This book introduces non-specialist readers to the history of how human societies have sought to control, use and exploit our oceans, seas and shorelines over time in different geographical and cultural contexts. The Unruly Ocean examines the development of the modern international legal regime – the law of the sea, maritime law, marine environmental and pollution law, fisheries regulation, and underwater cultural heritage law – and considers how effective these laws have been in addressing the many challenges facing marine and coastal environments ranging from piracy and war to oil spills and the extraction of marine resources. It concludes by discussing the socio-ecological crises facing the world’s oceans, seas and shorelines, and explores current ideas for reimagining a legal regime that restores the health of our oceanic realm and offers a more holistic, transboundary, rights-based approach to ocean governance. This book will be of value to law and non-law undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as research scholars and other educated audiences interested in a legal history of the world’s oceans, seas and shorelines.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A riveting, adrenaline-fueled tour of a vast, lawless, and rampantly criminal world that few have ever seen: the high seas. There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. But perhaps the wildest, and least understood, are the world's oceans: too big to police, and under no clear international authority, these immense regions of treacherous water play host to rampant criminality and exploitation. Traffickers and smugglers, pirates and mercenaries, wreck thieves and repo men, vigilante conservationists and elusive poachers, seabound abortion providers, clandestine oil-dumpers, shackled slaves and cast-adrift stowaways—drawing on five years of perilous and intrepid reporting, often hundreds of miles from shore, Ian Urbina introduces us to the inhabitants of this hidden world. Through their stories of astonishing courage and brutality, survival and tragedy, he uncovers a globe-spanning network of crime and exploitation that emanates from the fishing, oil, and shipping industries, and on which the world's economies rely. Both a gripping adventure story and a stunning exposé, this unique work of reportage brings fully into view for the first time the disturbing reality of a floating world that connects us all, a place where anyone can do anything because no one is watching.

From a MacArthur "Genius," a bold new perspective on the history of Asia, highlighting the long quest to tame its waters Asia's history has been shaped by her waters. In Unruly Waters, historian Sunil Amrith reimagines Asia's history through the stories of its rains, rivers, coasts, and seas -- and of the weather-watchers and engineers, mapmakers and farmers who have sought to control them. Looking out from India, he shows how dreams and fears of water shaped visions of political independence and economic development, provoked efforts to reshape nature through dams and pumps, and unleashed powerful tensions within and between nations. Today, Asian nations are racing to construct hundreds of dams in the Himalayas, with dire environmental impacts; hundreds of millions crowd into coastal cities threatened by cyclones and storm surges. In an age of climate change, Unruly Waters is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Asia's past and its future.

“This bracing history charts the myths, the exploration, and the inhabitants of the all-too-real and wild circumpolar ocean to our south.” —The Sydney Morning Herald, Pick of the Week Unlike the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic Oceans with their long maritime histories, little is known about the Southern Ocean. This book takes readers beyond the familiar heroic narratives of polar exploration to explore the nature of this stormy circumpolar ocean and its place in Western and Indigenous histories. Drawing from a vast archive of charts and maps, sea captains’ journals, whalers’ log books, missionaries’ correspondence, voyagers’ letters, scientific reports, stories, myths, and her own experiences, Joy McCann embarks on a voyage of discovery across its surfaces and into its depths, revealing its distinctive physical and biological processes as well as the people, species, events, and ideas that have shaped our perceptions of it. The result is both a global story of changing scientific knowledge about oceans and their vulnerability to human actions and a local one, showing how the Southern Ocean has defined and sustained southern environments and people over time. Beautifully and powerfully written, Wild Sea will raise a broader awareness and appreciation of the natural and cultural history of this little-known ocean and its emerging importance as a barometer of planetary climate change. “A sensitive portrait of a complex ecosystem, from krill to blue whales, and of the ice, winds, and currents that are critical to the circulation of the world’s oceans.” —Harper’s “Wilderness seekers will rejoice in this stirring portrait . . . McCann deftly navigates both natural glories and archival complexities.” —Nature

Existing in myriad forms, containing multitudes in its reflection, and coursing through each and every one of us, water sustains the world around us--and life itself.

Bringing together leading scholars from across a diverse range of disciplines, this unique book examines a key question: How can we best conserve marine living resources in the polar regions, where climate change effects and human activities are particularly pressing?

A stunning story cycle that explores the fractured lives of families in a Jersey Shore beach town from the bestselling, New York Times Notable author. Faith, a mother of two young children, Cece and Connor, is in need of summer childcare. As a member of a staid old beach club in her town and a self-made business consultant, she is appalled when her brother-in-law sends her an unruly, ill-mannered teenager named Lee-Ann who appears more like a wayward child than competent help. What begins as a promising start to a redemptive relationship between the two ends in a tragedy that lands Faith in a treatment facility, leveled by trauma. Years later, Faith and her mother, Irene, visit Cece in college. A fresh-faced student with a shaved head and new boyfriend, Cece has become a force of her own. Meanwhile, her grandmother, Irene, is in the early stages of dementia. She slips in and out of clarity, telling lucid tales of her own troubled youth. Faith dismisses her mother’s stories as bids for attention. The three generations of women hover between wishful innocence and a more knowing resilience against the cruelty that hidden secrets of the past propel into the present. Including stories from an array of characters orbiting Faith’s family, The Ocean House weaves an exquisite world of complicated family tales on the Jersey Shore. In ever-tender and elegant prose, Mary-Beth Hughes masterfully explores the emotional consequences of loss and the saving graces of love. “[The Ocean House] accrues a rich, novelistic sweep and leaves readers with a vertiginous sense of contingency.” —The New York Times

“[Daniel Pauly] is an iconoclastic fisheries scientist ... who is so decidedly global in his life and outlook that he is nearly a man without a country.”—NEW YORK TIMES “Daniel Pauly is a friend whose work has inspired me for years.”—TED DANSON Daniel Pauly is a living legend in the world of marine biology. He coined the influential term “shifting baselines,” in which knowledge of environmental disaster fades over time, leading to a misguided understanding of our world. He blew the whistle on the global fishing industry, alerting the public to the devastation of overfishing. And he developed data-driven research methods that led to groundbreaking discoveries. Daniel Pauly is also a man whose life was shaped by struggle. Born after the Second World War to a white French woman and Black American GI in Paris, Pauly’s childhood has been described as Dickensian. His father left before he was born and his mother, whose family did not accept her and her mixed-race son, fell prey to a manipulative Swiss couple who abducted Pauly under murky circumstances. He was taken to Switzerland, where he was treated cruelly as the couple’s servant. Pauly escaped to Germany to attend university and, as a young man, travelled to the United States during the 1969 civil rights movement, where he met his father’s family and experienced a political and racial reawakening. From there, he went on to have one of the most decorated careers in the field of marine biology. The Ocean’s Whistleblower “weaves together the challenges of marine research with an astonishing coming-of-age story” (Andrew Sharpless, Oceana) and is told through interviews with colleagues, friends, and Pauly himself. A brilliant book about a brilliant man, The Ocean’s Whistleblower finally profiles one of the most influential scientists of our time.

On the map of global trade, China is now the factory of the world. A parade of ships full of raw commodities-iron ore, coal, oil-arrive in its ports, and fleets of container ships leave with manufactured goods in all directions. The oil that fuels China's manufacturing comes primarily from the Arabian peninsula. Much of the material shipped from China are transported through the ports of Arabian peninsula, Dubai's Jabal Ali port foremost among them. China's 'maritime silk road' flanks the peninsula on all sides. Sinews of War and Trade is the story of what the making of new ports and shipping infrastructure has meant not only for the Arabian peninsula itself, but for the region and the world beyond. The book is an account of how maritime transportation is not simply an enabling companion of trade, but central to the very fabric of global capitalism. The ports that serve maritime trade, logistics, and hydrocarbon transport create racialised hierarchies of labour, engineer the lived environment, aid the accumulation of capital regionally and globally, and carry forward colonial regimes of profit, law and administration.

Wartime intrigue spans the lives of three women—past and present—in this emotional novel from the acclaimed author of The Last Year of the War. February, 1946. World War Two is over, but the recovery from the most intimate of its horrors has only just begun for Annaliese Lange, a German ballerina desperate to escape her past, and Simone Deveraux, the wronged daughter of a French Résistance spy. Now the two women are joining hundreds of other European war brides aboard the renowned RMS Queen Mary to cross the Atlantic and be reunited with their American husbands. Their new lives in the United States brightly beckon until their tightly-held secrets are laid bare in their shared stateroom. When the voyage ends at New York Harbor, only one of them will disembark... Present day. Facing a crossroads in her own life, Brette Caslake visits the famously haunted Queen Mary at the request of an old friend. What she finds will set her on a course to solve a seventy-year-old tragedy that will draw her into the heartaches and triumphs of the courageous war brides—and will ultimately lead her to reconsider what she has to sacrifice to achieve her own deepest longings. CONVERSATION GUIDE INCLUDED