Capitalism and the Sea

“Global capitalism is a seaborne phenomenon. This simple fact gives us multiple reasons for thinking about the relationship between capitalism and the sea today. The global ocean still serves as a trade route, strategic space, fish bank, and supply chain as it has since the advent of capitalism (and indeed long before then). Seabeds continue to be drilled for their fossil fuels and minerals, and coastlines developed for real estate and leisure. Container ports now act as regional hubs for the complex networks of global commerce, transferring commodities and generating value across different maritime-dependent sectors of the world economy ranging from shipbuilding to insurance, freight transport to cruises. The legacies of, and continuities in, seaborne slavery and bondage - as well as the modes of resistance and internationalism they engendered - remain central to emancipatory politics across the globe. Bioprospecting has extended capital's reach to the deepest underwater frontiers, while the offshore world accumulates, displays, and recirculates the wealth, surplus, and excess of the planet's super-rich populations and their often indistinguishable criminal associates. The toxic discharges of our carbon civilization have for centuries now been absorbed by the oceans, expanding, warming, and acidifying the blue-water part of the planet in ways that will bring unpredictable but irreversible consequences for the rest of the biosphere. These are all aspects of the complex interaction between capitalism and the sea that we address in this volume, showing how neither can be fully understood without the other.”*

* Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás, Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World. (London: Verso, 2021), 432 pages, ISBN 9781784785239.

💧Hydrofeminism
💧Fertile Water
💧More-than-human Agency
💧Ecological Economics