Privacy at Sea: Practices, Spaces, and Communication in Maritime History (Global Studies in Social and Cultural Maritime History) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 303135849X ISBN 13: 9783031358494

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025

Synopsis

This book explores the idea of privacy at sea, from early sixteenth-century maritime expansions to nineteenth-century naval developments. In this period, the sea became a focal point of political and economic ambition as technological and cultural shifts enabled a more extensive exploration of maritime spaces and global coexistence at sea. The exploration of the sea and the conflicts arising from establishing control over maritime routes demanded a more nuanced distinction and negotiation between State and private efforts. Privateering, for example, became a bridge between the private enterprises and the State’s warfares or trade struggles, demonstrating that the sea required public control at the same time as it enabled private endeavours. Although this tension between private and public interests has been explored in military and economic studies, questions of how the private appeared in maritime history have been discussed only through a particularly merchantile lens.This volume adds a new dimension to this discussion by focusing on how privacy and the private were perceived and created by the historical agents at sea. We aim to move beyond the mercantile “private” as a direct opposite to the “public” or the State, thereby opening the discussion of privacy at sea as a multiplicity of lived experiences.

Chapters 1, 8 and 14 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

About this title

About the Author

Natacha Klein Käfer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on healing knowledge and its connections to privacy and confidentiality in the early modern period as well as transcontinental networks of knowledge. 

From the Back Cover

This book explores the idea of privacy at sea from early sixteenth-century maritime expansions to nineteenth-century naval developments. In this period, the sea became a focal point of political and economic ambition as technological and cultural shifts enabled a more extensive exploration of maritime spaces and global coexistence at sea. The investigation of the sea and the conflicts arising from establishing control over maritime routes demanded a more nuanced distinction and negotiation between state and private efforts. Privateering, for example, became a bridge between the private enterprises and the state’s warfare or trade struggles, demonstrating that the sea required public control at the same time as it enabled private endeavours. 

Although this tension between private and public interests has been explored in military and economic studies, questions of how the private appeared in maritime history have been discussed through a particularly mercantile lens. This volume adds a new dimension to this discussion by focusing on how privacy and the private were perceived and created by the historical agents at sea. We aim to move beyond the mercantile ‘private’ as a direct opposite to the ‘public’ or the state, thereby opening the discussion of privacy at sea as a multiplicity of lived experiences.

Natacha Klein Käfer is an assistant professor at the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on healing knowledge and its connections to privacy and confidentiality in the early modern period as well as transcontinental networks of knowledge. 

Chapters 1, 8 and 14 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 303135849X
• ISBN 13: 9783031358494
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416
• Editor: Klein Käfer Natacha