Please see below our editorial of the latest publication.
The International Journal of Maritime History welcomes all readers to 2026 with a Forum entitled The Rescuing Sovereign at Sea: Historical Perspectives on Maritime Law, Morals, and Politics. This Forum brings together a set of historically rich and conceptually ambitious contributions that address a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to rescue life at sea? Across different periods and regions, maritime rescue has never been merely a technical or humanitarian undertaking. Rather, it has been a dense site in which law, morality, politics, and sovereignty have intersected, clashed, and co-evolved. The Forum’s central proposition is that the sea has long functioned as a laboratory for the articulation of sovereign power, while practices of lifesaving have simultaneously challenged and reinforced state authority and legitimacy.
The contributions approach both rescue and sovereignty not as abstract principles but as historically constituted through concrete practices, institutional arrangements, normative orders, and cultural symbolism. From nineteenth-century lifeboat organisations and imperial infrastructures to international conventions and contemporary border regimes, the articles show how saving lives at sea has been bound up with questions of jurisdiction, responsibility, hierarchy, and moral obligation. Taken together, they situate maritime rescue within broader debates on humanitarianism, empire, international law, and the limits of sovereign power.
Ron Po’s article opens the Forum by shifting attention beyond the familiar Euro-Atlantic narratives of organised lifesaving. Drawing on extensive research into charitable history and volunteerism in late Qing China, Po reconstructs the practices and principles of the Zhengnitang, a local organisation devoted to rescuing people from drowning. While lifesaving has often been framed as part of a global nineteenth-century humanitarian movement originating in Europe, Po demonstrates that Chinese societies developed their own sophisticated and enduring models of rescue. Crucially, he situates these practices within both national and transnational contexts, arguing that Chinese lifesaving organisations influenced European counterparts during the long nineteenth century, even as global humanitarian discourses also fed back into Chinese practices. In doing so, the article complicates linear diffusionist accounts of humanitarian modernity and highlights the multiplicity of moral and organisational traditions underpinning rescue at sea and on inland waterways.
Nebiha Guiga’s contribution examines another foundational moment in the institutionalisation of maritime rescue: the creation of the Société Centrale de Sauvetage des Naufragés (SCSN) in France in 1865. Although formally a private humanitarian organisation, the SCSN was deeply entangled with the Napoleonic state. Its first president was an admiral, and it benefited from substantial patronage by Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie. Guiga explores how these state connections shaped the early life of the organisation, focusing on the political meanings embedded in patterns of donation. Through a quantitative analysis of the 5170 initial contributors, the article reveals complex networks of donors whose motivations ranged from philanthropic commitment to alignment with imperial maritime policy. The tension between presenting lifesaving as a universal humanitarian cause and mobilising it as a tool of political legitimacy is central here, underscoring how rescue could serve simultaneously moral, social, and sovereign ends.
Lukas Schemper’s article extends the Forum’s focus on sovereignty by analysing nineteenth-century maritime safety as a so-called ‘standard of civilisation’. In imperial and semi-imperial contexts, the ability to control maritime hazards, ensure safe navigation, and organise rescue was increasingly treated as a criterion for full sovereign status. Failure to meet this standard could justify external intervention or derogation of sovereignty. Through three case studies (Cape Guardafui, Cape Spartel and the Bosporus Strait) Schemper traces how trans-imperial projects at key chokepoints of global navigation produced different configurations of sovereignty. Some arrangements reflected vertical hierarchies between imperial powers and states deemed less than fully sovereign; others embodied more horizontal forms of shared or pooled sovereignty among empires. Maritime safety thus emerges as both a technical problem and an argumentative resource in the negotiation of imperial order.
Henning Trüper’s contribution offers a genealogical exploration of the normative orders governing maritime lifesaving since around 1800. Rather than assuming a smooth convergence between morality and law, Trüper identifies a series of ruptures. First, humanitarianism is presented as a symbolic break within established moral cultures, introducing new expectations about the value of human life and the obligation to save it. Second, the law imposed another rupture by seeking to codify and regulate these humanitarian impulses. Yet this legalisation remained incomplete and fractured, shaped by diverse and sometimes conflicting legal traditions. By tracing these layered ruptures, the article connects present-day normative disorder – visible in contemporary controversies over rescue at sea – to earlier historical trajectories, reminding readers that the uneasy relationship between law and morality in maritime rescue has deep roots.
Gard Paulsen’s article centres on one of the most iconic maritime disasters of the twentieth century: the sinking of the Titanic. The catastrophe prompted the drafting of the first International Convention on the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) in 1914. Paulsen examines the convention not only as a response to tragedy but as a culmination of nineteenth-century maritime legal developments. The obligation to ‘proceed to the assistance of the persons in distress’ has often been interpreted as a foundational moment in the emergence of an international legal duty to rescue. Paulsen complicates this view by showing how SOLAS combined elements of sovereignty, public responsibility, private authority, and international cooperation that were already characteristic of maritime law. Rescue obligations thus appear less as a radical innovation than as the crystallisation of longer-standing legal and political arrangements.
Irial Glynn’s article brings the Forum’s themes into the late twentieth century, examining responses to boat refugees between 1979 and 2001. Glynn argues that state practices at sea were shaped by shifting configurations of sovereignty and solidarity. When rescuing boat refugees aligned with foreign policy objectives and prevailing moral sensibilities, states demonstrated prolonged and highly visible solidarity. When such conditions were absent, however, governments exploited the legal ambiguities of the sea to intercept, repatriate, or confine refugees in offshore detention centres beyond the reach of national courts. These practices, Glynn suggests, were designed to ‘rescue’ territorial sovereignty by asserting control over borders. Yet they produced a striking paradox: in seeking to preserve sovereignty through dramatic maritime spectacles, states frequently undermined both national and international law.
Beyond the Forum, this issue includes two Research Notes that further demonstrate the journal’s commitment to methodological innovation and interdisciplinary engagement. Gleb Zilberstein, Svetalan Zilberstein, and John McNeill explore the relationship between the ocean routes of the Age of Great Geographic Discoveries and the contemporary distribution of microplastics and plastic debris. By linking early modern maritime circulation with present environmental challenges, the note highlights the longue durée of human impact on the oceans. Gustav Ängeby’s Research Note addresses the methodological challenges of measuring wartime economies of European shipping between c. 1750 and 1815, offering new approaches to quantifying maritime activity in periods of conflict. The issue is rounded out by a diverse set of book reviews that reflect the breadth and vitality of current scholarship in maritime history.
Collectively, the contributions to this issue invite readers to rethink rescue at sea not as a self-evident moral act but as a historically contingent practice deeply embedded in structures of power and meaning. By foregrounding sovereignty (imperial, national, shared, and contested), the Forum demonstrates that lifesaving has long been a site where humanitarian ideals are negotiated against political interests and legal frameworks. At a moment when maritime rescue remains fiercely debated in public and political arenas, these historical perspectives offer essential context. They remind us that the dilemmas faced today are neither unprecedented nor easily resolved, but part of a long and complex history in which saving lives at sea has always been inseparable from questions of who governs, who is responsible, and on what moral and legal grounds.
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