“Global capitalism is a marine phenomenon.” With this phrase, Liam Campling and Alejandro Colas, professors at Queen Mary University and Birkbeck College respectively, begin their book Capitalism and the Sea, published in 2021 by Verso. In this way, they underline how closely tied to the sea is the way of production and consumption that has dominated for several centuries. That is why they rush to underline that the sea is a social space and not just a natural field. Not because its particular natural, climatic and geomorphological characteristics do not play a role, sometimes determining social practices as well – let us consider the role that climatic phenomena, forms of seasonality and sea currents played in the development of trade, but because the social relations that develop in capitalist modernity they can transform the field.
The position of the two authors does not come from some reproduction of the positions that consider that the birth of capitalism came from the expansion of commercial transit practices, thus from the sphere of circulation. After all, they are well aware of the objections raised against this scheme, already in the 1970s, by the stream of “political Marxism”, with researchers such as Robert Brenner or Ellen Maxins Wood insisting that the “moment of birth” of of capitalism is not to be found in the expansion of trade but in the emergence of capitalist social relations of production in the English countryside and the forms of private appropriation of common lands. However, they underline the importance that maritime trade circuits had in the consolidation and reproduction of the social system we used to call capitalism, but also the new form and dimension that both maritime trade and fishing took within the new social condition, including the great scale of slave trade that marked early capitalist modernity.
It is no coincidence, as the two authors note, that institutions such as the London Stock Exchange, insurance cooperatives such as Lloyds’ and to a large extent the very concept of the joint-stock company were born out of maritime trade and the need to be able to secure the funds to organize large transports – but also to insure goods against many risks. Let us not forget that at the height of colonialism the two major East India companies, the English and the Dutch, not only had great economic power but also military power.
The law of the sea
The law of the sea itself was largely a creation of the new demands of the maritime expansion of capitalism. This was reflected both at the beginning of the free seas – as early as the time of Grotius – which reflected the power of the great colonial and commercial powers, but gradually, as the vast resources of the sea became apparent, from the catch to the wealth beneath from the bottom, they also led to the emergence of more and more sovereignty rights in the sea as well, culminating in the establishment and incorporation in UNCLOS, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, of the concept of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), although nowadays and in the face of the ongoing climate catastrophe it is preferable that much of the undersea resources, especially hydrocarbons, remain untapped. In this background, maritime power became an integral part of claiming an upgraded role within the international system, as a deterrent mechanism but also as a defense even to non-state actors, as shown by the confrontation with the various variations of piracy over the centuries, up to in our days
At the same time, the sea is a resource exploitation field. This is particularly evident in the way in which the two authors present the development of fisheries and in particular the way in which a very specific type of industrial fishing develops which is closely related to the parallel development of the food standardization and long-term preservation industry. From 19th century whaling to all modern forms of mass fishing of fish primarily for the food industry, such as tuna, examples abound.
And of course the sea is a field of work, as both the merchant navy and fishing, especially ocean fishing, rely on wage labor, in jobs that are at the same time particularly demanding, since they require a wider set of skills, particularly dangerous (there have been periods where even a fifth of the total number of sailors was lost due to shipwrecks, disease and hardship), with hierarchies that often follow ethnic or racial lines, but which at the same time historically allowed the formation of strong relationships of solidarity and collectivity and often collective resistance between sailors.
Maritime cosmopolitanism
The sea has traditionally been associated with the concept of cosmopolitanism. This is not just about the cosmopolitanism involved in international trade and the movement of goods from one point to another, or the multinational nature of businesses in this industry. The two authors underline that the tradition of multinational crews, which even today is a very frequent phenomenon, if not the norm, in ocean-going shipping, shapes the conditions of another, emancipating, cosmopolitanism of work.
