The Empire of the Seas: Maritime Sovereignty, Authority, and Order in Early Modern Intellectual History

Reviewing recent scholarship on the early modern intellectual history of maritime empire, this article traces the impact of David Armitage's The Ideological Origins of the British Empire on the development of a transnational and comparative approach to the study of maritime sovereignty and imperial order. First, the article discusses how the intellectual origins of Britain's “empire of the seas” must be understood within a broader European and global history. As shown in studies on Hugo Grotius and his Iberian rivals as well as recent work on the Mediterranean, the famous dispute over mare liberum and mare clausum, which informed British claims to maritime empire, was part of a long tradition of seeking justification for exclusive rights of property and jurisdiction over European seas and the world's oceans. A second theme is the authority of antiquity. Not only Roman law but also Greek examples of naval power provided early modern thinkers with intellectual resources for justifying maritime sovereignty based on effective control and security. Finally, the article highlights recent studies that show how maritime empire depended not only on theories but also on legal practices, which generated shared legal frameworks across competing empires through a continual interaction between order and disorder.