Emulating the Mudskipper (Periophthalmus Koelreuteri): Toward an Amphibious History

At present, the coast is seen as an eccentric appendage to the land, slightly aberrant, exotic, contributing little to the dominant paradigm of territorially focused history. Rather than trying to counter this perception, I would like to magnify it by insisting that we must bring a whiff of  ozone to our littoral studies. Recent scholarship on coasts lacks an aquatic element. Dening found beaches to be divisive and hostile for humans, Heesterman stressed the permeability of the littoral, Braudel found coasts to be more land than sea oriented, while Ottino wrote of "fringe cultures" around the shores of the Indian Ocean. The now vast literature on port cities remains regrettably terrestrially focused. What has been ignored, and what needs to be considered, is that coastal waters must also be included in the littoral. The notion that coastal waters are to be distinguished from the high seas has a long history. The latter is generally seen, to use Grotius' terms, as res communis or mare liberum. As to the former, in Hndu normative texts, such as the Kautiya, the authority of the coastal power extended perhaps six miles to sea; so also the Majid and other Muslim authorities. More recently, Steinberg's excellent study made the same distinction, as indeed does the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982. Taking more account of aquatic influences on the coast will help us write a more convincing amphibious or fungible history, moving easily between land and sea, and one which will inevitably increase the distinction between history located on coast, and that inland. My presentation will be a preliminary attempt at the difficult task of bringing more maritime influences to our analyses of the marge.l