What keeps capitalism afloat

Winner of the IPEG 2022 Book Prize

The global ocean has through the centuries served as a trade route, strategic space, fish bank and supply chain for the modern capitalist economy. While sea beds are drilled for their fossil fuels and minerals, and coastlines developed for real estate and leisure, the oceans continue to absorb the toxic discharges of our carbon civilization - warming, expanding, and acidifying the blue water part of the planet in ways that will bring unpredictable but irreversible consequences for the rest of the biosphere.

In this bold and radical new book, Campling and Colás analyse these and other sea-related phenomena through a historical and geographical lens. In successive chapters dealing with the political economy, ecology and geopolitics of the sea, the authors argue that the earth's geographical separation into land and sea has significant consequences for capitalist development. The distinctive features of this mode of production continuously seek to transcend the land-sea binary in an incessant quest for profit, engendering new alignments of sovereignty, exploitation and appropriation in the capture and coding of maritime spaces and resources.

"This ground-breaking, immensely rich and densely argued book shows how criss-crossing sealanes have connected ports and cities, and brought together different modes of production and social classes. Over the centuries, the sea has circulated values, human subjects, and shifting modes of exploitation; in doing this, global capitalism has established new chains of activities and evolving patterns of extraction, exploitation, circulation and distribution of (surplus) value. This mighty work of scholarship traces these human endeavours; in doing this, it has opened fresh avenues of research." - Alfredo Saad-Filho, King’s College London

"A novel perspective...Capitalism and the Sea brings into focus important questions from the history of capitalism." - Marx and Philosophy

"An important and rewarding read, as well as a valuable addition to the growing body of work studying capital's relationship to ecology and the destruction of the environment on which we all rely." - International Socialism

"An oceanic journey through the political economy, ecology and geopolitics of the sea." - Morning Star

"A fabulously wide-ranging new history of the last five centuries, covering the slave-trade, ecology, modern container ports and EEZ's, industrial fisheries, territorial disputes and much more." - Hastings Independent

"An ambitious, systematic, and convincing account of the reciprocal impact of capital upon the salt-water world in the past 400 years." - Antipode

"An engrossing and meticulously researched book that challenges conventional wisdom about the role of the sea in the modern world." - Odisha Economic Journal