The Outlaw Sea

William Langewiesche, The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime (New York: North Point Press, 2004), 239pp.

Landlubbers that we are, most tend to forget that, as William Langewiesche puts it, “our world is an ocean world.” First published as a series of articles in The Atlantic , Langewiesche’s book opens the ocean world vividly to those of us who rarely see beyond the three-mile horizon visible from the beach. Populated by tens of thousands of merchant ships and several million sailors of all nationalities, the ocean is virtually ungoverned, perhaps ungovernable. It is a world of terrifying shipwrecks, twentieth-century pirates intercepting a cargo of aluminum, and terrorism. In a system known as “flags of convenience,” ship-owners are able to choose the legal system most conducive to increasing profits, so that ships frequently sail under the flags of nations that they have never visited. Even the registries are not based in the supposed countries of origin; a ship registers as “Liberian” through a company based in Virginia. It has been said that the nation-state is a dinosaur, rapidly yielding to technological globalization. Langewiesche’s fascinating book shows that global political chaos is old news at sea.