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Taking as its starting-point the image of song as cargo from the opening of Pindar's Nemean 5, this chapter discusses the political and economic identity of the archaic and classical Aeginetans through detailed exploration of myths and religious practices, on Aegina itself, as well as in the Saronic Gulf and the wider Greek Mediterranean, in particular with regard to Aiakos and the Aeginetan cult of Zeus. The Aeginetan mythic self is profoundly linked to the island's commercial activities; a set of interconnected myths and cults embeds the island in patterns of local and regional economic activity in the Saronic Gulf; and Aeginetans also form part of a wider elite-born network of commercial and maritime enterprise in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean. Stereotypical Aeginetan characteristics such as ‘strength at sea’ and ‘justice’ or ‘hospitality’ towards strangers are reflections of the island's role as a cosmopolitan hub in the Saronic Gulf.

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the story of the Portuguese Nation. The history of the Portuguese Nation reveals a community that made the Ocean Sea its home, and the maritime trades its sustenance. The Portuguese mercantile nation did not so much claim sovereignty over the Atlantic as dwell upon it. This book explores the quality of this abiding. It shows how the men and women of the Nation built and maintained a collectivity that conformed to the fluid and wide-ranging nature of their maritime milieu; how they faced the turbulence and passions of the market; and how they harnessed its dynamism.

This chapter evaluates how the shipping lanes that traverse the South China Sea region are the lifelines of China's future and will shape and influence its trajectory as a great power. If China can maintain and control the regional sea lanes of communication and the trade and maritime logistics hubs across the region, it can expand and project power well beyond the region, fulfilling President Xi Jinping's “Chinese Dream” that seeks “the great rejuvenation of China.” The aggregate is that China has much riding on the future development, success, and prosperity of its Maritime Silk Road and maritime economy. The chapter examines China's growing dominance in shipping, shipbuilding, logistics and supply chains, fisheries and aquaculture (also known as aquafarming), and regional port acquisitions and development from Taiwan to Australia. Moreover, China's growing maritime geoeconomic entrenchment in Cambodia, Brunei, and Malaysia will make it increasingly harder for other regional and global powers — particularly the United States, India, Japan, Taiwan, and others — to compete economically in the maritime space. It also makes it more challenging to box China in regionally owing to its increasingly independent and reinforced maritime networks.

This essay addresses Chinese maritime history and investigates a range of topics, including the international nature of research in Chinese maritime history; new archives and recent research in shipping and shipbuilding; maritime trade; ports and port cities; and maritime communities. It also focuses on Mitsubishi-Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) and China Merchants' Steam Navigation Company, two major Chinese and Japanese merchant shipping companies and provides suggestions on future directions of maritime history in East Asia.

This chapter discusses the significance of the shift in seaborne commerce regulation from the Maritime Trade Commission (Shibosi) to Maritime Customs (Haiguan). Compared with the former system, confined to few major ports, the Maritime Customs system produced a network of management covering a larger number and different scales of ports and thus opened the way to the growth of private trade. Not only did this enable southeastern China—the heart of the Qing economy—to open up to Europe and other Asian states but it also encouraged both Chinese private trade and the triangle trade between China, Southeast Asia, and Japan. This trade prospered into the early nineteenth century, integrating China, especially its coastal region, into the East Asian trade network and the global economy.

This chapter outlines the Iberian maritime trade networks, drawing attention to the key strong points and establishments of the Portuguese and Spanish empires. In order to accept that the Southeast Asian periphery was incorporated into the global order by the sixteenth century, one should look to the mechanisms of penetration. Obviously, the creation of European outposts in East-Southeast Asia was crucial to the capture of such precociously traded commodities as spices and silk at the source interocean arbitrage trade in bullion. In their times, especially during the long seventeenth century, Melaka, Macau, and Nagasaki under the Portuguese, Manila under the Spanish, and Batavia and Taiwan under the Dutch performed this role perfectly. So did a second echelon of European outposts. A distinctive feature was the commercial networks and trading posts established by the Iberians, examined in this chapter, and the trading and colonizing impulses of the European chartered companies.

This chapter explores the role of violence and theft within the ča·di· (“cha-dee”) borderland during the era of maritime fur trading. Although these activities marked encounters among Natives and non-Natives, they were much more than the simple conflicts and acts of plundering percieved by ship captains and crews. Violence marked encounters because rival chiefs competing with each other to control space, resources, and people in the borderlands. When imperial actors entered the borderlands, they exacerbated older lines of tension, created new opportunities for conflict, and applied their own tools of violence. In the indigenous borderlands where distinct people contested over and shared spaces and resources, violence and theft were neither anomalous nor a result of miscommunication: threats and violence were mechanisms central to both Native and imperial processes of this period. Indigenous leaders such as Tatoosh used these to expand their influence and to frustrate imperial designs for domination of tribal space.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the series of decisions that were made in the year 1684 which proved momentous in the history of Chinese foreign trade. First, the maritime trade ban was lifted and Manchu and Chinese private traders were allowed to trade abroad. Second, all merchants from both tribute and nontribute countries were permitted to enter coastal ports. Third, a clear distinction between trade and tribute enabled those countries having no tributary relationship with China to participate in private trade. Fourth, a maritime customs systems managed seaborne trade and collected tariffs. These policies, the most important elements of High Qing trade policy, remained in force for the subsequent century and a half.

This chapter emphasizes the continuities in policies and practices surrounding private maritime trade from the Song and Yuan dynasties to the Ming and Qing, showing that the solid foundation laid in the Song and Yuan made it much easier for Chinese merchants to dominate international trade. The increasingly significant position of private trade in social and economic life led the Song and Yuan governments to enact a maritime policy centered on the encouragement of private trade. Since then, despite a disastrous decline in the early Ming, China's private trade took advantage of favorable international factors to surge from 1500 onward. By the 1680s, well-organized Chinese trade groups were not only dominating the western Pacific trade network but also playing a crucial part in the Chinese economy by bringing foreign silver into China.

This chapter shows that U.S. and German naval strategists stressed the importance of the economic dimension of naval warfare, as they prepared their navies for battle fleet warfare, but adhered to a regime of limitation when they conceptualized naval warfare as a war of economic pressure targeting the opponent's civilian commerce. After World War I, the German political theorist Carl Schmitt claimed that maritime warfare had helped to pioneer so-called total war, the conduct of which had dissolved the boundaries between combatants and noncombatants, soldiers and civilians. Such total war was built around the potentially unlimited use of force across the civil–military divide. This chapter first provides an overview of commercial warfare within the context of maritime law before analyzing how German and U.S. navalists before World War I thought of war against the opponent's maritime trade via commerce-destruction and commercial blockades.

This chapter opens with the 1788 encounter between Chief Tatoosh, the highest-ranked Makah titleholder at the time, and John Meares, a British maritime fur trader. Focusing on the web of regional trade and kinship ties, it explains that borderlands networks and related diplomatic protocols already existed when Europeans and Euro-Americans arrived in this corner of the Pacific. Indigenous networks and protocols shaped the initial period of Native and non-Native interactions on the Northwest Coast from the late eighteenth century into the 1800s. Makahs used customary marine practices, such as hunting sea otters and fishing, to engage expanding networks of exchange. Providing sea otter pelts and provisioning ships were the first examples of this pattern that recurs throughout Makah history. By exploiting networks of trade and kinship, Native chiefs controlled spaces on their own terms and frustrated imperial processes. Their ability to do so reveals that the broader processes of encounter, resistance, and conquest reshaped the indigenous world.

This chapter describes how the Kangxi emperor arrived at his decision to encourage private overseas trade. In dealing with the issue of overseas trade, Kangxi supported the pursuit of profit and made it the starting point of his trade policy. Like many European monarchs of the day, he believed that trade—including overseas trade—benefited both state and society. On the basis of this view, in 1684, the Kangxi emperor invited foreign merchants to bring their goods to China's ports and encouraged Chinese merchants to set out from those ports for destinations in foreign lands. More important, over the subsequent thirty years, he persisted in this open-door policy, blocked every attempt to reinstate the maritime trade ban, and protected private traders from those who would see them destroyed for “philosophical” reasons.

This chapter examines an important transitional period in South China's history and in the history of piracy during the period from 1600 to 1780. It discusses the closed-door policies of the Ming and Qing governments that banned maritime trade and labelled private sea merchants outlaws. It explains that though piracy declined during this period, it never disappeared completely. It suggests that one of the factors that contributed to the reduction in piracy was the government's co-optation of powerful coastal families, with close ties to overseas trade, into the Qing naval apparatus.

This chapter discusses how the emerging northeast Asian trade network inclined the Jurchen and Manchu peoples to develop a way of consciously enriching the state through trade, inspiring the banner elite to push the Kangxi emperor to lift the maritime trade ban. The northeast Asian trade network emerged in response to Chinese and Korean demand for sable and ginseng, which had risen rapidly from the late fifteenth century onward—only trade with the Jurchens could meet the increasing demand. Through this network, Chinese iron tools, silk and other textiles, Korean salt and cattle, Southeast Asian copper, and Japanese knives flowed into the Jurchen and Mongolian regions in exchange for ginseng, furs, honey, and horses. Ultimately, the Manchu's economic dependence on the northeast Asian trade network became a key element in the development of Manchu mercantilism.

In 1827, U.S. President John Quincy Adams appointed Samuel Rossiter Betts, a former artillery officer, as a federal district judge for the Southern District of New York. Betts took charge of the growing body of maritime cases stemming from New York harbor’s flourishing sea trade, developing a reputation as an expert in American maritime law. Along with fellow federal jurists Peleg Sprague and Joseph Story, he would forge the young nation’s maritime law. This chapter chronicles the education and intellectual development of Betts, Sprague, and Story as well as their legacy in the area of maritime law. It also examines the developments within maritime law, and how it was formed by Congress and jurists to regulate and bring order to maritime trade. The chapter furthermore looks at how the three jurists sought to use the waters to create a powerful judiciary and a federal government with authority over seafarers in order to help the structural and economic development of a young United States.

Chapter 2 analyzes the economic, demographic, and geographical factors that influenced slavery, slave-trading and efforts to achieve abolition in the nineteenth century Indian Ocean World. It examines the forms of unfree and indentured labor in the region, offering reasons for their emergence. In the nineteenth century, the region became an economic macro-region, functioning as a part of the burgeoning world economy. Yet, indigenous markets flourished, affecting labor demand and existing systems of servitude. The chapter argues that these slave systems are better analyzed as hierarchies of dependence. Exploring the history of the maritime slave trade, it argues that the number of slaves traded may have exceeded the 10 to 12 million landed in the Americas. It closes by pointing out that the story in the Indian Ocean World is not just about East Africa, emphasizing the importance of indentured labor and debt bondage in that story.

This essay endeavours to determine how close maritime history has come to answering central historical problems by exploring the wealth of literature and research relating to Denmark after the year 1500. The essay covers topics of Danish shipbuilding; Business Histories; Trading Histories; Ship operations; Home ports; Individual voyages; Wrecks; Rescue and Pilot services; Fishing and hunting; Exploitation of the seabed; Social history; Maritime communities; Maritime lifestyles; Maritime art; and International maritime history.

As the maritime fur trade shifted its focus farther north along the Northwest Coast during the early nineteenth century, Makah men used whaling to engage the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), a new commercial and colonial force in the region. This chapter opens with Makahs “pillaging” a shipwrecked HBC vessel and concludes with the smallpox epidemic, two critical events in the early 1850s. These incidents resulted from the changing nature of the mid-nineteenth-century ča·di· borderland, specifically the transition from maritime to land-based fur trade, the rising power of the HBC, and the arrival of British and US settlers. The region also underwent a geopolitical change as the United States and Britain maneuvered to define their colonial claims to the Oregon Country, an area of joint occupation in the Far North American West until 1846, when the two nations divided the region along the forty-ninth parallel. In the process, a more traditional borderlands between two colonial empires emerged, yet conditions of the preexisting indigenous borderlands continued long after the two nation states settled the boundary question. Amid these changes, the supposed pillaging of the ship and the smallpox deaths highlight the ways indigenous peoples such as Makahs experienced, interacted with, and responded to settler-colonialism. The actions of Makah chiefs maintained their control and ability to influence others. By engaging new opportunities, the same chiefs also made colonialism possible in this region.