Capitalism and the Sea is one of those rare scholarly contributions that manages to combine academic rigour with political relevance. As the blurb on the book's back cover from the International Transport Workers' Federation suggests, the book is a vital resource for maritime workers and their allies, should they want to understand the forces they are up against better. Indeed, these forces are carefully examined through the six chapters—book-ended by an introduction and conclusion—where Campling and Colás take the reader on a fascinating and wide-ranging history of capitalist development, persuasively arguing that ‘the Earth's separation into land and sea has significant consequences’ across historical periodizations of different expressions of capitalism (commercial, industrial and neoliberal). As the reader progresses through the chapters, the book adds layers to our understanding of capitalism and makes powerful interventions in a whole host of historical and contemporaneous scholarly debates including on the transition to capitalism, on the role of the state and on how to conceive of the nature–society relation. It does this through a continuous and seamless move back and forth between the abstract and the concrete with mobilization of an impressive amount of existing literature and archival material as well as the authors' own empirical data. As such, the book should also be seen as a culmination of the authors' independent and collective work—especially following up on their joint piece in Environment and Planning D (Campling & Colás, 2018). The introductory chapter both contextualizes the book within existing literature and establishes the theoretical foundation. Here, the authors lay out their approach to understanding capitalism's ‘terraqueous predicament’ (terraqueous ‘simply meaning consisting of land and water’, p. 3), i.e., the intensification of ‘the relationship between land and sea, incorporating the oceans into the law of value, extending maritime commodity frontiers and attempting in the process to ‘flatten’ the geophysical division between solid ground and fluid water’ (p. 3). The framework set up in this chapter draws on (and the remainder of the book significantly contributes to) ‘the exchange between historical materialism and political-economic geography’ (p. 4). Refreshingly, rather than succumbing to the chest-beating style of many current debates, they elegantly weave together a theoretical lens through a combination of otherwise antagonistic bed-fellows of contemporary Marxism, e.g., Malm with Moore—as well as Neil Smith, who both the former two set themselves in opposition to. It is with this powerful Marxist lens that the subsequent chapters study how the constant search ‘for fresh ways to valorise the oceans, capital produces new terraqueous forms of appropriation, exploitation and world ordering, sometimes in alignment, but generally in antagonism to both labour and nature’ (p. 21). The authors organize the book around scrutinizing what they distinguish as spatial phenomena (order, appropriation, offshore) and temporal processes (circulation, exploitation and logistics), but which they emphasize should be seen in relation to each other. Each of these phenomena and processes constitute an individual chapter. The first chapter on circulation lays out a picture of ‘capitalism as a mode of production deeply entangled in a web of maritime trade, risk and enterprise’ (p. 28). Picking up on their position laid out in the introduction—of capitalism emerging as a distinct mode of production in the ‘long’ 16th century (1450–1650)—the chapter examines the rise and fall of different commercial centres and the role of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans herein. It does so through a detailed and thorough historical investigation of particular institutions—‘credit and insurance firms, stock exchanges and trading companies’ (p. 31)—and their role in the geographic expansion and deepening of capitalist social relations. Clarifying how ‘society and nature were closely entangled’ (p. 37) in this expansion and deepening, they emphasize how, for instance, wind currents shaped the commercial circuits when they relied on sail and simultaneously how the sea became a domain of innovation as the profit motive drove actors to overcome such geophysical limits. The chapter's focus on circulation does not preclude a focus on production and class relations. Not losing sight of the role of exploitation of workers for the transport, manufacture, processing and/or extraction of the commodities being circulated and the fixed capital through which the circulation takes place, they also note that ‘the maritime sector during this period can thus be seen as a vanguard of developing capitalist social relations’ (p. 48), especially with reference to the Dutch East-India trading company. For avid readers of this Journal, the closing of the chapter may be of particular interest. Here the authors discuss the theoretical implications of these elucidations for understanding different forms of capitalism. They manage to bridge the otherwise entrenched debates around the transition to capitalism between the ‘circulationists’ (Braudel, Wallerstein, Arrighi) and the ‘political Marxists’ (Brenner, Woods) (p. 57) persuasively. They argue that these competing perspectives on the birth of capitalism can be productively put in a dialectical and dynamic relation with each other in order to understand not only the rise but also the development of capitalism and the ever-deeper integration of circulation and production. This leads to the conceptualization of the changing role of the oceans across these different forms of capitalism: where the oceans under commercial capitalism primarily functioned as a trade route, under industrial capitalism (‘from the late eighteenth century’), the sea itself becomes a site for the production of value (p. 65). The exploitation and appropriation that is the basis for this production of value is interrogated in Chapters 3 and 4, but before that, the authors delve into the prerequisite order that underpins these in Chapter 2. Order is understood in substantive rather than descriptive terms involving the ‘dispensation of global power—sometimes known as hegemony—that allows the relatively smooth and unperturbed reproduction of dominant socio-economic and political structures’ (pp. 67–68). With the deep historicization that characterizes the authors' approach, the chapter empirically focuses on military-juridical order as it has developed ‘through the prism of capitalist development over the past 500 years’ (p. 69). This ambitious endeavour is approached through the identification of a series of ‘foundational moments’ towards the creation of the contemporary global maritime order: (1) ‘the age of mercantile empires’ which saw a combination of piracy and privateering under the principal of ‘freedom of the seas’ supportive of ‘Pax Britannica’; (2) the emergence of a new geopolitics under inter-imperialist rivalry from the late nineteenth century; and (3) the development of multilateral regimes (such as the relatively recent United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea [UNCLOS]) from the late 1950s amidst naval competition between two global superpowers, USA and USSR, and the rise of the global South (pp. 70–71). Intervening in an already expansive literature (carefully referenced throughout) on the rise of modern maritime law, the chapter makes an original contribution by analysing how the evolving maritime order was constitutive of and constituted by the ‘gradual and uneven shift from commercial to industrial capitalism’ (p. 81), hence facilitating the changing role of the oceans from functioning as a trade route to a site of production of value. Throughout, the chapter emphasizes the contested and conflictual nature of this transition and the need for ever more elaborate forms of order required to enable deeper integration of the sea into capitalism. This culminates in a discussion of contemporary challenges around ‘upholding a maritime order tailored to the reproduction of global markets’ as clear in counter-piracy efforts in the Western Indian Ocean and territorial disputes in the South China Sea (p. 97). This chapter moves between abstract and concrete to a lesser extent than the others do, but Colás' earlier work on developing a Marxist geopolitics particularly shines through (see Colás & Pozo, 2011). Chapter 3 then moves to the question of exploitation. Empirically, the chapter deals with ‘the capitalist exploitation of seafarers and fishing crew’ (though fishing crew actually get a much more substantial treatment in Chapter 4) with a temporal focus on what is characterized as the ‘the ‘second’ British empire (roughly 1793–1914)’ and ‘the neoliberal era of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century’ (p. 110). Exploitation is theoretically approached ‘as the production of surplus value in the movement of commodity capital around the world and in the appropriation of nature at sea’ and understood ‘in the technical Marxist sense as the extraction of surplus value by capital from labour power’ (ibid). The chapter is concerned with examining ‘the diverse forms that exploitation takes in the world of work’ (p. 111) following the understanding that class relations are ‘dialectically articulated with other sources of social domination and subordination’—with reference to the class-relational approach that Campling et al. (2016) have laid out elsewhere. Conceptually, this is done through a sophisticated labour regime analysis that allows the authors to ‘bridge the essential relations of capital-as-process and the ever-greater levels of concreteness of historical capitalism’ (p. 112). Mobilizing this conceptual framework, the chapter then moves through an intricate examination of how ‘the global ocean acts as a natural force that pushes maritime capital [first commercial, then industrial] to develop new ways of recruiting and disciplining an international workforce, while reinventing novel forms of racialization, coercion and regulation’ (p. 114). Conceptually expansive, this allows for an elucidation of the articulation of the labour process at sea with different forces, e.g., state regulations, specific cultures of labour organizing and resistance. The authors carefully bracket off their empirical focus from the question of social reproduction and only hint at the expansive empirical potential of examining the terraqueous nature of the maritime labour regime, for example, when they quote Gopal Balachandran on the labour-sourcing practices of small shipowners in India: ‘[s]hipowners attempted to reconcile cheapness with reliable supply through engineering the circular movements of small/medium peasants and owner-cultivators between their rural homes and jobs at sea. Such labour was cheap because the cost of reproducing it was externalized to low productivity agriculture’ (p. 126). While Campling and Colás do not venture much further inland than the ports on the shorelines in their empirical examination, their conceptual approach nevertheless opens up ‘fresh avenues of research’ (Alfredo Saad-Filho's blurb on the book) on how the maritime factor shapes labour regimes on land as well as the need to integrate questions of social reproduction. Chapter 4 moves on to the question of appropriation. Empirically focusing on appropriation of fish, the chapter examines who owns marine life and how fish became a commodity. They theorize the appropriation of marine life through mobilizing Jason Moore's work (including in this journal, see Moore, 2010a, 2010b) on commodity frontiers as central to the reproduction of capitalism through combined processes of commodity-widening and commodity-deepening. In the case of fisheries, these processes play out through the geographical expansion of fishing fleets into new territories combined with technological development in the means of extraction. As the authors emphasize, the state is central to the production and reproduction of commodity frontiers, including in fisheries. To grapple with the role of the state, they introduce the notion of pelagic imperialism, defined as ‘a process whereby powerful states directly or indirectly provide economic and geopolitical support for their fishing capital to expand into distant waters’ (p. 184). The state-capital relation, however, is a turbulent one and drawing on Capps (2016, 458) they mobilize the ‘essential yet contradictory’ social relation of modern landed property to concretely examine how the state mediates capital's access to the sea and its resources. Appropriation thereby also plays out in this ‘second, narrower sense’ where ‘by virtue of monopoly ownership of some portion of the earth, landed property [here the state] is able to appropriate ground rent as a portion of the future surplus value that is expected to be produced’ (p. 186). With these conceptual tools in hand, the authors then move through different phases of pelagic imperialism: before steam and oil focusing on whaling (1600s–1850s), through the rise of Japan ‘as the world's largest industrial fishing nation’ (p. 189) (1880s–1940s) to the globalization of industrial fisheries under the American pelagic empire (1950s–1970s), culminating in the contemporary period characterized by the UNCLOS (1980s–2010s; also discussed in chapter 2). It is in this latter period, where states assumed the juridical basis for the class-function of modern landed property when coastal and island state's Exclusive Economic Zones become ‘a sovereign mechanism for extracting ground rent’ from fishing capital (p. 208). Meanwhile, pelagic imperialism continues in new forms to this day, as discussed through the role of China's fishing fleet and its expansion, whereby the Chinese state's direct and indirect support for its fishing capital ‘mirrors the pelagic imperialism of the Western powers’ (p. 210). From here, Chapter 5 takes the reader to the question of logistics. The authors wade into the ‘latest fashion in social theory’ (p. 241) theoretically and empirically and bring out both a deep historicization (moving beyond fetishizations of the container) and provides a more wide-ranging analysis of ‘the dynamics of shipping enterprises as capitals-in-competition, and the strategies deployed in this competitive struggle’ (p. 218). The chapter adds yet another layer to the conception of the rise and reproduction of capitalism in and through the sea, by opening with a theorization of ‘annihilation of time by sea’. Following their method of analysis, they emphasize how in historical capitalism this annihilation is only ever ‘incomplete’, because ‘oceanic movement is far from “smooth” or “flat”’ (p. 215) and is rather subject of ‘multiple forms of friction’ (p. 214) – from strikes and political conflicts to wars, climate change and poor infrastructure. It is amidst these frictions that the ‘bitter struggle’ amongst capitals-in-competition in the shipping industry is examined. As the chapter elucidates in great empirical detail, a central component of that struggle is ‘the tendency towards concentration and centralization’ of capital with the state playing ‘a decisive role in competitive accumulation’ (p. 215). The close analysis of differentiation and segmentation within capital in the chapter is fascinating and here one discerns Campling's (2012) approach to the tuna industry at play – an approach more recently formulated in terms of examining ‘classes of capital’ (Campling, 2021). Temporally, the chapter moves through maritime logistics under Pax Britannica (1860s–1930s) and under contemporary globalization (1950s–2010s), discussing how the ‘planned movement of commodities across otherwise fragmented points of production and consumption’ has played out in these periods (picking up on and adding to earlier discussions especially in chapter 1). As in previous chapters, the authors hint at the terraqueous nature of these processes and the importance of the maritime factor for socio-spatial change under contemporary capitalism throughout, e.g. how ‘the maritime logistics of industrial capitalism catalysed the transformation of social relations of production, cultures of consumption and entire landscapes, both in the industrial cores of the world economy and in the global South’ (p. 239, emphasis added). This chapter then also opens up ‘fresh avenues of research’ with potentially fruitful linkages to be made with e.g. the work of Neil Brenner and friends on operational landscapes and planetary urbanization where the maritime factor's importance is invoked in the abstract but rarely shown as concretely as Campling and Colás do (Brenner, 2014; Brenner & Katsikis, 2020). Finally, the last chapter sheds light on the murky offshore world. Moving through the role of the offshore in various forms through the history of capitalist development—from colonial outposts to contemporary fiscal paradises—the chapter powerfully elucidates continuities: ‘[a]lthough offshore financial centres as we know them today are more recent inventions, the product of specific post-war global economic conjuncture, they are functionally rooted in previous centuries of overseas colonial administration’ (p. 294). The offshore is thus analysed both as a particular juridical-political function and as a ‘general historical-sociological practice’ (p. 269) pivotal for capitalist development. This allows the authors to examine the offshore not merely in terms of the benefits and luxury it provides for society's elites (as tax havens, tourism destinations) or as a space of brutally discarding and/or exploitation of surplus populations from metropoles to colonies – as is done in the first sections of the chapter – but also in terms of how the ocean has always functioned as dumping grounds of pollutants. Invoking the title of Sekula and Birch's brilliant film-essay The Forgotten Space, the authors starkly lay out the implications of the continuing function of the oceans as the dumping grounds for excess pollutants stemming from onshore dynamics associated with the Capitalocene. Criticizing the media- (and policy-) hype around plastic-waste, they instead focus on the less immediately visible concerns of ocean acidification, warming and overfishing. The resulting uncovering of the ‘likely oceanic outcome of ‘business as usual’ for global capitalism’ is a sobering read (p. 299). Counter to Sekula and Birch's evocative title though, the oceans do not remain forgotten and are quickly becoming ‘a place for experimentation with zoning and governance systems aimed at guaranteeing the sustainable reproduction of marine life in all its precious diversity’ (p. 294–295). However, tragically, the ensuing efforts at ensuring this sustainable reproduction as pursued through, for example, the Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and so-called ‘blue growth’ end up reproducing earlier imperialist dynamics of order and appropriation. This time such dynamics are justified with reference to mitigation of climate change and environmental destruction through turning the overseas territories of France, the UK and the USA into Very Large MPAs (VLMPAs) or by Small Island Developing States using their sovereign power to create VLMPAs—under close guidance from US-based environmental foundations. Furthermore, these attempts at extending onshore zoning mechanisms to the offshore all miss the point by fetishizing ocean space in isolation, rather than taking the terraqueous predicament seriously: ‘the more terrestrial mechanisms of zoning are brought to the sea, the greater the risk of underplaying the onshore sources of the climate crisis’ (p. 306). The terrifying reality of climate change and its oceanic outcomes thereby clearly manifest that the offshore ‘can no longer be perceived and conceived as some thing or some place outside the onshore world’, thereby bringing the reader very neatly full circle back to the terraqueous predicament with which the book began. The book's concluding reflections are fittingly titled Terraqueous Horizons and dwell on the political lessons to be drawn from the analysis ‘in particular for democratic projects seeking to transcend capitalist social relations’ (p. 312). These last 11 pages are wide-ranging in the discussion. The authors cover how a terraqueous outlook can or should inform anti-capitalist struggles for emancipation across questions of ‘the decarbonization of the world economy to multilateral cooperation, gender equality to different forms of internationalism’ along with the ‘strategic value of stoppage and disruption’ (p. 319). Taking the preceding analysis to heart, they remain sober (and indeed emphasize the need for this sobriety) in their understanding of the significant challenges and limitations facing any such projects to avoid falling into utopian and populist calls that might feel more comforting. They recognize how the potential for such democratic projects ‘needs to be constantly realised, nurtured and sustained by actual organisations, concerted campaigns and concrete actions’ (p. 318). Nonetheless, their analysis provides hope for any such anti-capitalists struggles, in that it ‘reminds us that capitalism is only a very recent historical arrival on our shores, and that humanity deserves much more to outlive this upstart social force we ourselves have created than the other way around’ (p. 322). Both for its academic rigour and political relevance then, this book should be widely read and engaged with by scholars and activists concerned with understanding and changing the role of the sea in our society—and society as a result of it.