 Thank you everybody and welcome to this week's SOAS Department of Development Studies in Bloomsbury, DTC for the Social Sciences Seminar. We're delighted this evening to welcome tonight's speakers, Liam Campling and Alejandro Colas to SOAS for a presentation entitled Capitalism in the Sea, Sovereignty, Territory and Accumulation in the Global Ocean. Liam teaches Political Economy at Queen Mary University of London, where he's the Director of the Centre on Labour and Global Production. He's an Editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change and has published widely on global production, international trade and the political economy of development and the environment. He's currently working on a monograph appropriately enough entitled Capitalism in the Sea. Alejandro is a reader in international relations at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he also directs two of their MSc programs. He's author of the book Empires and a co-editor of a volume entitled Mercenaries, Bandits and Empires, Private Violence in Historical Context. His work on topics including Imperialism, Internationalism and Global Governance has appeared in leading journals such as Development and Change, International Affairs and Millennium. And he's a member of the Isaac and Tamara Deutsche Memorial Prize Committee. Also joining us this evening is Juan Greguera. Juan is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the UCL Institute for the Americas. A member of the Editorial Board of Historical Materialism and Co-convener of the London Latin American Marxist Reading Group. Juan will act as discussant tonight, offering his reflections after Alex and Liam present. The hashtags, if you want to tweet, are SOAS, DEVStudies and ESRC. And I think I'll hand over to you both now if you want to. Thanks very much and thanks Feizi and Alfredo, Juan and Joe for the opportunity to introduce or present work in progress. Liam and I are working on a book called Capitalism in the Sea. And this is really our first proper outing in terms of how far we've got. We've embarked in this project about 18 months ago, two years. By the way, maritime punery comes in waves, so forgive us if there's an excess of that. We've been working on this for about 18 months, two years as a specific project. And today what we want to try and do is, in quite an ambitious way I suppose given the time, try and condense some of the ideas. So we want to consider how a social form like capitalism relates to a natural force like the sea. And we assume that both of these are historical entities, they're changing entities. They relate unequally. That is, there is no mechanical or automatic direct reciprocity. And that these two entities, one social the other natural, have different temporalities as well. Clearly the sea is, I was going to say is older than the hills, but Liam reminded me that it's older than the hills. And capitalism on our account is no more than about 500 years old. But the relationship between these two entities has arguably accelerated in the past few decades, or arguably a century and a half. For the first time, the human race is able to change the physical geography of the oceans through acidification and global warming. And the sea itself has facilitated the speeding up of the capitalist circuit. So we want to make two main arguments. One that the sea is a site and a source of competitive innovation and experimentation by capital. In part, and this is important for our story, because of the biophysical properties of the sea and the obstacles that the sea, the oceans present for the reproduction of capitalism. The second argument is that the responses to these challenges of expanded reproduction through and at the sea have historically produced what we have called a toracious space. And we'll try and illustrate that as we go along, borrowing that phrase from Herman Melville and I suppose other formulations. But clearly we're informed by the whole tradition of the Fabrian and Harvey-esque production of space ideas, including the production of spaces of solidarity and contestation, political and otherwise. The sea has operated as a frontier of capitalism. It's been a surface through which new markets have prized open. It's a rich source of energy, of protein, of monetized leisure. It's a critical theater of inter-imperial rivalry, of military domination and world hegemony. It has also been a site of both the vilest forms of human oppression, such as the slave ship, but a conduit of emancipatory transformations, both individual and collective, not least through forms of internationalism. For capital the sea therefore is both a risk and an opportunity. So mercantile and later properly liberal tropes celebrate the sea as a realm of freedom of navigation, freedom of trade, of scientific inquiry, of cultural exchange, of universal law and social mobility. Words for instance like flotation, liquidity, flows, ventures invoke all the kind of movement and the prospect that the sea offers. In fact in more recent neoliberal formulations the sea almost becomes a libertarian utopia, a non-place beyond the state, regulation taxes, class antagonisms and war, the kind of place that Richard Branson likes to live in. It is presented as sheer surface, a flat frictionless horizon of opportunity. We think this is pure fantasy in the strictest ideological sense. The sea has acted on our account as a laboratory for novel forms of violence, of exploitation, oppression and appropriation. Since its very origins capitalism has sought to transcend the land sea divide or the distinction trying to integrate the various circuits or the various elements in the circuit of capital, commodity, productive and money capital, into a totality that reconciles the terracious nature of our world, the fact that the world is made up of both earth and water. But this push to go beyond the biophysical properties of water and earth has in turn produced on our account very peculiar spatial forms, three of which we're going to focus on in the remainder of the paper. One is the exclusive economic zone. The second is the open register ship or the flag of convenience, we'll use that as a shorthand. And finally what I've called or what we've called counter-piracy high-risk areas. And we want to focus on each of these spaces. And our overall argument then is that each of these spaces, specifically where land meets sea, we've chosen them partly because they represent that liminal space, if you like, highlights certain experimental dynamics in capitalist development and its particular relationship to the global ocean. So specifically the EEZ underlines the innovation in capitalist appropriation of marine resources. The flag of convenience represents or crystallizes a space for the exploitation of labour and the multilateral counter-piracy initiatives represent an attempt at maritime governance of capitalist circulation. So you can see we're going to use a collection of concepts that are not perfectly or mechanically aligned, but our argument or our proposition is that these moments are all fleeting moments in the constant metamorphosis of capitalism, but they could be seen for purposes of presentation as sort of snapshots, as stills in that circulation, that reproduction of capital. As places where commodity, productive and money capital are respectively reproduced. So as I say, we're trying to articulate both spatial metaphors and metaphors or realities of mobility. These are not mechanical or static correlations. We want to emphasize that. As all of these Syracuse spaces, the EEZ, the flag of convenience ship and piratical area, combine different and distinctive expressions of sovereignty, territory and appropriation. But for the purposes of our presentation, it might be said that the EEZ represents a specific capitalist form of appropriation, so we're going to highlight that aspect in the circulation of capital, the flag of convenience as a domain of sovereignty and the piratical waters as a domain of territory. In short, what we're kind of doing, we're trying to do, is answer three types of questions. One is, who owns the fish? How is exploitation organized at sea? And where does authority lie on the oceans? And so we're going to have Box and Cox with Liam taking over this first question of who owns the fish, and then I'll pick up the... So first of all, who owns the fish? Social property relations over fisheries have a very long history, extending well before the emergence of capitalism. For example, a system of marine tenure in feudal Sicily shapes access to bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean. But for around 400 years until the mid-20th century, the sea outside of a cannon shop from the coast, around three nautical miles, was considered as Rex Nullis, or nobody's property, and thus open to assumed limitless exploitation or extraction of fish. So we're going to sketch two kind of moments of experimentation in terms of access to and, in turn, ownership over marine fish populations. One in the late 1940s and another in the 1980s. Both centered on US state power, and both represent a sea change in the doctrine of who owns the fish. So after World War II, the United States was faced with a conundrum. On the one hand, how to stop the fishing capital of the rapidly reindustrializing Japan from returning to fish for salmon off the coast of the US West Coast, where it had been dominant in the 1930s. And on the other hand, simultaneously support the expansion of the US tuna fleet into new commodity frontiers in the Pacific Ocean, in other words into other countries' waters. So why did this matter to the US state and capital? Well, first of all, there was a sizable canning industry in the US since the 1800s. Canning plants were established across the mouths of rivers throughout the entire length of the Pacific coast of North America. They were there to process salmon caught on their return to spawn in rivers after two years of living in oceans. Their butchered bodies fed the salmon canneries, which in turn provided nutrition to the growing American working class. If Japanese boats caught the salmon before they could return to spawn, it would mean the end of raw material supplies to this industry. On the flip side, San Diego's tuna canneries started out in 1903 by catching relatively close to the US. But buoyed by heavy subsidies from the US state, the industry began to grow and new fishing grounds were needed. Tuna are a highly migratory species in the sense that the population swim great distances traversing human-drawn borders in the oceans. Tuna populations off the Pacific coast of Latin America and crucially in the Central Pacific Ocean, where the US Navy was planning a series of post-war bases, were central to the US industry's development. As the US Secretary of State of the Interior stated in 1947, quote, tuna is a magic word in any community or country which looks to the sea for food and profits. The solution of the US state to the conundrum of simultaneously protecting its salmon populations and supporting the expansion of its tuna industry into other countries' waters continues to shape the global governance of the oceans to this day. In 1945, President Truman famously and unilaterally proclaimed US sovereignty over the continental shelf, motivated primarily by control of access to oil and other mineral resources in the seabed and subsoil. Less well known is that on the same day, he also unilaterally proclaimed the United States right to establish fishery conservation zones in the higher seas contiguous to the US coast. This specified that where a fishery was developed by Americans, it would be universally managed by the US states in the interests of conservation. Quick parenthesis here, the exclusive economic zone didn't exist at this point in time, so this warfish in this water belonged to nobody. So the Americans unilaterally declared that it belonged to them. So while on the one hand, the US state was promoting trade liberalization through things like the general agreement on tariffs and trade, on the other hand, it was establishing new regimes of protection of access to what it saw as its raw materials. But how and why to specify where and when conservation is actually needed? This all came together with a scientific concept, and by scientific I'm using scare quotes there, which was actually much more a contradictory product of economic nationalism and free market ideology than having any basis in fishery science. You may have heard of this concept of maximum sustainable yield. Essentially it was developed by the US State Department to justify its protection of its salmon stocks while allowing its fleet to expand internationally. So this concept of maximum sustainable yield, and there's a kind of figure here, the original drawing for it, became the cornerstone of international fisheries management bodies in the 1950s and today it's still the dominant way the fisheries are managed. Essentially it was implemented as a tool to avoid restrictions on fishing unless there was a scientific proof that stocks were overfished. Proofs that were then very hard to ascertain. Maximum sustainable yield thereby provided a basis for the US fleet to expand into waters across the Pacific despite objections from coastal states. The idea being that if the fish wasn't caught according to this concept of MSY, it was waste. So in short the US restricted fishing on its salmon but made ownership of tuna nobody's property, at least until it was extracted by a fishing capitol and then it becomes the ownership owned by that boat. So what the US did here was develop the concept of maximum sustainable yield which changed the conditions of access. It was deployed as a contradictory mechanism of inclusion and exclusion in the ocean and it would serve the US tuna industry very well, thank you, at least until the 1980s to which it now turned. By the mid-1970s I should know the exclusive economic zone which you can see here, here's the kind of network of exclusive economic zones had been accepted in customary international law. This gave states sovereign rights over access to marine resources in up to 200 nautical miles of ocean from their coastlines. In other words, where the fish are in their waters they are owned by the state. They've been negotiated crucially in the world historical context of the third-worldest call for a new international economic order in this entire kind of era of the 1970s and so on and the EZ acted as a form of state-landed property allowing developing country governments to capture ground rent from the fishing activities but not so for the US fleet. The US state bluntly rejected the idea of the EZ and used its geoeconomic and political power to contest coastal states' efforts to regulate US boats fishing. In particular, the US refused to accept the highly migratory species like tuna could be anybody's property and encouraged its distant water fleet to fish in coastal waters with impunity. Cash-strapped newly independent Pacific Island countries you can see them here, the network of EZs that they have relied on the ground rent from tuna access as crucial government revenue. In response to what it saw as the illegal capture of its resources in the mid-1980s, the Solomon Islands apprehended US vessels fishing without paying ground rent but this did little to deter the US fleet because the US government reimbursed all of the expenses incurred by it or it saw as the illegal seizures of US vessels. Further, the value of this penalty was subtracted from foreign aid to the Solomon Islands. There you are. Yeah, it was precisely the biopolar power politics of the Second Cold War that the Pacific Islands would leverage. The island nation of Kiribati began negotiating a fisheries access deal with the USSR and the United States jumped. Rather than allow the Soviet Union a foothold in the central Pacific, the US set up a multilateral access agreement with all 14 Pacific Island countries which you can see here which for a long time was among the most comparatively generous of all tuna access deals. So with the population of only 60,000 people Kiribati's brinkmanship would transform the US state's recognition of property in the oceans. What this story of fisheries access shows is the centrality of geo-economics and geopolitics in answering the vexed question of who owns the fish. The politics of inclusion and exclusion that come to the fore in these historical moments illustrate that maximum sustainable yield and the EEZ were conceived principally of zones of property rights and therefore rent appropriation rather than areas of sovereign jurisdiction and thus of law enforcement. So to move to a completely different register. Now I'm going to talk briefly about labour regimes on what I'm calling the total institution of the boat. The question here is how is exploitation organized at sea? Now of course it's impossible to do justice to the diversity of labour regimes on boats under historical capitalism and at first sight it might even appear that there are few differences from working lives on boats in pre-capitalist eras. A boat's a boat. The following is intended as a kind of taster on the peculiarities of capitalist exploitation of labour at sea. I'm going to sketch just some very quick historical moments in different periods in time. So turnaround time is a central structuring dynamic in the merchant navy, especially given the high rate of depreciation of boats caused by the eroding power of brine, wind and waves. For commercial capital a measure of the productivity of labour power on boats is the number of crew per gross ton of ship, i.e. the volume of stuff moved per employee. Now there was considerable variation in average labour productivity between the fleets of northern and southern Europe through the 1700s. The northern European fleet averaged around 15 tonnes per person and the southern European fleet averaged around 5 tonnes per person. The vessels of the English and Dutch East India companies were the tip of the spear of commercial capitalism driven by competition between capitals to maximise productivity and turnaround time while the southern European vessels were throwbacks to an area of late feudal and by Iberian plunder. But the Dutch United Provinces in England responded to maritime labour shortages in very different ways. The Dutch merchant navy was generally quite cosmopolitan in character. Rapid capitalist development meant a general labour shortage and the share of foreigners in Dutch maritime employment grew from around 15% of the total in 1600 to over 50% of the total in the late 1780s by which time there was a peak of around 60,000 people directly employed in the maritime industries. Despite this rapid peak in maritime employment the British had forced maritime labour. In contrast, impressement was used widely in Britain to deal with labour maritime shortages. Low stagnant wages and hard isolated and often deadly work saw the British state depend on the impress service as a major supplier of forced labour to the navy. Between 1775 and 1883 over 110,000 men were procured. The British state also regulated the majority of crew. It was even recognised as vital by Adam Smith who defended the mercantilist policy of giving the sailors the sailors and shipping of Great Britain the monopoly of the trade of their own country as necessary for the defence of the country. So along with the Corn Laws the navigation acts of the mid 1600s were amongst the most prominent legal pillars popping up Britain's mercantilist empire. In part they were designed to limit Asian seafarers working on boats in the Atlantic where three quarters of the crew were legislated to be British. Despite this legislation in the long distance colonial trades which were dominated by East India company ships, foreign crew were widely recruited. And in intra-regional trade in Asia a majority were non-European although very often the captains and the owners were Europeans. Now this shifted jumping again 200 more years shifted with the 1849 repeal of the navigation acts which suddenly saw around 20% of crews on British boats being non-British by the 1890s. South Asian seafarers derogatory referred to as the last guards were the lowest paid they were paid about one sixth of British nationals wages. Their working conditions the worst, their provisions the poorest quality and their working hours the longest despite the fact that they were working directly alongside British seafarers. Unsurprisingly British ship owning capital took full advantage of this heightened rate of exploitation and cost reduction and by the 1920s employed around 50,000 Indian seafarers. Multinational crews were used to deal with labour shortages but also used as a disciplinary mechanism. Resistance to harsh maritime labour regimes took varied forms. Mutiny was perhaps the ultimate expression of this but even here there is a wide variety variation as to the causes from simple opposition to low pay and despotic captains through to politically motivated acts linked to rebellions on shore such as Ireland as a lot of Irish crew on British boats. So but despite this despite some important strikes in the 1870s so for example refusals to work on boats called death ships boats that were known to be likely to sink very often for insurance purposes where those crew were actually put into prison as a result around 1,500 sailors in the 1870s were put into prison for refusing to work on death ships. But it was not until the 1880s that mass unionism emerged in Britain's maritime industries. Crucial moments of seafarer militancy peppered the wider working class and anti-colonial movements such as the 1889 docker strike and again as part of the syndicalist movement in 1911 and 1912 where to quote at one time or another every port on the UK was on strike and violence was at its greatest. Solidarity amongst seafarers dockers and steve doors proved to be a winning strategy. Despite this active trans-oceanic organization among maritime workers from the 1880s onwards it was often racially framed and pitched in politically reactionary terms. In the US for example membership of the international organization of masters mates and pilots of America was restricted to quote any white person of good moral character in sound health and a firm believer in God. In Britain the National Union of Seaman supported a 1935 government subsidy to tramp shipping that was available only to boats with British crews thereby excluding Indian and other colonial subjects. Reactionary white unionism can be counter pointed with harnessing by black seafarers of the internationalist potential of their working lives and very often in solidarity with other left leaning seafarers groups. While black seafarers were actively discriminated against by elements of white unionism and the British state they used their mobility to link up struggles in Africa, the Caribbean and Europe which were integral to the production and reproduction of communist inflected nationalisms including the coordination of strikes in British West Africa during the 19, sorry during the World War II. Growing internationalism and the radicalization of seafarers was often translated into new maritime labor law where the state responded to this upsurge. However capital quickly responded with a new innovation to the resistance and reworking of labor law. The flag of convenience. I'm just going to show a random picture here one of my favorite photographs I've taken is a Chinese boat flying a Fiji flag with a very nice boat name, more rich. A characteristic of the flag of convenience is the ability of ship owners to buy a sovereign and thus the legal jurisdiction that regulates their activities. In doing so, ship owners produced territory as an accumulation strategy. Quick potted history, the legal modern flag of convenience originated in Panama. Designed in the 1920s to short circuit new US law on seafarers rights and prohibition on alcohol Panama gave legal and illicit US enterprises the ability to register vessels under its flag in return for a small fee. So the Panama Papers is not the first time that Panama has popped into the news around issues like this. As Leon Fink puts it in his book, Sweatshops at Sea For seafarers, flags of convenience were, to quote, a stunningly unique economic phenomenon. In one sweep of a pen, an entire ship's labor force could be transferred overnight to the jurisdiction and sovereignty of a new national master. Flagging out was ratcheted up during the global stagflation of the 1970s and the frantic hunt for improved profitability amongst boat owners there was a general crisis of overcapacity in Shippingland. By 2014, the owners of well over 70% of tonnage of the world fleet chose to use flags other than their own, mainly flags of convenience. Ship owners used flag of convenience to cut crew costs to undermine the self-organization of labor, to minimize tax bills and to reduce labor regulation. As a result, fishers and seafarers started and ended the 20th century working in the world's most dangerous jobs. Fishers and seafarers fought easily between the cracks of regulatory jurisdiction. Flag state, port state, vessel owner, crew agency, national waters, high seas, all of these intermingled to create complexity. Given this jurisdictional complexity of maritime labor regimes, seafaring is also one of the first examples of international labor regulation which goes all the way back to kind of medieval and even ancient Rhodian law which I'm not going to go into here. In more contemporary terms, it has more occupation-specific regulation at the international labor organization than for any other job. But despite this, it is organized labor, not states that has part blocked the anti-labor tide of the flag of convenience. The flag of convenience is not an automatic or smooth strategy for capitalist accumulation. For example, it is contested by the International Transport Workers Federation Flag of Convenience which relies on secondary action by port workers in solidarity with the crew on flag of convenience boats. So the proportion of flag of convenience ships with agreements with the ITF, International Transport Workers Federation, grew from less than 8% in 1990 to over 30% in 2000, although that's declined in recent years with the reduced industrial muscle of dockers. On which note I will move over to Alex who will talk about piracy. So thus far, as Liam's been suggesting, the exclusive economic zone is an innovation in forms of appropriation premised very much around law and certain conceptions of the separation between a jurisdiction and property rights. It's produces a space, a distinctive space which is the 200 nautical miles. The ship, the factory ship, that figure, which of course has varied throughout history and place but is also a sort of immutable mobile a moving entity that on the one hand represents the movement of capital, circulation of capital, but as Liam has just been describing through history and in very contested forms has also been a domain of deep hierarchies of the most static forms of hierarchy, regimentation. It is therefore also a space produced by a terracious space that actually never quite leaves land. I want to finish the set of illustrations and they are exactly this illustrations or stories with reference to contemporary counter piracy and piracy of the coast of Somalia as most of you will know around 2007-2008 the waters of that part of the Horn of Africa became there was a sharp increase in incidents, reported incidents of piracy and this presents a problem of capital in at least three ways. One is a problem of blockage of circulation generates all kinds of delays and there are profit margins especially in and around places like the Suez Canal. Secondly it raises the thorny jurisdictional issue of the figure of the pirate what do we do with pirates who are captured at sea in the high seas, in international waters and there is a response which is the response of universal jurisdiction but nonetheless as I will try and illustrate in a minute there is often a problem for those that capture alleged pirates of processing them for criminal activities and thirdly there is a problem of governance that the sea be it off the coast of Somalia or in many other parts of the world although that region I think had its fair share of the following of being a sort of pathology for all kinds of waste, toxic waste out at sea if you like and out of mind kind of attitude. So it's in that context where I want to refer to another map or a map with a series of zones perhaps the preferred spatial form of the toracious idea of capital and these were zones that were created literally in August 2011 when a group of maritime industry organizations including the International Chamber of Shipping as well as the ITF which Liam has mentioned issued a series of guidelines entitled best management practices for the protection against Somali based piracy, BMP4 otherwise and this is a representation of the kinds of spaces that were generated there a high risk area in the Gulf of Aden an internationally recommended transit corridor an extended risk area. All of these new spaces were furthermore regulated by novel forms of governance multilateral hybrid that is combining military, civilian involving public-private partnerships and they furthermore recharged locations that have recolonized locations in a way that have a historical legacy places like Dubai, Djibouti, Seychelles became the centers, the operational headquarters of various counter piracy initiatives so what we have here is a form of explicit territorialization and these efforts at territorializations of the ocean create new valorizations of risk that bind land and sea in very peculiar ways the incidence of piracy increases the risk and therefore the costs labor, insurance, fuel and transit across the Gulf of Aden as it happens just in December last year this was the high risk area was revised again by a body of fundamentally private shipping concerns and reduced but I guess what we especially interested here is that the mapping of the high risk areas in their various forms has direct implications for the terms and conditions of seafarers working on vessels in those areas so once again multilateral, stakeholder governance style initiatives are experimented in the terracious context of the of the coast of Somalia with an international bargaining forum, the union employer negotiating body from maritime industry agreeing a series of bonuses of compensation packages of rights refuse sailing within those designated areas now none of these phenomena, remotes, control and command the friction of weather patterns increased premiums are necessarily unique to the high seas but what we do want to suggest is that they are distinctive as the scale and the fluidity of the ocean space precludes the traditional terrestrial response to this predicament and that is occupation major challenges for capital is that the sea cannot be occupied or not permanently at least and so these multilateral governance initiatives that I've been referring to make the sea safe for commodity circulation but they have to battle with the challenge of enforcing a monopoly over the means of violence in these high risk areas and so what we have is an attempt once more at transcending sea land divide in the same way that the open registries and attempted bringing in land based regimes of labour on the ship and the way that the exclusive economic zone is a way of attempting at appropriating resources of the sea the pacification of maritime zones is an instance of trying to bridge this gap in turn generating the new spatial configurations which in many respects reinforce the duality of land and sea so counter piracy takes on the multilateral character at sea but its regional states and their offshore sorry their onshore coastal facilities that acquire a geopolitical role say shells to buy Djibouti are recharged with that role of being centres for the patrolling and surveillance of the ocean space again regional states and their onshore facilities acquire this geopolitical role furthermore the free seas become increasingly regulated but they're regulated by land based regimes of risk through insurance premiums special employment terms and so on and so forth seeing these kinds of expressions of governance and the Indian Ocean once again the western Indian Ocean has become a sort of laboratory for experimenting with these forms of governance seeing these through the longer duration in history helps us to understand the unique spatial temporal relationships that we're trying to underline between capitals of the sea because the notions of risk and profit and indeed their complex geographical interconnection are obviously not new to this region nor is piracy in fact if we start closer from home and hone in on a couple of institutions the city of London or more even more appropriately Lloyd's insurers we emphasise the continuing primacy of this city as a centre of not just global finance and insurance but of production of spaces overseas interestingly both some of you will know both these institutions the city of London Lloyd's had origins in coffee houses which in the course of the 17th century attracted stockbrokers, merchants jobbers in exchange alley so those parts of London around Corn Hill and around that area become the venues the actual locations for exchange and stocks and shares and market information and of course they act as locales for trading in commodities including coffee from places like mocha or what is now Ethiopia Eritrea so on our account they incorporate the circulation of money commodity and productive capital into a single fixed location interlacing the city activity with wider maritime networks trading not just in coffee but also in spices in silk in precious metals and of course in human beings as well and furthermore that linked London at that early stage in the 17th century to wider circuits of trade and commodity exchange and indeed credit reaching out into the Mediterranean the Black Sea and beyond into the Indian Ocean and I want to just dwell briefly on three kinds of institutions central to the reproduction of capital particularly money and commodity capital which are the product of the maritime factor as we've called it the joint stock company the foreign exchange bill and the insurance market both maritime and terrestrial traffic generated diasporic merchant communities but it's arguably coastal and repose that acted in the long 16th century as the key nodes for the process of differential accumulation the northern European 16th century joint stock company is one critical institution it adopted some of the Mediterranean forms the so-called Mauna from Arabic of Mauna for mutual aid and assistance and the Latinate form the commenda contract which underwrote commercial activity of the Italian republics so here we have the phenomenon of shared risk of stakeholders of a unified management of these companies run by shareholders the foreign exchange bill is another expression of this maritime factor in the burgeoning financial centers of Antwerp Amsterdam and London the bill of exchange is a form of deferred payment between merchants trading across distant locations and although it was introduced as a credit instrument in northern Europe by Italian merchants the practice had a long antecedence in the Indian ocean in the form of the Suftaja indeed, again speaking of the Horn of Africa the Hawla or indeed the one of my favorites, apparently it's not true it's a shame, but the institution of the Scheck which apparently was the precursor to the contemporary Czech so the crucial innovation here in this early modern use of bills of exchange is that there was an increasingly limitless capacity to circulate across different markets not one of transaction between merchants but the protracted reciprocal iteration of that exchange allowing these bills of exchange to acquire an abstract quality of a store of universal value by the mid 16th century the emerging European ports like Antwerp, Amsterdam and London were thus inserted into a lattice of intercontinental commodity exchange where again spaces like the Transiatic Contour or the Mediterranean Fondoc or the Kothi of the East Indian Ocean all of them double up as warehouses lodgings of the universal figure of the commercial agent of the Factor in the European language or the Waqel al-Tujar in the Arabic or the Bapari or the Shahbanda harbormaster of the Indian Ocean and I'm not trying to practice my various languages but it's just by way of illustration illustrating how these circuits are integrated across various oceans in fact on the if you can indulge me on this semantic or etymological trip interesting I think many English words like magazine or traffic tariff or romance languages like adwana or avais derived from Arabic and Persian reflecting again this westward journey from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean sea and beyond what we're trying to say and I'll start to wind up is that the specifically early modern European commercial practices that crystallize profit proselytism and power in the shape of the chartered companies that Liam was talking about are the antecedents to the kind of high risk area and perhaps the most signal example of this is the market in insurance that underwrote not just the the process of circulation of the bills of exchange that I've been talking about but of course the process of primitive accumulation the confluence of services of risk of credit of insurance of intelligence the the emergence of of newspapers Lloyd's List or the Courant in Antwerp and Amsterdam are reflections of this this confluence of this functional confluence of services that are the product not just of spatial concentration but also the fact that traders start to double up as bookkeepers and currency exchange and interest calculators and combine that kind of access to information with their commercial acumen and here the sea as we were saying earlier also plays has a certain agency in so far as the sea with its changing tidal ranges with its changing forms in natural harbours the freezing, the weather and so on and so forth becomes itself a domain of risk calculus and it's out of that toracious combination of on the one hand accumulating capital be it in Antwerp and Amsterdam or London and on the other hand we see as a space of opportunity but also risk that the kinds of insurance outfits like Lloyd's emerge so in some throughout the long 16th century credit and insurance practices that had first reappeared in Europe throughout the medieval traffic gradually migrated northern to the northern ports like Antwerp, Amsterdam and London and this staggering increase in the accumulated wealth in those countries was also in those cities rather was also accompanied and to degree facilitated by the structural change in the relationship between finance, trade and government it's also represented anecdotally but I think very interestingly in the beginnings of a sea or a maritime imaginary in the writings in English language of Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe who apply similar tropes of seaborne risk and adventure in the subsequent creations so I hope that this gives you again a picture combining the flag of convenience and of the exclusive economic zone that addresses the question where does authority lie in the oceans and part of our answer is that the authority in the oceans lies in those entities many of them public private many of them hybrid that are able to define produce the spaces of high risk areas of zones so just in summary what we've tried to do is explore three questions the first one is who owns the fish how is exploitation organized at sea and where does authority lie on the ocean we propose the conceptual way in we think spatially linking sovereignty territory and accumulation and there's obviously a necessarily sketchy series of case studies across time and places what we hope to have done is to illustrate the role of the sea as a powerful site of capitalist conflict and reproduction and to highlight the maritime factor in capitalist development we made two main arguments just to reiterate them the first one is the sea is a site and source of competitive innovation and experimentation by capital in part because of the specific bio-physical challenges it poses and secondly the responses to these challenges have historically produced interracrious spaces including those of solidarity and contestation so we hope that we've piqued your interest in this forgotten space and thanks I'll move over to one of the chair thank you very much to both of you that was fascinating would you like to take five minutes to offer some reflections thank you just to open the discussion a few things and questions as well let me say that it's of course a pleasure to be here and to I don't know why I accept it here but anyway that's another question but it's a pleasure to see Marx's political economy as a good antidote against many mystifications and fictitious narratives of what's the sea and reclaiming a territory I think it's quite important as you show even though you have only a few samples I think it's quite an interesting research agenda so I got I would say that against the idea that the seas if you allow me, no man's land you show quite clearly that there are two that the process of valorization is going on at the sea so capitalism is extracting different natural resources by fishing but also by something you mentioned but it's quite important nowadays which is deep sea mining so offshore oil will be there and the second one is of course another key thing in the process of valorization which has been there since the beginning of times which is transport does the first kind of way of regaining of showing again that capitalism is key in understanding the sea the second one is the importance of the state so the state investment in the sea navigation dredging lighthouses counter-parasy the whole public investment and we will get to the problem of the state which state is there so I think that you manage quite convincingly to to transcend this land sea binary that's I would say it's the naive interpretation of the naive reading of what's the sea for capitalism today and in this way you do way more than understand something about the sea I think you do something which is important which is you illuminate again the question by looking at the specific case you illuminate lots of questions on the problem of space territory and the state which is I think interesting as well so I would say there are one important historical role of the sea that you recover and we should maybe discuss one is the one you mentioned about the finance and the social form of risk how it's been shaped after the sea but I think you end up in another risk I will get to that and the second one is how one you didn't mention but how the axis of the Mediterranean has changed to the Atlantic all through the development of capitalism so the importance of Italy Turkey and the Arab world have changed to places such as this island and the Atlantic we can discuss how that's been kind of hand in hand with the development of capitalism but let me get to problems I think we could discuss today so I would say you are getting these two wrong but there is a risk of misunderstanding what you're doing in two specific ways so one is when you get to what's so specific about the sea so you show quite quickly that there is no such a land sea binary but then what's left about the sea that's different from land and I think you have a risk of romanticizing land which is you show suppose the idea that you have when I try to understand where you try to see the sea as something different I had was just said today that sea has an agency and has types and has risk I think you can also if you do agriculture you will know about rains and different like climatological problems and so you would say also that nature has an agency you also speak of biophysical challenges or obstacles sometimes while the sea has both and if you look at land and shingles and deserts you would also find it's also problematic and land is not always so homogeneous and so stable as its looks so I will challenge you to see why you think some geographical features of the sea as a space so geographically or biophysically defined are different or intrinsically different from land so that's where I would say this is the risk of romanticizing land the second one is I would say a bit more controversial but it's the risk of romanticizing the national state and it's in the solutions you find to the problem of territorialization and I think the sea is different and the sea shows how there is no it's a bit uncomfortable to find a patchwork of different national states claiming the territoriality to specific patches of the sea but then you all through your exposition you don't seem to challenge that but rather try to accommodate the model to that which with the idea of exclusive economic zones or even with the idea of the flag of convenience I think because what I understand that this is pointing towards is to the limits of the the limits of the nation state territorialization of different places so maybe we can talk a bit about that you understand that there are novel issues of governance but also when you get to the details sometimes you have state investment sometimes you have private companies actually being the only ones who rule there is you have also international internationalization such as the ILO or the World Bank basically being the rulers sometimes basically the American state as usual being the over power so I think there are also limits to the problem of the national state as when you look at how I tried to territorialize the sea and this also brings me to a question about resistance which is when you look at workers in FOC ships well whether their strategies have been always trying to get to belong to better state or rather others and I think by looking at resistance there we will also learn a bit more about this limits of the national state which I am understanding so again I think it's been a great and really challenging idea to reclaim the role of the sea in the development of capitalism and ensuring that we should also try to and challenging as our ideas of space and territorialization I think it will be great to see the book finished soon. Thank you. Thank you very much. Would you like to take a few moments to respond or should we open straight to the floor? Yes. That's fine. Anybody like to ask a question? Raise your hands, wave at me in the back there. Interesting. I'm going to let you decide the issue. Say a little bit more. What sort of shipping companies are talking about? How global are they? I know that there's a high degree without having to figure it out but I think we have a constant ocean bridge on and a shipping question. Thanks. Let me have a go first, the question about what's distinctive about the sea and then pick up these what's distinctive about the sea is that it cannot be occupied and I think that's critical. I take your point absolutely that there's a danger of sending the stick too far the other way. Of course, there are many parts of the world's landmass that present all kinds of challenges to governance but one way historically, especially not uniquely but especially under industrial capitalism is to settle those lands to get your settlers to occupy that land, to police it and critically if you're capitalist you can do it. I think there's, as Liam was saying there's a capitalist dynamic to there's similar capitalist dynamics at sea through improvement technological improvement fish gathering devices and so on and so forth Liam can talk about that but they're not premised on occupation of the sea. They're premised on rents licensed to fish in the exclusive economic zones. So the juridical form is not one of sovereign control or attempt at sovereign control as might be the case on land. It's one of appropriation and of rent extraction commodity extraction through the figure of the property rights. So that would be my starting point. I appreciate what I want to add that that is a framework which then obviously if it has any purchase can be applied in different contexts in different ways and there's all kinds, I'm sure all kinds of weird wonderful very phenomena similar to the one I've been describing about the way the marine resources are appropriated on land and I think mining is one of the areas that we've been looking at from parallels and this is more than us making the argument here it's more an invitation to hear whether that analogy works with that comparison works but the fishing vessel, the factory ship the total institution that Liam was talking about at sea has many parallels with the remote mining total institutions where life world and workplace are combined where there's ethnic segmentation stratification the forms of domination to reproduce so I think there's leeway for that but I would again go back to what is really unique about the sea I mean to put it somewhat bluntly is nobody lives at sea we live civilizations people have lived in coastal areas and we lived off from the sea off the sea lived in islands but the idea of sea setting for instance is one of those neoliberal utopias this idea that you can actually reproduce societies at sea so I'd emphasize occupation and linking occupation to improvement really interesting question as well I don't have the wherewithal to provide you a detailed anatomy of what is a very complex complex of shippers of lease of container leases of of shipping firms transport firms, operators and so on and so forth but with regard to the example of the high risk area off the coast of Somalia it is bodies like an outfit called BIMCO does anybody know BIMCO have you heard of BIMCO Norway really until one begins to investigate and this is an outfit set up in 1905 called the Baltic and international maritime council incorporating some of the big players in the shipping world container world ship owners you know from Hapak Lloyd right through to you know some of the masks and so on and so forth but these are bodies telling me to my mind anyhow forged in moments of sort of of liberal valorization of the sea around the turn of the 19th century that are explicitly about mobilizing these maritime interests and they were responsible for retrenching or revising the high risk area it's that body that has defined that high risk area in the case of the original high risk area and the international maritime recommended transit corridor just up there on the Gulf of Aden proper there's various moments and I don't want to elaborate too much but it started out the counter-piracy operations the NATO and EU led operation at Atlanta is the dominant one and it has had various renewed mandates but it started off as a UN World Food Program initiative or campaign to allow World Food Program vessels to provide emergency aid allegedly to Somalia and a UN Security Council Resolution 1816 allows for the counter-piracy in Somali coastal waters from that initial multilateral attempt at relief by 2008 through again a multilateral body this I'd refer you to this best management practices for protection against Somali based piracy, BMP4 really interesting, I don't normally say this about these kinds of documents but really interesting because again it involves classic global governance language of stakeholders of public-private partnerships of multilateral agencies so the UN specialized agencies are involved the private shipping companies are involved the international maritime office is involved which in effect is a branch of the international the commercial what are they called, chambers of commerce outfits so it's a roundabout answer which I think boils down to that it's complicated but in a way it's deliberately complicated because the whole point is that there is a domain where these kinds of governance can be experimented precisely because they are nobody's property because they are the high seas there is a body of law, the UN convention of the law of the seas and suppression of unlawful acts at sea but it's mediated through these governance institutions the sorry no, the Straits of Hormuz of course they're critical choke points together with the Malacca Straits with the Suez Canal with the Panama Straits and now interestingly the northern passage along the Russian coastline Arctic coastline and the northwest passage across Canada they these zones these parts of the world in the Arctic areas that are turning from ice to sea are being valorized and they're being securitized and they are being charged with diplomatic force you know suddenly India, People's Republic of China want to have observer status in the Arctic Council what's that about it's about a potential route at least a summer route potentially a year long route in the next decades that would most accounts slash the route from say Shenzhen to to Felix though by about a third you know that's a significant saving it's also about the kinds of energy sources that you're referring to you know mineral extraction on the sea bed it's also about NATO and it's geopolitical increasingly increasing tension with Russia with NATO countries like the United States, Norway, Canada now sharing waters with the Arctic so the banal answer sorry if it sounds too banal is that it's complicated and I guess what we're trying to bring to the table is that it's complicated for a reason namely that there is a domain that facilitates not again mechanically or automatically but facilitates this overlapping idea of governance and also because and this is my insistence perhaps more than Liam's although I think we're kind of converging on that they are certain biophysical properties to the sea goes back to it cannot be occupied or it cannot be improved in ways that land might be I just want to add very quickly the major difference between the sea and the land is that the sea as yet has not been able to be changed by human beings is now but not as a deliberate as an unintended consequence of capitalist development but it's just not the same types of ability to mould the environment within which human beings live and of course ocean acidification global warming, dead zones and so on that's changing but that's a slightly different kind of dynamic I think I also wanted to get at your second point a little bit more which was about the risk of romanticizing the nation state and what of resistance are you suggesting that if there weren't non-flags if flags of convenience didn't exist there'd be the same problem anyway is that kind of what you're getting at no worries okay what the flag of convenience allows capital to do is to bypass law and by law according to which law suits it the various flagging nations are able to kind of race to the bottom actually technically the race to the bottom isn't the case when it comes to environmental regulation on boats and when it comes to occupational health and safety on boats actually there's a kind of race to the middle on labour standards there's a race to the bottom and I think that's crucial when understanding why is that flags of convenience are being used in the way that they're being used and while the quick thing that's worth mentioning the question of appropriation and mining in the seabed is that as yet that's not the case in what's called the area or the common heritage of humankind but that's what's going to be changing next that's kind of on the agenda so if there are a couple of big multinational firms who are working with very small easily manipulated island states to make a case that they should have the right to dig in the so-called common heritage of humankind and that's kind of the new frontier let's say of appropriation from the sea because at the moment you can only do that legally on the continental shelf but not in a really deep sea thank you any more hands thank you can I have a first go? Liam or do you want to I'll do the historical one the periodization I think it's a good example of reclamation of sea reclamation but the in terms of international law that that claim if you're talking about the Spratlys and other kind of islands in South China Sea are reliant on land being visible or being above the low tide even if it's two and a half meters which is sometimes the range so we're still talking about the need to then claim the 200 nautical miles from a piece of land that is above sea so I take your point that the UN convention on the law of the sea and as Liam was saying even before that a Truman declaration and having the geopolitical power allows the territorialization of the sea and indeed the enclosure a word that we haven't used yet but the map that Liam was showing earlier this is enclosure there's no doubt about it but there are still some parts of the high seas that cannot be claimed because there's no land around above sea level so I know it probably sounds like a cruelly materialist point but that's the point I mean there is a historic as you know a historic dispute amongst various states, Vietnam people's republic, Philippines and so on and so forth what I've found quite interesting in this is that the people's republic is using the famous 9 dashed line that is actually a Taiwanese map or you know a republic of China map so they're using a claim that effectively Taiwan has as well and you know you get these ironies again where the French apparently still claim have a claim on the Spratlys because of their colonial legacies and so there's very much an imperial colonial reading, contemporary colonial reading of that dispute as a legacy of imperialism in Southeast Asia that in some respects continues but I guess the main point is that the spatial representation of that the way in which it's represented and presented in bodies like the commission on the limits of continental shelf is one that is presented as being multilateral and distinctive to that regime of the UN convention of the sea on Yunklos. Can I just add to something very quickly on that so from China's perspective the whole law of the sea reflects what they would argue would be the confetti of empire which is these various overseas territories overseas countries and territories of Britain and France and the United States and others which allowed them to claim large chunks of the sea and you compare the volume of the Chinese he said on a per capita basis it's tiny. So that's kind of there of self justification for the history of imperialism. But what I wanted to talk about briefly was Shria's really good question about historical periodization. Absolutely. What we're doing here is just a taster of a book and various chapters and the way we've tried to address this thorny problem to even historicize the focus primarily on historical capitalism we're not really doing an abstract analysis of how do you historicize something you know 400, 500 years of history. The way we've periodized is according to themes. So for example one of the themes I was talking about on exploitation and labour regimes there the focus very much is on the British merchant marine and the relationship with empire so that's very much kind of the focus there but then we kind of shift to post-World War II flag convenience and the changing global shipping. Completely different types of crews for example Philippine crew being on a crucial kind of labour outsourcing strategy of the Philippine state. So in the book it will be much more focused on specific periods but obviously this is a snapshot of that. So the main point that I wanted to make is to be able to develop different periods according to the different themes. So on exploitation there will be a principle periodization around the British Empire and post-World War II kind of context but on something like appropriation there is the long history of the development of capitalist fishing but you know it's kind of really picked up after World War II industrialization of fishing on a global scale and it allows you to then pick out particular moments and if that answers the question a little bit maybe. Alex? No, it's just a reinforce that it's a big question we don't really have, we're not there yet I think and I think the interesting thing is that there's multiple and just to reiterate what Liam's saying that there's multiple temporalities so if you look at international law there's a sort of grossion moment of us thinking about the law of the sea if you think about the organization of labor it has a different there's a different sort of periodization I guess what we'll probably try and do is emphasize those moments of overlap it's not a functional overlap but there is I think a structural relationship for instance to take the example of the law of the sea between Grosius's musings on the law of the sea and his defense of the freedom of the sea and the expansion of northwest mercantilist empires it's just it's obvious actually at one level that doesn't mean that it pans out smoothly clearly there's forms of contestation but it's remarkable that Grosius explicitly is contracted by the East India Company to say to warrant Dutch encroachment on the Spice Islands to get the Portuguese out the way and that moment of overlap of mercantilist or commercial capitalism on the one hand and the beginnings of a certain conception of the three seas I think would be one concentration maybe never, well let's see but the Broadellian conceptions of multiple temporalities that sometimes overlap will probably play some role there because there's no tidy beginning or end Any final questions? Yeah It really brought about the ending of the official document hence the bone shore un- unions, the docking unions here around really worked the rise of pain which meant capturing a new almost new depot of the maritime and the on your argument about biophysical elements you mentioned of the patient was demanded you have the nice diagram there of the fact that when the quality moves it never reduces itself once or not what does that does that play any specific argument or any specificity argument has to be about at least the obstacles to activate how does it actually take a circuit of capital I didn't get that to read how you can't occupy it but so what how does that do which is I think on the point of occupation which is one interesting I think one could argue that there is some mythology of the land of the territory in every single national state where the sea is more occupied the large chunks or pieces of land so suppose you can't occupy the Sahara desert not the Atacama desert but Chile won't ever say they don't own the land right but that's purely mythological I mean and it's more important the sea in terms of the maritalization process than the Atacama desert similar thing could be argued for Amazonas so the question of occupation I understand that you are getting an old idea of settlement and the possibility of social reproduction and there are lots of spaces where social reproduction is not possible but still are part of the maritalization process which is the point here so I wouldn't take this at face value basically that since you can't occupy then there are no there are no social forces around the regulation and maintenance and so on there will be are there any more questions from the floor for handover so the first question of the downplaying of the sea versus land comparison I'm going to skip that because I think we kind of talked a little bit about that and focus much more on your point about the extreme impacts on marine life and so on like whale oil for example whale blubber providing the light of Boston and so on we're writing very much about that and the appropriation of nature through naturalism in the sea that's fundamental kind of one of the chapters that we're writing about and I talked a little bit about that in relation to fisheries but one of the things you other kind of intonated was what we're putting into the sea so it's not just pollution it's not just plastic it's also heat and the incredible 20 last 25 years heat dump that's the sea is essentially absorbed and eventually that's the carbon oceanographic science is correct that's going to start getting to its absolute limits what we now know about greenhouse gas global warming is going to become accelerated precisely because of the heating of the sea so I think that's a fundamental aspect of what we're doing but just not what we're talking about today because we're just trying to talk about very specific narrow points even though of course we're also running through hundreds of years of history so you know it's yeah so our apologies for missing that point but it's certainly there on the question of occupation I think that this is leading us into a little bit of a red herring because the sea can be occupied in certain ways so for example if you look I was just the other day I was in the Solomon Islands and I was in the regional surveillance center and they have this map on the wall but it's real time and they're mapping every single boat in the sea and you'll actually see the boats fishing exactly exactly on the line using GPS so the line of the Z even though it's a man made line it doesn't actually exist as a border there is a kind of form of kind of an occupation there in the sense that it's kind of regulated and governed and then the question is to what extent does that matter anyway well it does matter to the extent that those states are able to appropriate rents from that activity of those fishing fleets so when they're fishing in sort in shore they can capture a portion of the surplus value from that activity when they're not in their waters they can't and that's exactly why Tuna I mean that's why I'm so fascinated by Tuna because they swim around these entire areas and you can see here there's kind of huge millions of miles that Tuna swim creates a very peculiar and difficult problem for Capital 1 to try and catch but also to then for the state to try and regulate it's exactly that kind of no person's land of the high seas which makes it kind of interesting let's say but also potentially more environmentally destructive because it's impossible to regulate I mean Liam's as some of you know is the man on Tuna so I'm not going to Mr Tuna UK but just to riff a bit on that for me what is to address your question what is challenging about the Tuna is that it's a movement and that I think does condition how Capital can then appropriate that potential commodity I mean again I'll defer to Liam what I find quite interesting is experiments in Tuna ranching for instance of enclosing are unsuccessful amongst other reasons because of the nature of these highly migratory species apparently cost more to fatten those pendant Tuna those ranch Tuna they reproduce less so the mobility is the value but in order to capture that value you need an infrastructure that has to be in movement as well and I suppose at the end although technology and labour regimes that Liam's been talking about might allow the extension of the ship at sea so the factory ships might be out at sea longer at some stage they want to return to land and they are in some respects they never leave land while they're at sea and I think that is distinctive I mean I take your point that sovereignty is a legal fiction but boy does it have an infrastructure that reinforces the air if there is an incursion of I don't know Venezuelan supported agents into Colombian in the Colombian part of the Amazon then those countries will do something about it there will be a diplomatic incident that doesn't happen in the high seas because it's nobody's property or at least not in that particular form that would be my point I take your points and as Liam said I hope that we don't downplay the land sea division in fact in a way I think that our challenge is not to overplay it in ways that one has suggested and logistics will play a central role inevitably in the book there's a whole chapter dedicated to logistics not least because some of you will know the first the guy who in effect universalised the container as we know it today a guy called Malcolm McLaren not the punk empresario called his outfit sea land services he wanted trucks on ships he wanted trucks that go on water and he got them they're called containers one of the themes that Liam doesn't like me saying this but I sense we're almost closing so it might be for the sort of post-match discussions but is that there is a process of or there are elements of the sea washing back onto land a sort of maritimisation of land through for instance coastal export processing zones but I think the container is a key element of that because the container is not simply a freight technology it is a social force it's a political artefact that carries with it all kinds of very powerful social relations I'm talking about the fact that it's universal that it's standardised, that it's mechanised and that working in the school of management that has real implications for the way in which labour is organised in these special economic zones but note for me the critical thing is that again there's a zonal dynamic here in terms of spaces, the zone is something that is kind of exceptional it's a it's a legal fiction but if you're working in that zone you know that that fiction actually applies quite seriously on your terms and conditions on your life or on your relationship between the workplace and the life world and I this is something that we're still thinking about I'm not suggesting that the sea is the origin of the exporting processing zones alone but it cannot be a coincidence that a disproportionate number of these EPZs are coastal that they're precisely spaces where land meets sea so we've got another question we've got time the historical issue that's what you do first just to check if there's anyone else with a question now would be the perfect time we'll have to look that one up it was so funny I could really walk out by his bunch it was magic yeah just briefly I know we're nearing the end game but it's really too push on the issue of periodization in Ocamp so there are many periodizing people and I love the stories you have but perhaps being honest you have to move with you from the same century it's for me that the issues facing Ocamp and the sea they raised a bit the argument beginning of it still can I just try and address the question of does historical materialism prioritize anthropocentric thinking about the sea the reason why we've prioritized I think the extraction of particular fish is because that's the ones that capital has been prioritizing and despite that it also has very considerable unintended consequences for multiplicity of other species by catch and so on so that's part of the story not the story we were talking about today but I think it would be wrong to just talk about the commercial stocks and not look at the entire ecosystem within which they exist because if you take out certain species it has a negative effect elsewhere so you talked earlier about the cod that had a very positive impact on the shrimp population which are now a bound to full product of that ocean of Canada so I don't think that historical materialism of necessity has to prioritize the capital-centric kind of species but I think in terms of trying to study what capitalism is and what it does that's the first step I would argue and then from there you have to also look at the wider dynamics or less of course you're coming from an actor network kind of theory and you're trying to suggest the various positionalities of various things of equal relevance which will be a different kind of question that we're going to get into and on Henry's point there are many competing periodization what we were trying to do today was pick particular moments and show the difference so for example the labour regime on the British merchant marine in the 1700s compared to labour regimes on boats and the flaking convenience vessels which is both of which aren't the only labour regimes on boats in both of those eras the dominant ones in both eras so that's the way we've kind of tried to slice up that pie just as an example so I think that's exactly what it is that we're trying to do I think but maybe not as well fought through or precise as we would like to be yet so again quickly or as briefly as possible because these are really good and big questions the ontology I mean that word always in a way I think we're emphatically not saying that that capitalism is the only order that has this to rakeus territory I'm surprised nobody's picked up on our use of the to rakeus and whether we should or not but anyhow that's another issue of course all kinds of human cultures civilisations, social formations across time and place that to negotiate the relationship between land and sea but we are making a claim from a historical materialist perspective that there's a certain specificity to that relationship and it's it is one where capital tries as you know Monsieur le capital to capture sea resources to valorise them oftentimes in ways that it might do on land and yet our story our proposition is that there's constant limits to that there's constant biophysical limitations to that and you know capital in different contexts innovates response to that by for instance saying okay we can't we can't enclose the sea there are no fences in the sea but what we can do is experiment with a juridical form that allows the exploitation of resources 200 nautical miles as property whilst recognising that there's freedom of navigation so there's a classic sort of separation of the political and the economic and that is historically distinctive you know Polynesian society I mean Phil Steinberg's book is very good synthesis of this as you probably know you know he looks at what he calls the Indian Ocean model of what he called stewardship of the sea the Pacific nations again this has changed through time but have a completely different conception of the sea and the relationship between land and sea which you know is often linked to spiritual burial places to a different cosmology we're suggesting that there's a dominant form of conceiving of land and sea which is a capitalist one now Henry this is where it gets dangerous because you know we start stroking each other's egos or at least we might stroke yours in the sense that on the issue of the origins of capitalism of course in the book we have to define the term and put our cards on the table where we arrive at this your point that for instance in the classic contrast between a sort of Ellen Wood, Brenner it's agrarian capitalism stupid it's about England and the Wallastine Broaddale circulationist it's all about the sea it's both it's not either or it's both and what's I think quite interesting this is the chapter on circulation which I've kind of taken the lead on is part of the story I try to tell today is that you know that there is no the city of London Amsterdam and Antwerp are integrated into these pre-existing pre-capitalist networks and they're valorized in particular form and we have to be quite conjunctural about it look at the specific ways in which that happens we attempt to do that in the book and the first version on circulation but the story or the where we've reached is a view that it's not either or there is a strong relationship between accumulation of capital in the English countryside and the circulation or kind of value overseas just to add to that super quickly sorry people don't often talk about maritime industries maritime industries in the transition to capitalism in England everyone talks about kind of agriculture and then clothing and textiles there was third largest employer in Britain from the 17 hundreds and throughout it it was a huge huge industry lots of lots of ancillary industries producing its own kind of like motions of capital innovation and development and I just think that there's something there as well although we haven't nailed it exactly yet no that's excellent so we have lots of food for discussion we'd like to invite you all very warmly to join us for a reception after the seminar so we're going to have some wine and some nibbles and keep talking about these issues that's going to be right now in the senior common room in the main building on the first floor if you don't know the way wait around for me and I can show you and next week we have a special panel event that we'd like to invite you all to development in crisis states conflicts refugees celebrating 25 years of development studies here so as so hope to see you there and hope to see you at the reception and thank you very much for coming and thank you to our speakers Liam Alex and so one