All history is maritime history
Paine, Old River Control SH
Sea History 167 (2019): 5–6.
While visiting New Orleans in March, I persuaded three siblings and our father to join me on an expedition to visit the Old River Control structure between Lettsworth and Vidalia, Louisiana. If you want to get people to join you on an eight-hour field trip, you need a compelling story. Mine is this: Old River Control is the single most important piece of infrastructure in the United States. It is also the most vulnerable.More
Sea History 167 (2019): 61–62.
The four-volume The Sea in History is the product of the Paris-based Association Océanides, which bills itself as a multidisciplinary project with three objectives: “to provide scientific proof that the oceans are at the heart of political, economic and social issues, to enhance the overall policy of the seas, and to train future generations.” Conceived in 2010 and published only seven years later, the set includes English and French essays by some 260 different scholars from forty countries.
Offing Echoes (Mumbai) (Feb. 2019): 15–22.
Few arenas of human activity have a greater influence on the world today than the maritime industry. Perhaps none does. This is not hyperbole. Rather, it is a simple fact, as attested in three straightforward statistics: The world’s oceangoing fleet carries about 80 percent of world trade by volume. The ocean covers 71 percent of the planet and contains 95 per cent of the world’s water. Yet these plain statements have become dull with repetition, perhaps because what happens on and in the ocean is important almost beyond our ability to comprehend it. As a result, perhaps no line of work is as unacknowledged or underappreciated. A vexing and persistent question for people working in the maritime professions is, How can I make people appreciate the immediate importance of maritime enterprise—what I do—to their lives?More
Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences. 12 (2019): 457–72.
To take the pulse of history, touch a river. For land-bound species dependent on water for mere survival, they are indispensable. But humans’ relationship to rivers is far more complex than that of any other life form. Streams may entice us with their apparent serenity or vibrant turbulence. Rivers may offer easy communication along their length even as they block our advance across them. They may destroy our property in full flood but leave us begging for their return in times of low water or drought. They may seem susceptible to our engineering, but ultimately rivers will always have their way, and we must bow to them.More
In The World’s Ocean: Culture, History, and the Environment, edited by Lance Nolde and Rainer F. Buschmann, 90–108. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio 2018.
Culture comprises many elements, including beliefs, social norms, traditional customs, the arts, civic institutions, and collective achievements of people or societies, and people both shape culture and are shaped by it. In considering why oceans and seas matter in world culture, it is essential to realize that before mechanical ground transportation and aviation in the 19th and 20th centuries, ships and boats were usually the most efficient means of transportation—when they were not the only ones. Thus, the opening of sea routes invariably resulted in cultural transformation, sometimes immediate, other times only in the long term.More
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