Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (review)

Scholars of the seas often find themselves hovering in the interstices of academic discourse, floating between the borders of nation-states and continents, and suspended between fixed disciplinary boundaries. With an ambitious agenda, Seascapes (and the original 2003 conference from which it springs) aims to correct the inherent terra-centricity of academic area studies by beginning from the watery depths of the sea as the point of departure. To that end, in this volume, oceans, seas, their coasts, and the people who populate and travel within them constitute the primary sites of analysis. The central assertion of Seascapes is that "maritime peoples, environments, and dynamics deserve to be investigated, taught, and theorized in their own right" (3).

Indeed, the volume's agenda is wide and overarching, as it attempts to adjust the well-established land-based biases of standard academic categorization. However, when one begins with the seas, a vast and open realm emerges, with its own problems, assumptions, and issues. As a means to order the unruly contours of this water-based discourse, the editors of the volume structured the diverse chapters into four parts. The first part, "Constructs," presents three chapters that outline the basic terms of an ocean-centered discussion by looking at islands as critical nodes, ships that defy national labels, and the representational politics of sea-based identities in Southeast Asia. The second part, "Empires," turns to the relationship between landed colonial centers and their far-flung ocean territories, in the examples of the Iberian seaborne empire, Ottoman ventures in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, and the world of the British Atlantic. The third part, "Sociologies," matches up an essay on a port city with three chapters that highlight the mobility of seafarers and port laborers in the Caribbean and South Asia. The-fourth part, "Transgressors," is the most straightforward, as it deals with the clearly defined rubric of pirates and corsairs and includes cases from the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific.

However, the reader may find more salient and productive connections in the volume by reading across these subdivided parts, which each fit together with varying levels of cohesion and success. For instance, several scholars highlight the spatial complexities of maritime locales by exploring relationships between land and sea, while also considering the zonal tensions between sea and sea. As an example, John Gillis undermines the deep-seated notion of insularity in regard to islands by recasting Atlantic islands as the sites where seaborne empires were constituted. In the period from 1500 to 1800, islands were not peripheral; rather they provided access to continental interiors and served as the springboards for European networks of expansion. In addition, Kerry Ward explores the history of Cape Town as an African port city that is balanced between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean realms. In order to provide a sense of Cape Town's liminal status between worlds, she contrasts the ways in which the city has been cast within the frameworks of South African urban history, European colonial studies, and general maritime work. Another question that appears throughout the volume is how one may control far-flung and widespread ocean realms—politically, commercially, or legally. For instance, Eliga Gould explores the English-speaking Atlantic as a vast region divided into sectors, each with varying levels of adherence to a shared legal code. He reveals that lawlessness and impunity abounded in the western and southern regions of the Atlantic, in sharp contrast to their European counterparts. Emily Sohmer Tai overturns the common understanding of piracy as exclusively circumscribed within the realm of personal gain. Rather, in the twelfth- to the fifteenth-century Mediterranean, pirates engaged in maritime predation as a tool to contest the efforts of land-based political entities to territorialize and control the seas. Peter Shapinsky reveals how local maritime warlords of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Japan, who were often cast as pirates, assimilated the language of...