Decolonization at Sea: Oceans as Imperial and Anti-imperial Spaces

During the late-colonial period, as oceans grew more congested and demand for marine natural resources increased, littoral nations began claiming stretches of territorial seas, meaning coastal waters over which they exercised sovereign control. The lack of international consensus over maritime law prior to World War II— seas had been free and unrestricted under the centuries-old doctrine of mare liberum—meant there was little to stop this rapid “enclosure” of oceanic space. Enclosure of the seas intensified after 1945, when the United States made unprecedented claims over not just its coastal waters, but the entire continental shelf adjacent to its shores. Almost immediately, smaller and newly-liberated nations across the Global South, alongside nations in the Global North, made similar claims by demarcating their own territorial seas, claiming ownership over the seabeds and subsoils of continental shelves, and declaring exclusive rights to exploit all marine natural resources found in, under, and even in the airspace above the open oceans. By the 1960s, free seas had been replaced by de facto “ownership” of thousands of nautical miles of ocean, including the exclusive rights of littoral nations to exploit all marine natural resources located anywhere from three to two hundred miles off their coastlines.

Beneath this global fever to “own” the world’s oceans lay some of decolonization’s most pressing issues: What were the geographic and political limits of national sovereignty? Who had the right to control and profit from the world’s natural resources? How should colonial injustices be acknowledged and rectified at the end of empire? Where might nations resist Cold War divisions and enact alternative political models? By repositioning our geopolitical understanding of decolonization to an oceanic perspective, this paper reveals the ways in which maritime spaces helped create new opportunities for negotiating the distribution of power and wealth in a post-empire world.