Zero-Sum Seas Nodal Monopoly, Cartographic Secrecy, and the Recurring Grammar of State-Directed Maritime Control, 1415 to 1920

This article argues that state-directed maritime commercial monopoly constitutes a recurrent but not continuous institutional form: each of the four systems examined here, the Portuguese feitoria network (1415 to 1580), the Spanish Casa de Contratacion and Carrera de Indias (1503 to 1778), the Dutch chartered companies (1602 to c. 1800), and the American Jones Act regime (1920 to the present), represents a rupture from its predecessor and a reinvention of the same underlying logic rather than a linear institutional inheritance. The unifying logic is mercantilist and strictly zero-sum: state power is measured by bullion accumulation, wealth gained by one political entity is wealth denied to all others, and the control of maritime nodes, routes, and spatial knowledge is the primary instrument of accumulation. Drawing on institutional history, the historiographical framework developed by William J. Novak for understanding the infrastructural American state, and the cartographic theory of J.B. Harley, the article demonstrates that each system achieved commercial dominance through three coordinated mechanisms: nodal capture (the physical or legal control of chokepoint ports and straits), route secrecy (the institutional suppression of navigational and hydrographic knowledge), and the public-private hybrid (the formal delegation of state commercial power to licensed monopoly entities that preserved the legal fiction of private enterprise while executing state strategy). The rupture-and-reinvention thesis distinguishes this analysis from continuity arguments: what passes between systems is not institutions but a structural logic that political actors in each period discovered independently under conditions of intensified zero-sum competition. This article establishes the institutional and conceptual framework for these claims and identifies the empirical spatial evaluation that this framework makes testable across the cartographic archives of all four systems.