3. Just One Last Watery Ghost-Dance?

Beyond Occidentalism: Waves of Imperialism, Oceanic Conjunctures

How do we think about imperial formations in terraqueous dialectical relation? I have suggested that Gramsci’s shifting writings on passive revolution have a sense of waves of revolution and hegemony that both cancel and preserve, or sublate (superare), specific struggles and forms of discipline. Each conjuncture draws on the remains of prior forms, and no hegemonic form lasts forever. While Gramsci uses the term in relation to European revolutionary waves that made a world of nation states, we might keep his notes on the sea in mind as we ask how imperial power accumulates in waves that continue to shape oceanic conjunctures of the past and present. Even though the deep ocean might seem as if it were a tabula rasa, ready for corporate plunder, we might find multiple waves of imperial power have already shaped this way of seeing.

Consider Campling and Colás’s periodization of three eras of oceanic capitalism: commercial capitalism (1651–1849), industrial capitalism (1850–1973) and neoliberal capitalism (1974–present.)9 Obviously, one era doesn’t end in 1849 with another beginning on New Year’s Day of 1850. Gramsci’s conjunctural approach refuses to separate space and time, exploring instead how imperial power accumulates through particular relations of dispossession and settlement, repression and incitement to struggle. In fact, while his categories changed across his work, he was quite steadfastly interested in exactly this task.

Consider again the debate between Hugo Grotius in his 1609 Mare liberum (Free sea) and John Selden’s 1618 Mare claus um (Closed sea). This was a product of a particular oceanic conjuncture in which Grotius was conscripted to defend the Dutch East India Company (Dutch: Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) in their seizure of the prized Portuguese carrack the Santa Catarina, the sale of which increased the capital of the VOC by 50 percent; this action during wartime required the legal-ideological rebuttal of the Papal division of the non-Catholic world into Spanish and Portuguese zones, and the oceans into a Spanish mare clausum, from the Mar del Sur (the Pacific) to the Caribbean Sea up to the line of Tordesillas, and a Portuguese mare clausum comprising the Mar da Etiopía (South Atlantic) and Mar da Índia. Grotius argued that the ocean cannot and should not be appropriated by any nation, and that it should be a free zone of transit and transaction; but this was a defense of Dutch imperial right to the oceans in the name of freedom. Grotius’s position helped establish territorial sovereignty as key to the military and juridical power enforcing freedom of trade and navigation. Selden’s Mare clausum was an argument for exclusion of Dutch fishermen off Britain’s coasts, and it was also an argument for territorialization of oceanic zones as fishing grounds.10 Grotius and Selden were not two sides of an abstract debate. Their arguments emerged through the maritime geopolitics of seventeenth century mercantile empires from the East Indies to the North Sea. The arguments actually spanned Grotius life and multiple oceanic conjunctures.

Alison Rieser recasts this account in a surprising way through the argument that the biological properties and habits of the Atlantic herring helped shape the doctrine of the freedom of the seas. These tiny fish historically migrate from spawning grounds off the coasts of Britain and Scandinavia to winter in the deep Northeast Atlantic. They inhabit the surface at night and descend to the depths in daytime as an evolutionary response to predators. A valuable source of livelihood as well as of revenue to English and Scottish landlords, merchants, and monasteries, the Atlantic herring was the topic of naturalistic observation around the North Atlantic. Timely arrivals of herring shoals were noted; nonarrivals were interpreted as divine punishment. Herring dies when removed from the sea, and it spoils quickly, and so is either eaten or preserved for transport to market. Grotius was interested in these natural properties; he thought migratory shoals reflected God’s voice through the rhythms of nature. Of course, he was not thinking about herring when he wrote Mare liberum in relation to the lucrative East Indies. Yet, Scottish fishermen apparently heard the argument as if it had to do with the defense of their fishing grounds from Dutch fishing vessels. When James I broke with his predecessor Elizabeth’s free-seas policy and sponsored a response to Grotius, ostensibly with his Scottish subjects in mind, his son Charles backed Selden’s Mare Clausaum, and Selden’s view of the sea was not the sea beyond the horizon that concerned Grotius, but rather the taxable coastal waters. Grotius, late in his life, imprisoned and then in exile, altered his position to one that permitted sovereignty in the interests of stewardship of fishing grounds and could not be convinced by Dutch merchants to rebut Selden. So, in a way, Rieser can argue that the herring had intervened in the course of the debates, even though their own populations would rise and fall as a consequence. In terms of Coronil’s three post-Occidentalist modalities (erasing the Other, folding it into the Self, and using the Other to destabilize the Self), this account of the entry of the herring into the law of the sea exemplifies the second, a folding in of the oceanic into terracentic history.

A different way of thinking about oceanic conjunctures comes into view in Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s classic The Many-Headed Hydra, which, among other things is a study of the making of the British maritime imperial state over the long eighteenth century as a project of “hydrarchy” built through the maritime infrastructure of empire and the violent suppression of waves of struggle across all shores of the Atlantic. Part of their task is a revisionist historiography of “the Age of Revolution” to demonstrate its omnipresent violence, but also the revolutionary solidarities it did and might have produced. As C. L. R. James had insisted about preconditions for revolution in Saint Domingue, their book argues that revolutionary activity threatened the sinews of imperial capital, the maritime infrastructure itself, so that the Atlantic conjuncture was also a powerful expression of hegemony. There is a red thread running through the book, a notion of the sublation of struggle signaled by the anachronistic use of a radical keyword from our time, “multitude.” chapter 4 returns to the archival challenge that the book foregrounds by turning to the work of Julius Scott and others.

When the British fiscal-military state came to power over the long eighteenth century, through its reliance on privateers and its ruthless attacks on piracy, it did so on an imperial oceanic stage in which multiple imperial powers competed over the sinews of mercantile and naval supremacy. The consequence across oceans, Lauren Benton shows us, with the Ottoman and Mughal empires in mind, was a differentiated “interimperial sea space that could not be owned but could be dominated.”11

Sujith Sivasundaram shifts the problematic of the age of revolutions to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, in his view forgotten in the focus on the Atlantic and Caribbean. From these other shores of the global South, the age of revolution was one of British imperial counterrevolution, of “the spread of British trade and rhetorical commitments to humanity and civilization; and the spread of war, weapons and violent contests.” When British colonialism arrived as a maritime event in South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope in 1795 and in Île de France (Mauritius) in 1810, its ideological focus was in upholding “free trade” and policing “Jacobinism,” a label bandied about in all directions including against the Dutch VOC. Sivasundaram’s argument is that “the British neutralized this age of revolutions, an age of indigenous assertion, and co-opted concepts of liberty, free trade, reason, progress, printed expression and even projections of selfhood.”12 This is precisely the kind of differentiated event legible through Gramsci’s passive revolution heuristic.

Consider Joseph Fradera’s account of the destruction and reconstruction of monarchical empires through the Atlantic revolutionary cycle, as Britain, France, Spain, and United States became liberal “imperial nations.” Fradera’s Imperial Nation is a work of grand synthesis that asks how new imperial constitutions, across empires facing widespread hegemonic crises, defended the rights of metropolitan citizens in relation to noncitizens in imperial peripheries. Fradera does not attend to the intellectual lives or interventions by these denizens, unlike for instance James or many others in his wake, but Fradera does help us think about how European imperial states simultaneously preserved and modified republican ideals in the extension of imperial national territory. And yet the ocean remains a backdrop to imperial power, a constitutive absence, like Borges’s camels in the Koran.

So, how might the ocean enter the narrative? Richard Drayton argues that it is only very recently, and briefly, that nineteenth-century industrial technology has been able to harness fossil fuels to create a kind of unimpeded mastery over natural energies.13 He seems to suggest that this illusion of mastery has come and gone, and that deeper oceanographic histories might yet have lessons for us in a time of waning mastery. This is precisely the temporal structure suggested by Aravamudan in the opening passage in this book. Consider this passage from Drayton:

Three million years ago, a fragile island of crust we call today Panama and Costa Rica, rose to connect Nicaragua to Colombia. The bridging of the Americas, and the enclosure of the Caribbean basin, caused a massive change in the world’s climate. By separating the Atlantic from its sister, it prevented the dilution of all the super salty and warm water accumulated in the smaller ocean during the summer months. North through the gap between Cuba and the Yucatan, mixed with some silty gifts of the Mississippi, a warm salty flow bends around Florida, to become the Gulf Stream which later cools and sinks deep in the North Atlantic to push a southwards stream bending in another gyre around the south Atlantic, until the Arctic flows into the Antarctic, scooping through another gyre to drive eastwards into the Indian, the Pacific, with arms forcing around and north until around the Cape, the Agulhas bends into the Benguela current to push across to Brazil and the Caribbean, so completing what oceanographers called “the global conveyor belt.”

And he goes on: “These flows of energy establish where and how human history is most likely to be made. They may be resisted, . . . but they encourage particular paths of movement, particular moments of engagement, accretion, confrontation.” The Northeast Atlantic trade winds teach us “why the Caribbean and Brazil were the critical initial zones of European colonial adventure in the New World. . . . Follow the south equatorial current in the Pacific and you travel with the silver of Peru on the Manila galleon. Follow it to the Indian Ocean and see where it slides close to the Equatorial counter current and you understand why Mauritius was described as the clef des Indes [key to India].” And many more of like descriptions could be added.

There are important insights in the environmental determinism, not just for the Age of Sail. Since almost 70 percent of the Caribbean’s waters come from the south, escaping slaves and convicts tried to catch the Guiana current; and earlier still, Amerindian migrations to the Antilles were from the Guianas and eastern Venezuela, as were forms of oceanic way-finding. While, Drayton suggests that we expect Indigenous knowledge to be the basis of anthropological, navigational, and botanical knowledge, Simon Schaffer’s work on Newton’s Principia (book 3) shows that the history of physics also relied on field observation and measurement through the French Academy of Sciences and its imperial intellectual circuit through Senegal, Martinique, and French Guiana.14 With Schaffer’s intervention, we have a destabilizing of a terracentric and Eurocentric history of physics by subaltern and oceanic processes, akin to Coronil’s third Occidentalist modality.

A more decisive destabilization of Eurocentric thallasology is apparent in Alexis Wick’s beautifully written The Red Sea: In Search of Lost Space, which contrasts the centrality of the maritime in European modernity with the terrestrial geographical imagination of the Ottoman Empire. Wick’s exploration is in part a geohistory of the Ottoman Red Sea, as well as an account of its historiographic absence until the sea was enframed as a scientific object. But ultimately this account of a spectral Red Sea that was and was not is meant very precisely to destabilize the combination of the European human sciences and the new imperialism that, in combination, created their geographical objects; that is the main argument, indebted to Edward Said and Timothy Mitchell. As lucid as it is, it is an account meant to destabilize the thallasology of the West.15

I contrast these attempts at thinking beyond terracentrism with Linebaugh and Rediker’s Many-Headed Hydra, which opens with a ruse of natural history in a reading of Rachel Carson as if planetary currents set the stage for the “Herculean” task of making the violent transatlantic order. And it is a ruse because the myth of Hercules and the Hydra was part of attempts at forging hegemony over a constantly struggled oceanic space. In Rediker’s work on the slave ship, the terrible animacy of the ocean comes into view in dialectical relation to the production of terror on the ship. The slave ship was a “moving reef” bringing along fish that feed on its wastes, and in particular significant numbers of sharks of different kinds, consciously encouraged to help enforce the despotic discipline of the ship as a factory for the making of slave labor. The terror of the shark was used to discipline desertion and rebellion amongst both slaves and crew. Rediker shows that human–animal relations were vitally important in a political sense. An abolitionist broadside makes this clear: “The Petition of the Sharks of Africa” satirizes the position of sharks who stand to lose their delectable floating dungeons were the slave trade to be abolished.16

Meg Samuelson has a wonderful response to Rediker’s argument that slave ships were factories for the production of race and labor. After an engaging reading of Damien Hirst’s shark tanks, Samuelson writes: “It seems, like Hirst, they [slave ships] also manufactured sharks. . . . Thinking with sharks compels attention to the despoilation of black lives and black lands by racial capitalism as well as to how this despoilation has ensnared sharks in an injurious net of cultural inscription. It brings to the fore the uneven distribution of vulnerability and grievability between and within species by surfacing the human-and-natural histories in which sharks were used to cast the majority of the human population beyond the pale of life-that-matters by reducing their status to meat.”17

In this dialogue between Rediker and Samuelson we have a powerful approach to post-terracentric explanation attentive to thinking relationally and differentially about sociocultural and natural histories, broadening questions of necropolitics to the more-than-human oceans. I have mentioned Stephanie Smallwood’s Saltwater Slavery, which can also be read as an attempt at creating a particular “terraqueous structure of feeling” as people relived the terror of the Middle Passage as waves of slaves arrived in America’s Black communities.18 Another kind of post-terracentric account comes from Jennifer Gaynor’s historical anthropology of the Sama maritime people, whose interdidal lives are usually written out of accounts of commercial, military, and political life that they were active participants in shaping.19 And another kind of approach is in rethinking the colonial-capitalist littorals in the marshlands on the verge of urban drainage in Debjani Bhattacharyya’s study of Calcutta in Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta. What is important in this study is that land reclamation helps us understand in a differentiated way the making of speculative land markets. Bhattacharya also draws on Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha’s representations of terraqueous landscapes, from the Ganga to the Mississippi.

My own research on early-twentieth-century Durban, on South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast, shows how former indentured laborers transformed neglected marshlands south of what was hoped to be a white city, through small farming that eventually took over the city’s food system, providing cheap fruit and vegetables to the white city and effectively creating a parallel city that was the basis of Durban’s distinctive demotic life and politics. What lies historiographically forgotten, to take a page from Wick’s “Red Sea,” is the Indian Ocean-ness of Durban’s political life, mobilized in struggles to end apartheid.20

Before leaving the topic of waves of imperial oceanics, let us return to the sea that concerned Gramsci, and to how we might think of the Pax Americana oceanically.

Gramsci’s Sea, the Pax Americana, and the Coming Cold War

Concerning Britain’s nineteenth-century rise to global industrial and colonial dominance Britain, Campling and Colás argue that “the Royal Navy upheld the Grotian conception of the high seas as nobody’s property, since it was only Britain that was in a position to fully exploit the oceanic commons.” This was built on the delegitimization of privateering, and by the Royal Navy’s privileges of stopping and seizing maritime goods, a legacy of its antipiracy police power. This is important for Gramsci’s insight that the Pax Americana is built on British imperial foundations. When the imperial ocean was industrialized through undersea telegraph cables, steamship circulation of goods and people, intensified fishing and whaling, and by the turn of the century, the militarization of the undersea by submarines, torpedoes, and mines, oceanic industrial capitalism was already war by other means.21

The naval arms race of the early twentieth century was fueled by thinkers like the American Alfred Mahan, whose 1890 book The Influence of Sea Power upon History argued a conception of geopolitical dominance through power over oceanic highways that effectively deprived the enemy of maritime routes. And this was ideologically key to the off-continent journey of the U.S. “Manifest Destiny” as an empire state as it moved offshore to a network of overseas naval bases. Mahan saw the importance of the Pacific Ocean to U.S. imperial power. Gramsci’s concerns in Notebook 2 were precisely with this oceanic conjuncture of the interwar period and for what the Pax Americana in the Pacific would inaugurate.

I want to speculate a bit about the elements of the twentieth-century oceanic conjuncture from the perspective of transformations of oceanic hegemony. Gramsci’s concepts of passive revolution and hegemony presume a field of struggle, which we attend to more carefully in the final chapter. I would like to return to Laleh Khalili’s Sinews of War and Trade for the precision with which it centers on the unusual keyword sinew.22 The Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun sinew as “a strong fibrous cord serving to connect a muscle with a bone,” and also figuratively as “strength, energy, force” or “the main strength, mainstay, or chief supporting force” (as in John Ruskin’s 1857 use: “The discipline of the masses has hitherto knit the sinews of battle”), and the OED records, since the sixteenth century, the related expression “the sinews of war, i.e. money” (as on the 1751 catastrophe of the H.M.S. Wager: “That part of the World, from whence their immense Wealth, the Sinews of War, is chiefly derived”). Finally, the verb to sinew is “to run through, tie together, cover over with, or with, sinews” or “to supply with sinews; to strengthen as by sinews; to nerve, harden,” including in a figurative sense (as in J. Todhunger, 1878: “Sinew thy heart to hear; for death is dreadful”). Sinew brings together connotations of force and bounty, fibrous articulation that appears to impart its own energy and strength. The concept-metaphor emerged from intertwined histories of imperial militarism and accumulation in places “from whence wealth, the sinews of war, is chiefly derived.” We might think of the verb form as the imperial imperative: sinew!

Khalili’s book follows sinew-making (roads, ships, ports, railways) to show that empire’s “fibrous articulations” were forged through powerful alliances that continue to benefit imperial power. The argument builds on Walter Rodney’s text on imperial extraction from the African continent as reliant on infrastructure leading capital to the port.23 Hence, the early-twentieth-century House of Saud forged an alliance with U.S. imperial power, prompting port construction and breathless transformation of the Gulf coastline portrayed in Abdulrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt. The tax- and customs-free zone of the Emirate of Dubai made it a node of British imperial interest during the unraveling of the British Empire, part of what Vanessa Ogle calls an “archipelago capitalism” of differentiated and enclaved sovereignties meant to sinew the workings of finance capital after colonialism through havens that maintain global power and inequality today.24

Khalili’s Sinews details these processes with an attention to place and circulation, drawing from work on critical logistics.25 British capital, backed by the state, explored the transformation of Sharjah Creek and Dubai Creek; their different fates demonstrate how imperial geopolitics and the infrastructure for capital accumulation are differentially forged. Khalili’s account enlivens earthly dialectics involved in dredging harbors, commodifying sand, and sinewing the Arabian Peninsula through new terraqueous territorialities of capital accumulation and political quiescence. As a consequence, maritime infrastructure appears central to the hegemonic apparatus in the peninsula at the turn of the twenty-first century and its regressive implications for decolonization and subaltern collective determination across the region. She ends with the caution that, despite Donald Trump, and now Joe Biden, courting “every two-bit tyrant and autocrat on the Arabian Peninsula,” including the “the sadistic and infantile crown prince,” we should take seriously the Saudi’s turn towards China, whose turn to maritime sinews would certainly also interest an oceanic Gramsci.

Gramsci would also have been interested in how the Pax Americana sought its own place in a period of decolonization of some empires at a time of shoring up of U.S. and Soviet imperialism through gradations of imperial sovereignty. The United States was keen in the 1930s to distance itself from the kind of imperialism evident in Germany or Japan. As Megan Black carefully shows, the U.S. Department of Interior took the key role in this projection of U.S. interests in science and environmental management, rather than settler colonialism by other means, particularly with its Territories and Island Possessions (DTIP) in 1934, including Alaska, Hawai’i, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico, followed by the “guano islands,” the Philippines, Guam, and Samoa.26 By claiming all the mineral resources on the continental shelf in 1946, the Department of Interior effectively annexed space on the scale of the Louisiana Purchase, juggling a vision of itself as defender of something called “the environment” while facilitating offshore oil and mineral extraction.27 This was the point at which the U.N. Conferences on the Law of the Sea convened between 1956 and 1982, when the United States faced Third World lawyering around the making of an international legal regime with respect to the deep sea, beyond the continental shelf, as we see in the final chapter.

There is something important that happened with the fixing of EEZs, the territorialization of coastal waters, with implications for the accumulation of rents. Campling and Colás argue that we should think of EEZs as “a sovereign mechanism for extracting ground rent, where the coastal state assumes the ‘class function’ of modern landed property, because, as with private property over landed resources, access rights to fish, or exploration and extractive concessions, are ‘separated from capital: it is merely the jural form and social location of ownership that has changed.’”28 What is important about Coronil’s analysis is that it shows how this conception of sovereign extraction of ground rent centralizes power in institutional and class fractions within the state in a way that is very difficult for the popular imagination to defetishize and dismantle.

Finally, the militarization of the Cold War ocean has left a powerful set of traces. The U.S. Strategic Island Concept became part of what David Vine calls a strategy of permanent war reliant on the world’s largest collection of foreign military bases.29 The sea became a nuclear zone by the end of the 1950s with the spread of the ideology of the “second-strike missile,” in which nuclear missile submarines could launch a second nuclear strike after having been attacked; this diabolical logic provided the grounds for mutual deterrence. Nuclearization was also enabled by oceanic nuclear testing, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States obtained the right to govern Micronesia as a “strategic trusteeship territory” spanning close to two thousand islands and 7.8 million square kilometers. Five days after this acquisition, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission created the Pacific Proving Grounds, and 105 atmospheric and underwater nuclear tests were performed over sixteen years. Islanders were dispossessed, certain islands were deemed depopulated, and many people and vast oceanic spaces have suffered the effects of contamination. As an important book in progress by Laurel Mei-Singh shows, this has emboldened new formations of antimilitarist and anticarceral activism that draw from histories of Indigenous resistance to U.S. occupation in the Pacific.

However, we ought not to just see the toxifying of oceans as a backdrop. Adam Romero argues that toxic pesticides are not just an unfortunate byproduct of industrial agriculture; rather, California agriculture “functioned less as a market for novel pest-killing chemical products and more as a sink for the accumulating toxic wastes” of fossil-fuel industry.30 Oceanic conjunctures like the Pacific Proving Grounds have been similar kinds of toxic sinks, as terraqueous territories and populations available for protracted suffering. As Jacob Hamblin shows, the United States, Britain, and other overdeveloped countries have dumped radioactive waste in the oceans for decades, and “in the 1950s, leading oceanographers viewed the ocean as a sewer,” which was fodder for Soviet critique of its Cold War rivals, and by the 1970s and 1980s, marine scientists made a great shift from seeing the ocean floor as a sink for barrels of toxic waste to considering its threats to the future.31 As Astrida Neimanis shows in her work on the dumping of mustard gas in the Gotland Deep of the Baltic Sea, the dumping site of between two and ten thousand tons of chemical munitions that resurface in various ways, legal regimes concerning disarmament and environmental protection cannot resolve the effects of these undersea weapons caches, leaving people and the marine environment in a state of suspension.32

Effectively, in all these situations, imperial states extract rents from human and nonhuman inhabitants of marine environments whose shortened lives subsidize the appropriation of their embodied ecologies as sinks for toxic waste. These are incalculable rents and subsidies. And yet, returning to Gramsci’s problematic, while the language of rent has sometimes galvanized subaltern political will, for instance in the rent boycotts in South Africa’s revolutionary 1980s, it is impossible for any single category to articulate human and nonhuman collective political will across our oceanic planet. How, then, do we conceive of opposition to these processes of turning the oceans into a planetary grave?