This chapter focuses on Captain Harry Foster Dean, a Black sea captain who has been largely forgotten but belongs to a lineage of Black Americans active in African repatriation movements from at least the early nineteenth century onward. Dean’s entire life was driven by the spirit of what we may call maritime Pan-Africanism—a variant of Pan-Africanism built upon aspirations of maritime capability. This chapter reveals what Marcus Garvey’s more familiar program, symbolized by the Black Star Line, can tell us about Dean’s significance to both Black Oceanic studies and the study of empire.

This case presents a medical scenario involving a 25-year-old crew member aboard a large commercial fishing vessel who sustains severe trauma after being struck by a swinging metal crate. The patient suffers from a left-sided hemopneumothorax and spleen laceration, resulting in hemodynamic instability. The medical officer, working in an austere environment with limited resources, must rapidly assess and manage the patient using available supplies, such as a chest tube kit, uncrossmatched blood, and basic first aid materials. Key teaching objectives include identifying both visible and hidden injuries, managing critical trauma in resource-limited conditions, and coordinating with shore-based emergency medical services. The scenario emphasizes quick decision-making and life-saving interventions, such as chest tube placement and blood transfusion, without access to advanced imaging or laboratory testing. The exercise challenges responders to stabilize the patient while awaiting additional support, preparing them for trauma care in isolated or resource-scarce environments.

The chapter traces a period of growing self-confidence in Irish letters that might seem surprising in the context of the post-Waterloo recession but takes some of its charge from the strength and eventual success of the campaign for Catholic Emancipation. Between 1815 and 1830, Irish writers felt able to look more closely at the island on their own terms, a move that meant for many a new interest in coastal locations and the shaping force of the sea. The chapter proposes new watery co-ordinates for mapping Irish romanticism via the cases of Gerald Griffin, Charles Robert Maturin and Jeremiah Joseph Callanan.

The chapter focuses on the experiences and representations of the shipboard community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to explore the changes in the imagining of ‘people’ and questions of individual and collective identity. By closely reading the novels by Joseph Conrad, James Hanley, and B. Traven, alongside the theoretical works of Sigmund Freud, Gustave Le Bon, and Hannah Arendt, it argues how fictional form diagnoses and dramatises with singular power the gradual move from Victorian ideas of the ‘crowd’ to an interwar imagining of peoples’ history and the language of rights. In the process, the chapter addresses a range of issues, from questions of race, class, and the body to the condition of statelessness and the growth of proletarian consciousness, which push the maritime novel in new directions.

In 1788, John Marshall made a prediction that was more prescient than he realized: The federal courts the new Constitution called for would be “the means of preventing disputes with foreign nations.” Marshall could not have known it, but for the next several decades international disputes over persons, ships, and goods caught up in maritime war would wash onto American shores, and into federal courtrooms. The courts’ decisions were essential to the United States’ emergence as a sovereign and independent nation. But preoccupation with Marshall’s famous constitutional rulings has obscured this story of judicial nation-building at sea. And while we have grown accustomed to the idea that “foreign affairs” are the domain of the legislative and executive branches, the political leaders who first tried to solve the puzzle of constitutional governance did not hew to such rigid notions of institutional responsibility. If Marshall’s legacy is the establishment of both judicial and national authority, this book shows that he and his contemporaries did so, first and foremost, at sea.

After Cannae, Hannibal needed a maritime base to allow reinforcements and supplies to reach him. But he failed to win over or capture Naples, an old Roman naval ally, and had mixed results elsewhere in Campania: he was successful at proud Capua. He was under-supported from Carthage for all his time in Italy, whether because they could not or would not help him. In 215, he signed a treaty of alliance with Philip V of Macedon. This brought few benefits to either party and would long be remembered by the Romans. Syracuse in Sicily went over to Hannibal in 214 but was recaptured by Claudius Marcellus (late 212). Similarly most of coastal Tarentum in south Italy was in his hands, but only between 212 and 209. In 211, when Capua was under Roman pressure, Hannibal marched on Rome as a diversionary tactic but soon withdrew. Capua fell and was harshly treated.

In 2012, Britain’s National Environmental Research Council (NERC) proposed a 25 per cent budget cut for the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the organization responsible for science and administration in the British Antarctic. When BAS Director Nicholas Owens learned of these proposed cuts, he ignited a political maelstrom by taking the matter straight to the Foreign Office, sidestepping NERC Director Duncan Wingham. In response, Prime Minister David Cameron pledged support for BAS and ordered the funding dispute resolved. Then the crisis worsened when Owens was suspended and temporarily replaced by Ed Hill, the director of the National Oceanographic Centre.

This chapter argues that the conflict at sea was an important and frequently overlooked part of the Napoleonic Wars. Focusing primarily on the Royal Navy and French maritime forces, but also mentioning the navies of Spain, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and United States, it outlines the manifold ways in which maritime warfare shaped wider events on land, and helped determine the conflict’s final outcome. It demonstrates that French attempts to invade Britain were successfully rebuffed by the Royal Navy, ensuring that Britain remained in the conflict. The chapter then offers a more modern take on the commonly misunderstood Battle of Trafalgar, arguing that it was far from decisive and did little to change the course of the war. The naval conflict continued in earnest after 1805, and the war of trade became all-consuming, particularly after the inception of ‘Napoleon’s Continental system’. Here the navy offered a stubborn resistance to the French Emperor’s objectives, helping to encourage illicit trade with the European continent while also expanding Britain’s empire and mercantilist reach elsewhere in the globe. Finally, it demonstrates that maritime support was crucial to the land war, not least Wellington’s Peninsula campaign.

This chapter surveys the major developments in the economic history of the Greek world in the classical period (479–323 BCE). While agricultural practices and productive capacities did not change dramatically, this was a period characterized by a massive increase in the demand for certain commodities, especially timber for the ship-building and monumental-construction efforts of the period and grain to meet the dietary needs of a growing human population. It also considers the major developments in the supply and circulation of coinage in the classical period and the emergence of private banking and the expansion of credit, all of which facilitated both local and long-distance trade. As trade intensified throughout the Aegean and poleis developed more sophisticated institutions for local governance, they developed strategies to derive revenue from trade and imposed regulations on both the production and trade of commodities in which they had a special interest.

This chapter “examine[s] the encounter between Irish literature as a ‘terrestrial form of thought,’ and the ocean as a putatively alien environment.” John Brannigan draws on a host of Environmental Humanities scholarship, most specifically from Blue Humanities; his reading treats the oceanic as a critical and material space providing alternative epistemologies to humanity’s dominant land-based knowledge systems. In the “encounter with the maritime” such terrestrial thinking “would find a scene of negation, radical otherness, or utopian or dystopian release.” The chapter begins with an important reminder of “The Real Map of Ireland, a dataset resulting from the Irish National Seabed Survey which mapped the 220 million acres of “land under the sea” over which Ireland is entitled to claim sovereignty and “exclusive economic rights” under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).” This new submarine “territory” that extends to almost a thousand kilometers across the Atlantic Ocean and the Maury Channel, and to the south over three hundred kilometers, Brannigan argues, “marks a submarine treasure map” and is open to capital’s inexhaustible extractive appetite.

This chapter looks at transport innovation in the mining sector between 1990 and 2016. Shipping the mining output is an expensive and in most cases an unavoidable component of the mining process. The importance of transport, in the logistics chain of getting raw materials to final users/consumers, increases over time. This triggers the need to innovate in the transport sector, which leads to making mining locations that were more remote, accessible. This chapter uses patent data to explore transport innovations in mining, both within the mining area and outside, in the form of haulage to destination. It explores all relevant modes of transport for mining sector, namely road, rail, conveyers and maritime. Through patent citation analysis, the chapter shows that most innovation originates from the transport sector and is then adopted into the mining sector.

The introductory chapter provides geographical contexts and briefly outlines both the history of the search for the Northwest Passage and the Franklin expedition. It gives an overview of the searches that ensued for the missing expedition over twelve years and emphasises the centrality of visuality and the importance of skills like drawing to shipboard life, as well as highlighting the gaps in the literature that this book will fill, in particular the neglect of rich primary-source visual material (such as on-the-spot sketches and watercolours) as a key source of information and evidence. It notes, too, the sparseness of scholarly work addressing this period of Arctic exploration history and the absence of detailed visual analyses of documentary art from the Arctic. This chapter introduces the key debates in the study of exploration literature, Victorian visuality, and historical geography. These include the gendered space of polar exploration, the imperial gaze, and theories of space and place. It looks too at how visual evidence can be seen as layers of representation, with each response departing further from the original sketch.

The conclusion shows how persistent colonial chaos has been in the southern Red Sea. Local diplomacy retains a distinctly competitive and militaristic flavour to this day. International competition and realpolitik in the southern Red Sea has, if anything, intensified in the post-Cold War era. Looking at Puntland, south-west Yemen and Djibouti today, we see the Djiboutian government depends on money and recognition from renting space to foreign navies, while in Somalia and Yemen, rival power brokers seek to translate acts of maritime aggression into international negotiations for military and civil assistance. Opportunities to rekindle a regional culture of international cooperation exist, but are deeply submerged beneath the depths of colonial history.