International Journal of Maritime History

This forum explores how maritime rescue has historically been bound up with questions of sovereignty. The contributions approach both concepts as constituted by concrete practice, normative order and cultural symbolism, tracing how efforts to save lives at sea became intertwined with law, morality and political authority. It is argued that maritime spaces have long served as laboratories for the articulation of sovereign power, while lifesaving practices simultaneously challenged and reinforced state legitimacy. Covering a wide chronological, geographical and thematic span – from nineteenth-century lifeboat organizations to imperial infrastructures, international arrangements and present-day border regimes – the articles situate the history of maritime rescue within broader debates on sovereignty, humanitarianism and normative orders.

What motivates a society or community to promote the rescue of individuals in hazardous waters? This article expands upon comprehensive research regarding charitable history and volunteerism in late Qing China to fill a void in the literature pertaining to the Zhengnitang, a local organisation committed to rescuing individuals from drowning. Although lifesaving has been examined within the framework of a global trend in organised humanitarian efforts, the particular practices, measures, and principles of Chinese lifesaving societies during the late imperial era in a transnational context require more scrutiny. This study contextualises the Chinese model of lifesaving within both national and international frameworks, emphasising its nuanced impact on the formation of European lifesaving societies during the long nineteenth century and conversely, how global humanitarian advancements may have influenced Chinese lifesaving efforts. We will also look at the deeply ingrained idea of lifesaving in imperial China, which is different from saving lives in other unfortunate situations, and how it has changed over time. This will allow us to explore how different Chinese humanitarian practices have affected the region and the world as a whole, as well as how they relate to the cultural history of water-related accidents and injuries.

The Société Centrale de Sauvetage des Naufragés (SCSN), established in 1865, was tasked with operating lifeboats and rescuing victims of shipwreck along the French coast. While it was a private humanitarian organization, its creation was largely an initiative of the Napoleonic state. Its first president was an admiral, and it received substantial financial support from Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie. This article explores the impact of these state connections on the early existence of the SCSN, focusing on the nature of its donations and the political dimensions embedded in them. It highlights the tension between presenting maritime lifesaving as a universal humanitarian cause and the political motivations surrounding the foundation of the SCSN, notably its links with Napoleon III's maritime policies. By examining the donation patterns of the 5,170 initial contributors through quantitative methods, the article sheds light on the complex networks of actors and interests that shaped the organization's early financial support.

This article explores the nineteenth-century view that the organization of maritime safety – the ability to control or circumvent the natural forces of waterways and ensure safe navigation and rescue at sea – was one of several ‘standards of civilization’ attributable to western states that would justify a derogation of a state's sovereignty if not met. It investigates this hierarchical understanding by discussing examples of maritime safety in the context of colonialism and informal imperialism. Focusing on three examples of trans-imperial projects at chokepoints of global navigation – Cape Guardafui, Cape Spartel and the Bosporus Strait – the article shows how this standard was an argumentative foundation on which powers could agree to exchange, cooperate and collaborate in response to maritime hazards. These projects show different configurations of sovereignty: the vertical relationship of a hierarchy between sovereign and less than fully sovereign nations as well as the horizontal relationship of a shared sovereignty between empires.

This article explores the relationship between moral and legal language as convergent and divergent types of normative order in the long history of saving lives from shipwreck since the late eighteenth century. The author presents an argument about humanitarianism as based on a symbolic rupture within an established moral culture and the law as imposing a second rupture on the resulting humanitarian culture, but a complicated and incomplete one, on account of the fractured nature of law when viewed through the lens of the diverse traditions that can be seen to impinge on the current situation. The nature of this argument, then, is genealogical and relates present normative disorder to earlier lines of development.

The International Convention on the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) was first drafted in response to the sinking of the Titanic. The 1914 convention sought international agreement on issues such as construction, navigation, communication, protection and rescue. The convention also formulated an obligation to ‘proceed to the assistance of the persons in distress’. The treaty has been interpreted both as imposing increased public and international responsibility at sea and as marking one of the origins of the duty to save lives at sea in international law. This article highlights how the convention in general and the obligation to come to rescue in particular can also be understood as a culmination of nineteenth-century maritime law, in which a combination of sovereignty, public responsibility, private authority and international law was typical.

This article considers how notions of sovereignty and solidarity influenced the response to boat refugees at sea between 1979 and 2001. It argues that states responded with prolonged solidarity when helping boat refugees served to support their foreign policy goals and fitted with the moral zeitgeist. When such conditions did not exist, states successfully used the legal ambiguity of the sea to intercept, repatriate and in some cases strategically confine boat refugees to offshore detention centres located beyond the reach of national courts. Restricting boat refugees on the high seas served to bolster governments’ claims that they could control unwanted immigration and, in doing so, rescue their territorial sovereignty. Yet this created a notable paradox: by allegedly preserving territorial sovereignty in their dramatic and very visible border spectacles with boat refugees, governments felt it necessary to cheat national and international law.

This work looks at the coincidence between the navigation routes of the Age of Discovery (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries) and the distribution of modern microplastics and plastic waste in the oceans. Plastics in the oceans have been an additional factor in the Columbian Exchange and the changing health and biodiversity of the world's oceans. The ocean routes of the caravels and galleons of the Age of Discovery and the distribution of modern giant ocean garbage patches coincide. Navigational charts and the logbooks of sailing ships of the Age of Discovery provide information on the distribution of the ocean currents that form modern ocean garbage patches. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is located on the route of the Manila galleons and the voyage of Andrés de Urdaneta. The famous voyages of Christopher Columbus coincide with the location of the North Atlantic Garbage Patch. The voyage routes of Vasco da Gama and Abel Tasman partially cross the garbage patch in the Indian Ocean. The zero or positive buoyancy of plastic has turned it into a modern transoceanic armada that follows the routes of the great navigators. The ocean currents and gyres that formed the routes of the great geographical discoveries have become vast accumulators of plastic pollution.

This note presents preliminary results from ongoing research on the relationship between privateering and maritime neutrality, c. 1750–1815. Drawing on two sources – the records of the High Court of Admiralty and the Danish and Swedish Algerian Sea Pass Protocols – it argues that maritime neutrality channelled and constrained the impact of privateering as inter-European conflicts expanded in scope and destruction. Focusing on the activities of Britain, as a major belligerent, and Sweden and Denmark as small neutral states, the note uses two quantitative methods. Shipping output is estimated as the number of days vessels operated at sea during wartime, compared with days ‘lost’ through capture by privateers. Combining these sources and methods provides a new perspective on how rulers and economic actors transformed law and diplomacy into instruments of profit: through neutrality, privateering pressures were redirected into legally sanctioned forms of exchange that turned war into opportunity.