Conference Description

Where once the historiographies of land and sea were largely seen to be disconnected, this is certainly no longer the case. Under such terms as ‘terraqueous’, ‘littoral’, or ‘coastal’ histories, historians have long sought to emphasise the deep connections of communities across land, sea, and the spaces in-between. Within the context of colonial history, this has led to important new insights into histories of coastal lives, labour, trade, free and forced mobility, technologies, and law. Yet, these approaches continue to observe the sea as a space of movement and exchange without studying the extraction and consumption of below-water resources. Nevertheless, significant scholarship has been dedicated to such examinations, particularly surrounding the history of fishing and whaling—but these tend to be dominated by certain geographical and temporal boundaries that speak to only particular colonial contexts at certain times. As a result, in his recent monograph Liquid Seas (2025), Corey Ross noted that “for most of the colonial world, the interactions between imperial power and aquatic life have scarcely been investigated.”

Taking place in August 2026, this in person and partly virtual conference will explore aquatic lives—broadly defined—within a colonial context across chronological, geographical, and thematic divides. We draw from Kevin Dawson’s hinter-seas (2019), which recognises how shoreside communities transformed coastal and distant seas into highly productive labor spaces that were economic, social, spiritual, and political extensions of their communities. Individuals who worked and lived with these waters engaged a whole host of activities including: fishing; whaling; salvaging; pearl-diving; beachcombing; and the harvesting of shellfish, seaweed, sea cucumbers, and other marine resources. Crucially, these activities were linked to amphibious lives in which below-water resources were essential to homemaking, consumption, spiritual practices, family and community wellbeing, as well as various economic activities centred on processing, marketing, and transportation. Hinter-seas de-centers historical analyses that have traditionally focussed on terrestrial—or land-based—production and narratives of deep-water voyages while expressing societies’ connections to the sea, a topic that has been understudied.

My Paper

I will present an excerpt from my new book project, Women of the Trade, which considers the possibility that West Africans and their legal culture(s) may have influenced the “English” policies implemented on the continent's coast and in the colonies.