Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World

What keeps capitalism afloat?

The global ocean has through the centuries served as a trade route, strategic space, fish bank and supply chain for the modern capitalist economy. While sea beds are drilled for their fossil fuels and minerals, and coastlines developed for real estate and leisure, the oceans continue to absorb the toxic discharges of our carbon civilization - warming, expanding, and acidifying the blue water part of the planet in ways that will bring unpredictable but irreversible consequences for the rest of the biosphere.

In this bold and radical new book, Campling and Colás analyze these and other sea-related phenomena through a historical and geographical lens. In successive chapters dealing with the political economy, ecology and geopolitics of the sea, the authors argue that the earth's geographical separation into land and sea has significant consequences for capitalist development. The distinctive features of this mode of production continuously seek to transcend the land-sea binary in an incessant quest for profit, engendering new alignments of sovereignty, exploitation and appropriation in the capture and coding of maritime spaces and resources.

Liam Campling is professor of political economy at Queen Mary University of London where he works collectively at the Centre on Labour and Global Production, is co-author of Free Trade Agreements and Global Labour Governance: Working Beyond the Border (Routledge), and is an editor of Journal of Agrarian Change.

Alejandro Colás is Professor of International Relations at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written two books for Polity Press, International Civil Society: Social Movements in World Politics and Empire, and is co-author of Food, Politics, and Society: Social Theory and the Modern Food System (University of California Press).