Because without its navy, which for the past seven decades has been the most powerful in the world, the United States could not have been as active a participant in the world as it has been. Or to take a less charitable view, the U.S. could not have gotten into or caused as much trouble as it has.More

Shaping the World Economy, and More

Maritime 2018: How Do We Value the Oceans (2018): 3–5.

There is nothing American about the quintessentially American Big Mac; its principal ingredients are alien to the western hemisphere. The wheat for its bun was domesticated in what is now Iraq; the cattle that supply its beef and cheese are native to Turkey; its garnishes of lettuce, mustard, pickled cucumber and onion originated in Egypt, India and central Asia. All of these reached the Americas as familiars of the miscellaneous conquistadors and colonists who carried them across the seas in hopes of replicating their homelands in a new world.More

Review of The Sovereign and the Pirate: Ordering Maritime Subjects in India’s Western Littoral, by Lakshmi Subramanian

World History Connected 15:1 (2018).

The efforts of the East India Company (EIC) to consolidate its rule on the west coast of India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries led to a rise in piracy in the Northward. This was the name the British gave to a region that “comprised Gujarat, Kathiawad, Cutch [Kachchh], Sind, and extended from time to time, into the Trucial Coast” (2). This piracy, a term that covers various forms of maritime predation, was concentrated in the myriad creeks of the western Kathiawar Peninsula, especially Okhamandel (including Dwarka, Beyt, and Positra), and in Cutch. Responsibility for containing it fell to the Bombay Marine and the EIC’s resident at Baroda.More

Review of Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean, by Jonathan White

Wall Street Journal Aug. 18, 2017.

Open the door to a saltwater summer home and you’re apt to find a tide table—perhaps not for the right month or even the right year, but there it is, enumerating the ocean’s cadence with the dependability of a metronome. For those of us accustomed to man-made schedules, however, the tide’s a fickle animal; its rhythms are not our own. The same tide at full flood by our boathouse may crest an hour later or earlier just a few miles away.

Connecting Past and Present: Maritime Museums and Historical Mission

The Mariner’s Mirror 102:4 (2016): 388–99.

The greatest challenge faced by maritime museums is how we make ourselves relevant in the twenty-first century. This is a problem that has three components, which we can characterize loosely as geography, chronology and theme or discipline. Foremost of these is, as they say in the real-estate world, location, location, location. Maritime museums have by default allowed our physical location to define and determine the centre and scope of all our activities, whether our focus is a port city; a bay, a lake, or a river; whether it is local or regional, or national or imperial; or even when its focus is on a particular industry or trade.More

Review of The Medieval Nile: Route, Navigation, and Landscape in Islamic Egypt, by John P. Cooper

The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du Nord 26:1 (2016): 80–82

The opening of the Aswan High Dam in 1970 had a profound impact on the people and economy of Egypt, but its effect on our understanding of Egyptian history has been equally dramatic. Virtually every student learns that the Nile Valley drew its fertility and prosperity from the annual inundation, which spread water and alluvium along the floodplain and into the delta. The dam was intended to prevent widespread flooding, provide a store of water against years of drought, and improve navigation. One result is that the river today displays “little of its radical seasonal variability,” and we have little sense of just how tricky travel was on the Nile for the preceding five thousand years.More