The opening of the Atlantic
We humans are a land-bound species. While water covers most of the Earth, our civilizations were built on land, and the power of the state ends mere kilometers beyond the shoreline. The sea is a realm of circulation, a passage-way: an in-between space through which ships filled with slaves, spices, and shipping containers travel from origin to destination. But the sea is also a space of dreams and a projection screen for fantasies of unknown empires, utopias, and radical departures from an oppressive status quo. From Plato’s Atlantis to More’s Utopiaand from the pirates of the 1700s to their contemporary counterparts occupying radio waves and digital infrastructure, the sea is conceived of as a realm that marks, tests, and irritates the limits of state rule. Amid rising sea levels, sabotaged underwater pipes and cables, the renewed militarization of international waters, and the unraveling of the transatlantic order, it may be time to consider what it means to think politics not from the land, but from the sea.
Mediterranean civilizations, from Rome and Carthage to the Republic of Venice, were geographically enclosed in a world they knew. Without terra incognita to stir their curiosity, they did not spawn great explorers of the sea (though some traders, travelers and missionaries did follow the Silk Road into Asia). It was not until the 15th century that the nations of Europe began to look at the vast oceanic expanses to their West. The Mediterranean was a pond compared to the Atlantic; here were shores unmapped, winds and waters yet unnavigable. Over the next centuries, numerous technological innovations, From Dutch naval engineering to British horology (a good clock was indispensable for determining a ship’s longitude on a rotating planet), opened up this world to European adventurers and entrepreneurs. Colonial expansion, the slave trade, and the bounty of open sea fishing grounds promised riches that easily outshone the risk to life and limb.
Whaling took a special place in this techno-economic complex that, over the course of several centuries, put the oceans on the map. There is a difference between leaving port to head for another shore, and leaving port to hunt an itinerant animal. Before man set out to chase this leviathan from arctic to equator, fishermen mostly stuck to the coastline; it was the whale who emancipated mankind from the shore. While it took Columbus little over two months to traverse the Atlantic, whalers were often on board for three or four years, a time during which the self-sufficient capsule of the ship was their only home. Hunting whales to turn their blubber into lamp oil, man explored the oceans, became familiar with its currents and passages, and learned to inhabit “the watery part of the world” (Melville). Some say it was not Columbus, but a nameless Basque whaling crew who “discovered” America in the early 15th century. Renouncing the very ground under their feet, whalers were among the first humans to live what could be called an oceanic existence – a life-form choosing not earth, but water as its element.
The foundations of capitalism and imperialism as they developed in the 16th and 17th centuries could only be built up and maintained by a powerful maritime state. While the Spanish came in strong, their mercantilistic policies were ill-prepared to absorb the massive amounts of gold and silver coming in from their American colonies, leading to inflation and difficulties in financing the many wars in which they were embroiled. Around 1600, the Dutch took over as the dominant power on the seas. They developed a new form of colonialism in which the Crown granted private enterprise (such as the VOC and the WIC) the right to colonize territories, engage in trade, and maintain an army to protect their interests. The English, who gradually took over maritime superiority from the Dutch over the course of the 17th century, emphasized trans-Atlantic trade as the way to advance British power, while building a strong Navy to secure their global position. Ships and sailors were the basis of English wealth and power, which was consolidated with the formation of the Bank of England in 1694 and a slew of legislation and financial innovation in the surrounding years.
In an age when nations vied for monopolies over the transatlantic trade routes that were used to ship slaves, spices, silver, sugar and tobacco – with Portugal controlling most of the African routes and Spain the American ones – Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius introduced an idea that would govern maritime territories until today. In his 1609 book Mare Liberum, he held that, unlike land, the sea cannot be owned or controlled by anyone, whether individual, company, or nation. Sovereignty ends at the shore, and the sea is an international territory, a zone free from kings and borders, religion and law: a common area to be freely used by all. According to Grotius, freedom of trade was a natural right, and attempts to monopolize trade routes were a crime against nature. As an ascendant maritime power the Dutch certainly had an interest in not being bothered by the Spanish and the Portuguese. Be that as it may, Grotius’ arguments have shaped international maritime law and established the concept of the freedom of the seas, which is operative to this day.
Privateers and pirates
The 17th century witnessed the emergence of a hegemony that straddled both sides of the Atlantic. Securing this global economic order required a massive amount of materials and labor. Ships alone depended on the enclosure of forests to provide the stands of oak for their hulls and the fuel to forge the iron holding them together – and this is not to speak of the human and non-human commodities these ships were meant to transport and the crews at work transporting them. The value of this merchandise made intercontinental trade a risky business, and warring countries would often attack each other’s vessels. Privateers were a type of maritime mercenaries that captured merchant ships sailing under another country’s flag. The Spanish fleet carrying silver from the colonies was a popular target, and its ships were frequently attacked by the Dutch and the English in a struggle that was political and economic as well as religious. But while privateers operated under a veil of legality, on the open sea, laws are not written in stone – and either way they are impossible to enforce. Many privateers exceeded the limits set in their so-called letters of marque, or even held forged letters licensed by nonexistent states.
As to the workers, much like its terrestrial equivalent, the sailor proletariat was generally assembled by means of violence. Since the second half of the 17th century, many seamen serving the Royal Navy were forced into service by so-called “press gangs,” and most would die within two years. But violence breeds resistance, and it is difficult to police a coerced workforce on the open sea. Many ships were manned by international crews that worked closely together and exchanged life stories: not merely a means of intercontinental communication, the ship was a place where people from different continents communicated, and where experiences of oppression and rebellion spread by word of mouth. Considering the rough working conditions on most ships, the fact that salaries were often several years in arrears, and the obvious difficulties of keeping a crew under control with limited resources and without the proximity of government forces, it is hardly surprising that many crews were an unwieldy mass prone to riot, mutiny, and desertion. This brings us to the other side of the emergent transatlantic order, a side populated by a host of characters that fell through the cracks of, or quite simply opposed, the emerging Empire.
When a crew rebelled against its captain on the open sea, they would often hoist a black flag and say goodbye to the civilized world. While privateers sailed under a country’s flag and could return to that country or its allies, this luxury did not exist for pirates. A marine life-form by necessity, pirates had no choice but to renounce their country; branded as enemies of humanity, their return to the rule of law inevitably ended on the gallows. Aside from the famous skull and bones, the Jolly Roger often featured an hourglass, indicating that the crew knew that it was only a matter of time until their life of lawlessness would meet an often violent end. But while piracy had its trade-offs, the life on board a pirate ship was generally much better than that on board a merchant or navy vessel. Pirates divided loot more or less equally among the crew, limited the authority of the captain, rejected the brutal and oppressive ways in which merchant and Navy ships were run, and were happy to accept new members, whatever their nationality or the color of their skin. While some pirate ships stole cargo that included slaves, others accepted enslaved people as equals among their ranks. The pirate ship was a beacon of democracy in an undemocratic age, and from the beginnings of the triangular trade until the early 18th century piracy was an attractive idea for the many crews trapped at sea against their will.
“For whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh at the end of the 16th century – and indeed, to a large extent, global leadership was and still is decided on the ocean. But the transformation of the Atlantic into a zone for the accumulation of capital was accompanied by the growth of a maritime radical tradition that flourished below deck. The sea did not simply succumb to European imperialism. Much like the forest, it provided a habitat for unruly characters that laughed in the face of Empire and thrived on its peripheries. The ship was both an instrument of economic development and a stage for resistance against that same development, inhabited by those fleeing from the repression of Cromwell and his colleagues. Deserters, persecutees, mutineers, pirates and escaped slaves met, shared ideas, and organized on ships and in the maroons along the Atlantic coast. A place without place, from the 16th century until today, ships were instruments of capital as well as heterotopia, spaces in which another world could be imagined.
In 1712, the African slave trade was deregulated, greatly increasing the stakes of the transatlantic trade; and in 1713, the Peace of Utrecht consolidated European states and expelled pirates to the criminal edge of world history. Less than a century before, protestant monarchs had gladly set pirates loose on Spanish ships. Now, slave-trading capital required an orderly Atlantic system in which ships could move their merchandise undisturbed by non-state actors, and lobbied the British House of Commons for a more active role of the Navy in suppressing piracy. The traders’ concerns did not fall on deaf ears. In 1722, the English led a successful military campaign rounding up pirates along the West-African coast, executing many and putting their marked and maimed bodies on display to proclaim the state monopoly of maritime violence in a violent performance. In the 1720s, as pirates were either killed or forced into a different profession, and their strongholds on the Bahama’s and Madagascar destroyed or rendered unusable by a growing military presence, the Golden Age of Piracy came to an end.
Oceanic thought
Although piracy as a political force was subdued by the state, its subversive potential lives on in the realm of tales and memory. The sea remains an indomitable space, one that sparks fantasies of new beginnings, away from the oppressive traditions of continental Europe. In the second half of the 20th century, many pirate radio stations operated in a legal gray zone by broadcasting from international waters. One of these went so far as to occupy a military defense structure off the coast of England and declare sovereignty, thereby founding the micronation of Sealand (a nation whose royal family is plagued by attempted coups, revolutions, and hostile takeovers). More recently, the term piracy has been used to indicate copyright infringement, and reclaimed by groups like ThePirateBay (which at one point tried to buy Sealand) and the various political Pirate Parties to indicate a vaguely defined desire for freedom from government interference. Much like the sea, the Internet is a transnational space that irritates national law and in which the distinction between theft and communization is often undecidable.
Beyond this peculiar offspring of a legacy that is hardly less peculiar, perhaps we can identify some characteristics of what constitutes a maritime form of thinking, and what has constituted the attraction of the sea for adventurers, dreamers, and dissenters throughout the ages. To begin with, the sea is a great catalyst for intellectual development: while in feudal states, few people outside of the clerical elite could read, sustaining a maritime empire without literacy and cartography is virtually impossible. Needless to say, the sea is also a great facilitator of intercultural exchange, one that mocks the idea of the nation as a thin layer of human ego on an otherwise seamless world where borders dissolve in ebb and flow. Perhaps it is precisely the cosmopolitan nature of a port city like Amsterdam that gave Spinoza’s work its flavor of liberalism and interconnectedness. More than one philosophy matured under the salty air of the sea, however, and a free market champion like Adam Smith is unthinkable without Grotius’ doctrine of the freedom of the seas and the British exploitation of that same freedom. Both Carl Schmitt and Gilles Deleuze speculated on the differences between continental and maritime thought. Where continental thought is concerned with borders and demarcations, always busy drawing lines between conceptual territories, the philosophers of the great seafaring nations prefer to deal with openings and new beginnings.
Islands, whether real or imaginary, are places to begin anew; places in which separation coincides with creation, and in which the origin of something implies the end of something else. Literature and history are full of examples of this strange obsession that seems to have fascinated western minds for centuries. From the US Declaration of Independence to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and from Rousseau’s island ruminations to the libertarian tech utopia Próspera off the coast of Honduras (backed by Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen), the Occident has produced numerous stories in which insular existence is conceived as a rupture with the continent and a chance to do things differently. But between continent and island lies a substrate in which all traces are erased, and that makes these new beginnings possible. This substrate is the sea. “Indefinite as God” (Melville), the sea is a formless space in which the concepts of law and nation become inoperative. Where the earth is a surface on which history is inscribed, the sea holds no records and erases every trace. No scenic particularities, no landscape and no past, only the endless blue of water fading into the endless blue of sky. The shoreless sea, a non-place that blurs earthly distinctions. In constant movement yet always the same, here lies a rootless realm in which history appears to be suspended.
Water carries off, water washes away, water purifies. The Great Flood erased man’s wickedness, so that Noah and his crew could make a fresh start. The aquatic existence wipes out sin, tears out roots, and dissolves national identifications. But how does one think in the absolute open of the ocean, without a shore in sight? In the dreams of European man, the sea has long been linked with madness. Reason belongs to terra firma; it needs stable ground under its feet. The sea, on the other hand, is an infinite and uncertain space in which reason’s demarcations become unstable. Madness is oceanic, the flowing outside of territorial reason, and something to be conquered by the sovereign European mind. The image of the Ship of Fools enacts this age-old association of water and madness: the madmen on the ship are confined in their very freedom, far from the security of home and hearth. In landlessness alone resides the highest truth, says Melville – but as Ahab well knew, the loss of land and territoriality means nothing less than madness (a century later Deleuze and Guattari would reach the same conclusion). As humanity shatters every self-imposed limit on temperature increase and glaciers melt at an alarming rate, the loss of land becomes far more than metaphorical: the specter of an expanding ocean that steadily erodes the very gains of civilization – those fragile constructs we once believed secure – looms at the edge of our collective imagination.
Quelili
There are biographical reasons for my recent interest in the sea. Since 2018, I have been working on the Foundry, a self-organized artist residency situated in a Galician village that was abandoned half a century ago. Together with many others I renovated the house, tended the garden, investigated the region’s history of mining and forest management, and learned how land became property. During all this, I began to feel part of a territory, and that territory became part of who I was. I also learned what it means to defend one’s territory: I joined collectives that take down invasive Eucalyptus trees on Galician common lands; I protested the plans for a megafactory that would produce fibers out of those same trees; I defaced the offices of a German holding that bought a mine polluting the area. Much of my activism would be called “defensa del territorio” in Latin America – an important political program in areas threatened by infrastructural development (from the Maya Train in Chiapas to the ZADs in France). But depending on what the territory is defended against, this kind of politics can easily mutate into less savory forms: a fine line separates territorial defense from Blut und Boden.
While the Foundry is as sedentary a project as a project can be, I am now part of a more nomadic undertaking. Inspired by the Gira Zapatista in 2021, when a delegation of the Mexican guerrilla group traveled to Galicia with a sailing boat (die Stahlratte), the Quelili project has recently bought a ship that aims to connect different groups across the Atlantic. In the trajectory of my own political thinking, getting involved with a boat felt like a logical step beyond the limits of space-based politics. The end of the Roman Empire was prepared in the monasteries that cultivated and experimented with different forms of social and economic organization, and I believe that the end of the global neoliberal order is being prepared in numerous spaces that exist on the periphery of state and capital today (I have mapped some of these spaces on FreeingSpace.com). But while neoliberalism relies on a global network for its survival, the spaces that try to fashion an alternative operate in relative isolation, and the work of sustaining them is often too consuming to leave much time for growing networks. With Quelili, we want to connect activists on both sides of the Atlantic without relying on the fossil fuels that made the current global order possible, and to think a politics of the sea that goes beyond trade, war, and extraction.
The course of our ship lies yet uncharted, but in the coming years, we hope to tap into the history of maritime radicalism described above, and to play a small role in reviving what might be called the Atlantic undercommons – those shadowed realms that needed to be erased for state and capital to dominate the oceans. Before it was reduced to a stage for international trade and military posturing, the Atlantic was home to a rebellious multitude that robbed, fled, and resisted the forces of global Empire. Back then, Empire took the form of boats carrying slaves and silver; today, it’s digital transactions and container ships. Little difference; as long as the sea is held hostage by the economy, its potential as a realm for new beginnings is curtailed, and as long as borders exist for people but not for capital, only the rich profit from globalization. While a tiny sailing boat will hardly solve the great problems of our era, perhaps the answer to fascism lies on the open sea rather than in the soil of the nation-state. In the words of Michel Foucault: “In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.”
Let’s be pirates, not police.
Sources:
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.
Carl Schmitt, Land und Meer.
Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces.’
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux.
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra.