The first empires of the seas date back to ancient times. How do they work?
The ancient thalassocracies – this is how we designate the States whose power is based in part on the domination of the seas – built their power around a string of ports which above all enabled them to control the maritime routes. The specialists of Antiquity or the Middle Ages however returned to the idea that the ancient navigators only skirted the coasts. We know today that they sailed “upright”, that they were going to the high seas and that the connections of the ancient worlds were quite important. There is a close link, thought from the beginnings of political theory, between power over the seas and the power of a State. Of course, this does not mean that all powerful states are maritime. Nevertheless, the sea is a decisive element of imperial construction. It is, for a State, symbol and proof of power.
This article is taken from “Special Edition Le Monde: Repairing the sea to save man”, 2022. This special issue is on sale in kiosks or on the Internet by visiting the website of our shop.
For their part, how did the Romans envisage the control of the seas?
The Romans, who are less intuitively associated with the sea than the Greeks, designated the Mediterranean as a pond nostrum, which is quite significant in this claim to appropriation of the liquid element. In modern and contemporary times, categories from Roman law are still used to think about the legal status of the seas. What the Romans call empire, it is power, empire, influence. In medieval and modern times, this is gradually translated by the term sovereignty. The notion of dominion, for example, which means the domain of the sea, refers to the way of spatializing power, of tracing a space that can be appropriated by the sovereign or by public power. This expression of “maritime domain” is still found today in conventions on the law of the sea. the seas in the XVIIe and XVIIIe centuries, the Franco-English controversies on the English Channel can all be read in the light of these debates on the legitimacy of theempire and dominion maritime, that is to say on the very legitimacy of claiming sovereignty of the seas.
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