Results of a conference entitled "Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges" held Feb. 2003 at the Library of Congress.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Karen Wigen ---- I. Constructs. 1. Islands in the Making of an Atlantic Oceania, 1500-1800 / John R. Gillis --- 2. Vessels of Exchange: The Global Shipwright in the Pacific / Hans Konrad Van Tilburg --- 3. Maritime Ideologies and Ethnic Anomalies: Sea Space and the Structure of Subalternity in the Southeast Asian Littoral / Jennifer L. Gaynor ---- II. Empires. 4. The Organization of Oceanic Empires: The Iberian World in the Habsburg Period / Carla Rahn Phillips --- 5. The Ottoman 'Discovery' of the Indian Ocean in the Sixteenth Century / Giancarlo Casale --- 6. Lines of Plunder or Crucible of Modernity? The Legal Geography of the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1660-1825 / Eliga H. Gould --- 7. Transgressive Exchange: Circumventing Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Commercial Restrictions, or The Discount of Monte Christi / Alan L. Karras ---- III. Sociologies. 8. 'Tavern of the Seas'? The Cape of Good Hope as an Oceanic Crossroads during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries / Kerry Ward --- 9. That Turbulent Soil: Seafarers, the 'Black Atlantic, ' and Afro-Caribbean Identity / Alan Gregor Cobley --- 10. Race, Migration, and Port-City Radicalism: West Indian Longshoremen and the Politics of Empire, 1880-1920 / Risa L. Faussette --- 11. South Asian Seafarers and Their Worlds: c. 1870-1930s / G. Balachandran ---- IV. Transgressors. 12. Marking Water: Piracy and Property in the Premodern West / Emily Sohmer Tai --- 13. With the Sea as Their Domain: Pirates and Maritime Lordship in Medieval Japan / Peter D. Shapinsky --- 14. The Pirate and the Gallows: An Atlantic Theater of Terror and Resistance / Marcus Rediker.

Historians have only recently begun to chart the experiences of maritime regions in rich detail and penetrate the historical processes at work there. Seascapes makes a major contribution to these efforts by bringing together original scholarship on historical issues arising from maritime regions around the world. The essays presented here take a variety of approaches. One group examines the material, cultural, and intellectual constructs that inform and explain historical experiences of maritime regions. Another set discusses efforts-some more successful than others-to impose political and military control over maritime regions. A third group focuses on issues of social history such as labor organization, information flows, and the development of political consciousness among subaltern populations. The final essays deal with pirates and efforts to control them in Mediterranean, Japanese, and Atlantic waters.

1 2