by the Past & Present editorial team
Edited by Prof. Renaud Morieux (Pembroke, University of Cambridge) and Jeppe Mulich (City, University of London) 2024’s Past & Present supplement “Ordering the Oceans, Ordering the World” is the seventeenth that the journal has published.
It can be accessed here via the website of the journal’s publisher Oxford University Press.
From “Ordering the Oceans, Ordering the World’s” the Back Matter
“This Supplement is premised on the notion that oceans were governed and not lawless spaces. Although this idea is now widely shared, the scholarship still tends to focus, on the one hand, on governance and regulatory frameworks, and on the other, on forms of resistance. The concept of `ordering’ enables historians to bypass this dichotomy. The structural changes that took place between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, with respect to state formation, empires, global trade and migrations, were inherently the product of inter-imperial and interpolitical dynamics, processes that happened at sea and not just on land. A focus on the water margins and the polyglot peoples inhabiting them shows how much these changes were shaped from below and from the peripheries. The contributors give centre stage to the plurality of actors, both within and outside the state, who contributed to the process of oceanic ordering. To understand how authority and power were projected across ocean spaces, the articles analyse patterns of political rivalry and collaboration, dissent and negotiation, violence and treatymaking. They track sojourners, privateers, fugitives and officials as they formulated individual or collective visions of order in seas rife with contestation. They chart oceanic ordering from the treacherous reefs of the Mediterranean to the verdant islands of the Caribbean, from quilombos in coastal Brazil to penal settlements in the Indian Ocean, and from makeshift prize courts in seaside colonial taverns to the bustling docks of London.”
Front cover of Renaud Morieux and Jeppe Mulich (eds.) Ordering the Oceans, Ordering the World” the 2024 Past & Present Supplement, published by OUP (2024)