Articles, Chapters, and Talks

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

Engelsberg Ideas, June 30, 2020

Historians are masters of teasing momentous events from apparently insignificant details. The most obvious such effort is Ray Huang’s 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline, which considered a number of little examined incidents and trends that took place in or began in 1587 and that, in hindsight, anticipated the collapse of the Ming Dynasty two or three generations later. In choosing what to expand upon in his study, Huang, writing in 1981, had the benefit of nearly four centuries of research, debate, and interpretation. We can be sure that his choices would have been wildly different had he been writing in 1587.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