The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Harbor in the early hours of March 26, 2024, has revived memories of a similar disaster that took place in Tampa Bay 44 years ago, when the bulk carrier Summit Venture, hit the Sunshine Skyway in St. Petersburg, Florida, resulting in the deaths of 35 people. The accompanying article about that event originally appeared in Professional Mariner 61 (December/January 2002).
Paine, Summit Venture, ProMariner 61Articles, Chapters, and Talks
Paine, “Over the Bounded Main”
Any discussion about boundaries at sea has to begin with the question: How useful could such an arcane subject as maritime borders and border making possibly be to the study of world history?
The short answer is: Very useful. In fact, the linguistic map of the world in the 21st century makes almost no sense without an understanding of a variety of legal instruments developed roughly 550 years ago.
A Sea-Change for the Classroom: Maritime Identities—Seas, Ships, and Sailors—the Law and Teaching World History
World History Connected forum introduction — “Something Rich and Strange”: Maritime Law in World History
Separated at Birth: The Estranged History of the First Centuries of American-Indian Relations
Vasant J. Sheth Memorial Lecture
England’s efforts to colonize North America and India were born from the same impulse and at the same time. As early as the 1580s, the great apostle of English colonization Richard Hakluyt, Sr., thought of them in tandem, while the East India Company and the Virginia Company (whose employees established the first permanent English settlement in North America) were founded only six years apart, in 1600 and 1606, respectively.
Considered in imperial perspective, then, India and the United States have been linked for more than four hundred years, though for almost the first two centuries only indirectly. Ships of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could certainly sail between North America and the subcontinent, and the will was there. Direct trade between the two regions was prevented not by technology or indifference, but by policy.More
Rediscovering the Age of Discovery
In The Routledge Research Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400–1800: Oceans in Global History and Culture, edited by Claire Jowitt, Steve Mentz, and Craig Lambert. London: Routledge, 2020.
Among the most complex issues of early modern history is the nature of the European breakout onto the world ocean and the so-called ‘age of discovery’. Assessments of what happened and why, what is meant by words like ‘discovery’, and even what the era’s chronological limits are, change from generation to generation and place to place, and depend in part on who is considering the matter and in what context. A modern dictionary defines ‘discover’ as ‘to notice or learn, especially by making an effort’. Yet the seventeenth-century jurist Hugo Grotius maintained that discovery involved ‘actual seizure […] Thus the philologists treat the expressions “to discover” and “to take possession of” as synonymous’. A further difficulty arises from the entanglement of the motives behind the voyages of discovery, what was actually discovered, and what resulted from Europeans’ encounters with the rest of the world.More