All history is maritime history
USNI Blog, Oct. 1, 2019.
Few subjects are more hotly debated by naval officers, policy makers, and historians than the strategic implications and definition of sea power, a concept first developed by the U.S. naval officer and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan in his pioneering work The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783.
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.
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
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.
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
The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du Nord 25:4 (2015): 464–65.
A book entitled China on the Sea: How the Maritime World Shaped China might reasonably be expected to focus on maritime affairs, especially the activities of Chinese mariners, merchants, and officials. As Zheng writes in her introduction, she wants to reassess Qing China by “putting the seas at the center of the narrative and using the oceans to elucidate the complexity of Chinese history.” While the book is full of fascinating vignettes about how an increasingly open-door policy towards foreign trade exposed the Chinese to a variety of imports, Chinese mariners and maritime trade-related institutions are all but absent from most of the book; the index contains no entries for “crew,” “port,” or “ships.”More