Abstract
Capitalism and the Sea is an intellectual achievement and an important book on two counts. First, it transgresses boundaries between academic specializations in the historical and social sciences that prevent critical analysis. This enables Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás to interrogate presentist and historically often uninformed social science writings on the current ‘logistic revolution’, and to raise, conversely, historical questions that assume contours only against the backdrop of recent changes in the practices of capitalist accumulation and of an escalating climate crisis. There is much to gain: the reader learns, for instance, from revisiting historical debates on the priority of overseas commerce or of agricultural transformation in the emergence of modern capitalism in light of contemporary research on decentralized production networks. For it is evident, even for earlier periods of industrial capitalism, that the ‘sphere’ of circulation cannot be mechanically separated from the ‘sphere’ of production, as the former comprises not only the distribution of commodities, but also the planning and organization of production across a historically expanding geography.
This takes us directly to the second major achievement of the book: it provides a robust as well as flexible conceptual framework for the analysis of the ‘terraqueous’ dynamics of capitalist development. In other words, it reconstructs and theorizes the historical trajectory of a mode of production premised on a permanent appropriation and transformation of the maritime–terrestrial interface. Making productive use of historical-materialist theories of social space and of global value chains, the authors base their analysis on three central theoretical propositions. The first proposition I have hinted at already: shipping, as a major component of commodity circulation, was no longer a mere function of overseas trade in the age of industrial capitalism as decreasing freight rates, higher speeds and, most importantly, the greater regularity of maritime transport enabled capitalists to plan and reorganize production on a global scale and implement new divisions of labour accordingly. Contemporary capitalism's complex and far-flung commodity chains are clearly premised on ‘just-in-time’ logistics provided, in the first place, through maritime transport. From a longer historical perspective, the authors show that shipping ceased to be an appendix of overseas trade by the early nineteenth century (or even earlier), that an increasing division between commodity traders and shipowners resulted in the emergence of a separate shipping industry subsequently, and that the close oversight of mineral-oil concerns over tanker fleets in the second half of the twentieth century exemplifies an intensifying, if mediated, connection between shipping interests and industrial production.
The authors’ second proposition is that the definition of the terraqueous space of capitalist circulation has been a fundamentally political phenomenon, with state power articulating claims to sovereignty with the protection of private property. If much of the historical literature has tended to juxtapose an assumed statelessness or libertarian freedom of the seas with the governmentality or despotism of the territorial state, the authors demonstrate throughout the book how the terraqueous interface has been subject to state and interstate regulation in various ways, ranging from the suppression of piracy to the establishment of ‘neo-liberal’ offshore zones. The third proposition pertains to the limitations of planned capitalist appropriation and of state regulation regarding the control of maritime space. The ‘first nature’ of the oceans has been clearly reshaped by the ‘second nature’ imposed on it by human society, 4 especially since the age of industrial capitalism (as the global warming of the oceans underlines dramatically), but this metabolic relationship precludes comprehensive control and evolves instead in dialectical shifts that entail consequences that were unintended by social actors and potentially even the annihilation of human society. This theoretical proposition serves as a framework for analysing the appropriation of marine resources and its consequences.
I admire the authors’ ability to synthesize a wide range of material (though a certain Anglocentrism generates limitations that are characteristic for many contemporary writings on global history and society) and I largely concur with their theoretical propositions. Having learned a lot while reading the book, I nevertheless wondered whether stronger connections might have been made between some of its chapters if the authors had followed through on their theoretical propositions more radically. I will restrict myself here to discussing where the first theoretical proposition could have been put to work with greater consistency. With regard to logistics, the transport of commodities across ‘terraqueous’ space and its role in the organization of society, the authors perceptively argue that a crucial transformation occurred with the rise of industrial capitalism in the early decades of the nineteenth century: if, at the empirical level, merchant shipping demonstrably ceased to be an auxiliary function of overseas trade, emerging as an economic sector in its own right with closer links to producing industries, this implies that, at the theoretical level, circulation can be understood even less than for earlier periods as a set of practices external to commodity production.
In Marxian terms, the production and realization of surplus value were not separate processes but ‘moments’ or aspects of the same process of capital accumulation. The circulation of commodities was now closely integrated with the production process: the profitability of an industrial enterprise was premised as much on the organization of the production process as it was on the organization of logistics (with both tasks often blending into each other). This tendency intensified and gained visibility in our own time but was discernible much earlier. The internal structure of the Peninsular and Oriental Shipping Company in the early decades of the twentieth century exemplifies one of the many organizational forms that this tendency could take: while being one of the great players of the world's largest merchant marine, the concern was involved in a wide range of business activities, which included a prominent involvement in factory and plantation enterprises in colonial India. Thus, even as the conglomerate's shipping services became less profitable by the 1920s, its shareholders were still able to reap the profits of colonial capitalism.
In a rarely quoted passage of Grundrisse, Karl Marx 5 argued as early as the 1850s that the capitalist mode of production entailed that ‘the spatial condition, the bringing of the product to the market, belongs to the production process itself. The product is really finished only when it is on the market’. This is how capitalist society transformed and redefined the sea as a space of circulation in the most fundamental way – a redefinition that has been, and continues to be, expressed in a wide array of forms and with varying levels of intensity but does not appear to have been invalidated or overshadowed by any other fundamental dynamic in the decades of so-called ‘neo-liberal capitalism’. The authors justly critique the ‘presentism’ of many writings on recent transformations in commodity logistics, but I suspect that the tripartite chronological division they propose for the history of capitalism's engagement with the sea (mercantile, industrial and neo-liberal) tends towards the same trap and weakens one of their key arguments. The fragility of the logistics regime exposed in recent decades may at least suggest that such a periodization is premature.
The proposition of a structurally necessary integration of maritime circulation into the production process under industrial capitalism is most effectively used in the ‘Logistics’ chapter when the authors analyse the shifts between maritime regimes of circulation and argue that these shifts were so fundamental as to make it impossible to speak of capitalist shipping in the singular (217). If higher speeds in maritime transport contributed to accelerating the turnover time of industrial capital, greater regularity permitted new forms of capitalist planning and decentralized organizational forms of production. A variety of organizational and technological developments in modern shipping catered to these needs in differential and changing ways, as the authors show convincingly.
However, the ‘Exploitation’ chapter seems somewhat unconnected both to the larger theoretical argument and to its concrete analytical application to the modalities of capitalist shipping. This chapter seems more descriptive and dithers unsteadily between proclaiming a capitalist maritime labour regime in the singular and references to maritime labour regimes in the plural. As a result, the chapter tends to overemphasize the specificities of seafaring labour across the centuries (even claiming a ‘maritime exceptionalism’ with regard to labour) and fails to ask what the drive towards acceleration and regularity implied for the organization of labour on board ship – how labour regimes dating back to a mercantile age of sail were transformed when a series of technological revolutions permitted their owners to synchronize the rhythms of ship work on steamship liners and tramps (or diesel-fuelled container ships and bulk carriers) with the rhythms of capitalist commodity production.
This critique would be unfair and disingenuous if it ended here. The authors rely, it must be said, on the writings of maritime labour historians who have themselves been prone to conflating very different regimes of ship work, broadly speaking of the ages of sail and steam. This is because they have often preferred to focus on recruitment, port life, trade unionism or political militancy, while the labour process and its embeddedness in the accumulation strategies of shipping capital have received much less attention. For a maritime labour historian like myself, Capitalism and the Sea is, therefore, an important intervention on two counts: it alerts us to the limitations of our own research and provides us with a conceptual apparatus that has much to offer for a new critical history of maritime labour processes.