A Bounded and Boundless Sea

Historians have long examined the mechanisms by which the United States extended territory, but territorial extent has often been delineated in terrestrial terms—land, soil, and bedrock. Scholars who hew closely to conventional notions of territory have struggled to retain focus on the watery expanses betwixt and between, the oceans, which make up more than seventy percent of the planet. This is not to say that oceans have been overlooked as a realm of significance to U.S. power, a point evident in the longstanding attention in historical works to naval power encapsulated by Alfred Thayer Mahan’s theories or oceanic commerce conforming to Grotius’s principle for the law of the seas. While oceanic battles and treaties have been investigated, less attention has been paid to the marine environment itself in setting crucial conditions that at times enabled and at times constrained U.S. action. This is a point that Kurkpatrick Dorsey—a diplomatic and environmental historian whose work on oceans is an exception to the above trend—made in his field-spanning 2005 Bernath Lecture in Diplomatic History. In his remarks, Dorsey insisted that much work remained for historians in order to effectively foreground the material environment in histories of American militarism and foreign relations.¹

Jason W. Smith skillfully takes up this call in To Master the Boundless Sea: The U.S. Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire. In the process, Smith brings the marine environment, as well as the scientific knowledge generated around it, into the center of his analytic viewfinder. He shifts perspective from an exclusive focus on strategists and decision-makers to the hydrographers who made sense of marine assemblages, “from the ocean surface to the sea floor, from the atmosphere above to the tidal zones, shifting sandbars, and reefs” (p. 9).

Using hydrography—the science of measuring the physical elements of oceans and other bodies of water—as a lens, Smith manages to retain focus on U.S. institutions, particularly the U.S. Navy, and the seas simultaneously. Smith draws upon a combination of state and naval archives, papers at private collections, scientific publications, and canonical literary works to weave together what are often treated as separate strands of U.S. history. He offers an expedient route between literatures in military, naval, and maritime history on the one hand and histories of science and technology and environment on the other. This juxtaposition, in turn, allows for a critical reflection on numerous historical debates that pour far beyond the explicit subject of hydrography. However, despite an admirable and expressed commitment to historicize knowledge and to situate it in a broader cultural context, To Master the Boundless Sea struggles to move beyond the experiences and insights of elite, white men so central to the business of exploration. This narrow field of vision seems ill-suited to assessing oceanic thought in a period marked by mass migrations over the seas: those of enslaved peoples, coolie laborers, and competing imperial agents, to name a few. Smith also misses opportunities to connect the history of naval hydrography with richly documented processes of gendered and racialized ideologies suffusing naval and scientific professionalization. The result is that this work on the boundless oceans at times feels unnecessarily contained.

First, Smith’s work intersects with a growing literature in US history concerning the role of knowledge production in facilitating U.S. expansionism in continental contest, hemispheric pacification, and Cold War hegemony.² Such histories build, implicitly or explicitly, from insight in political theory and postcolonial studies that situate knowledge as inextricable from power, including Michel Foucault’s “governmentality,” Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” and James Scott’s “simplification.”³

In the case of nineteenth-century hydrography, Smith indexes a process by which Americans aimed to know the ocean and constructed—even in the absence of a clearly articulated imperial politics—a springboard from which imperial projects could launch. The impulse to...