Maritime Frontier Research Articles

Negotiated Federalism: Intergovernmental Relations on the Maritime Frontier, 1789–1815

Abstract: The U.S. Constitution was designed to produce a profound alteration in the structure of the American federal polity by giving the U.S. government the power to raise its own money and enforce its own laws within the states. But when federal officials began to implement the new constitutional order across the union in 1789, they realized that this process required the participation and consent of state governments, whose legislation, investment, and manpower were needed to allow federal laws to take effect. Because of the power that state governments continued to wield, the successful institution of federal authority within the states relied on intergovernmental negotiation. The Atlantic port cities presented a crucial test case for this negotiated federalism, as the federal government sought to exercise power in spaces where state authority was already entrenched. In the course of setting up the customs and lighthouse services, rebuilding coastal fortifications, and enforcing neutrality and embargo regulations, early federal officials encountered the limits of federal power within the states, and developed intergovernmental negotiation strategies that allowed them to execute federal law in the ports. This negotiated federalism would become fundamental to the governance of the American union.

Exploring the maritime frontier: unveiling the transformative power of work-based learning (WBL) in maritime education and training (MET)

PurposeTo explore the benefits and challenges of WBL in MET in Thailand.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative approach was used, involving interviews and surveys with participants from MET.FindingsWBL offers practical experience, improved employability, networking opportunities, and real-world problem-solving skills, industry knowledge, professional development, and better learning outcomes, but faces challenges like language barriers, environmental issues, limited placement availability, time limits and task management, safety concerns, limited resources, and assessment issues.Originality/valueProvides insights into WBL in the Thailand maritime sector and highlights areas for improvement to enhance student preparedness for industry roles.

Feeding Refugees, Saving Souls, and Planting Churches: Lutheran Ministry in 1950s Hong Kong

Abstract The recent interest in the social history of the Cold War has given rise to many narratives of expulsions and migrations in world Christianity. This article focuses on the transformation of several Lutheran missions from sojourning in the wilderness of China’s maritime frontiers into becoming vital pastoral and welfare service providers in British Hong Kong. While licking their wounds after their reluctant exodus to Hong Kong following the Chinese Communist Revolution (1949), the Lutherans employed the triple mission of feeding refugees, saving souls, and planting churches, clinics, and schools to help the distressed population. They mobilized their global and local church networks to secure financial, medical and human resources for crisis management—resources that the British colonial government lacked. Its multilayered operation of relief programs exhibited the organizational capacity of Lutherans to assist stricken communities in Cold War Hong Kong.

The architecture of colonial jurisdiction: the annexation of Queensland's offshore islands

This paper explores the relationship between architecture and colonial sovereignty. It considers the case of the British colony of Queensland’s offshore islands, which existed somewhere between competing colonial jurisdictions and international waters following Queensland’s separation from the colony of New South Wales in 1859. The discussion situates this nineteenth-century moment within a broader history of British colonial occupation and development along Australia’s eastern seaboard dating to the late eighteenth century. This paper argues that anomalies of colonial law did not constitute an impediment to colonial sovereignty — rather, they were its very modes of articulation. Whereas Queensland’s offshore islands had previously constituted a maritime frontier that was actively exploited by private enterprise, as a result of the Queensland Coast Islands Act 1879, the Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait Islands were gradually transformed into a geography of regulation that assisted in governing the political community of the colony as a whole. This paper adopts an infrastructuralist analysis, reading the architecture of colonial development alongside other technologies and media as instruments in the implementation and clarification of colonial jurisdiction.

Late Nineteenth-Century Bulk Trade and Barges: An Historical Overview and the Likely Context of Two Deep-Water Shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico

The Gulf of Mexico emerged as an American maritime frontier in the nineteenth century. Maritime activities expanded and matured in terms of technology, scope, and scale. The commerce of an emerging nation left a substantial archaeological record on the seabed in the Gulf and on the ocean highway heading out of the Gulf and to the southern Atlantic coast of the United States as well as into Central and South American and Caribbean ports. Sailing vessels continued to work in these trades throughout the century, in their last iterations as bulk carriers and in some cases as cut-down barges. Two deep-water shipwrecks offer archaeologically well-preserved, essentially undisturbed opportunities to assess former sailing vessels engaged in the bulk commodities trades of the Gulf in the last part of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century. The wrecks dubbed the “Ewing Bank Wreck” and the “Vernon Basin 2109 Wreck” are former wooden sailing ships converted to barges carrying bulk commodities that were lost pursuing that trade. These wrecks reflect not only the rise of new bulk commodities trades in the Gulf, but also the inherent processes of repurposing ships at the end of their working lives.

What Is Innocent? Freedom of Navigation Versus Coastal States’ Rights in the Law of the Sea

Freedom of navigation and the rights of coastal states in zones extending from their shores are two of the foundational pillars of the law of the sea regime. However, these two foundational pillars are in tension when it comes to innocent passage, especially the innocent passage of warships. Traditional maritime powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom assert the right to virtually unrestricted passage by warships around the globe. Rising powers such as China and India, on the other hand, protest these activities as threatening their security and global peace and as a violation of their rights in their maritime zones. Conflict over these issues is not new, and history shows how such disagreement can lead to the brink of war. For example, the collision between Soviet and U.S. warships in the Soviet territorial sea in 1988 increased the already heightened tensions of the Cold War. This article explores the positions of Russia, China, and India regarding the passage of warships through the territorial sea. Looking at the history of these countries, we argue that the legacies of colonialism and imperialism have produced national collective senses of insecurity and trauma vis-à-vis their maritime frontiers. Thus, it should not be assumed that, like past great powers, India and China will eventually support the unrestricted innocent passage of warships.

Review: Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China’s Maritime Frontier, by Melissa Macauley

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China’s Maritime Frontier, by Melissa Macauley Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China’s Maritime Frontier. By Melissa Macauley. ( Princeton University Press, 2021. 376 pp.) Elizabeth Sinn Elizabeth Sinn The University of Hong Kong Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2023) 92 (2): 320–321. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.320 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Elizabeth Sinn; Review: Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China’s Maritime Frontier, by Melissa Macauley. Pacific Historical Review 1 May 2023; 92 (2): 320–321. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.320 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search The story of Chaozhouese migration to Southeast Asia, where they have permeated all levels of society, is well-known—but in this thoroughly researched and fluently written book, Macauley offers refreshingly new perspectives on the subject. In broad brush, she provides a deeper and wider picture than ever before by studying a period of several centuries and, spatially, its “frontier” from Shanghai to Hong Kong to continental and island Southeast Asia. Using the idea of “entanglement” to depict the multidimensional interconnectivity of events over time and space, and between the local and the global, she shows critical insights into a complex phenomenon. Yet, the broad brush aside, the minutely detailed information makes this book a gold mine for historians interested in “brotherhoods,” Fang Yao’s qingxiang activities, the “Swatow opium syndicate,” overseas Chinese remittances, and other fascinating topics. Macauley creates a masterly profile of the local official Fang Yao, relatively unknown to scholars,... You do not currently have access to this content.

André Wink. The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, c. 700–1800 CE.

Among the polities and cultures of Islam, the realms east of Baghdad have received increasing attention since the publication of Marshall Hodgson’s monumental Venture of Islam (1975), which offered an unprecedented panorama of the histories of the three “great empires” of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. Since then, historians have continuously reshaped the geographic frame of analysis beyond the boundaries of the contemporary national states in which the histories of these empires had heretofore been written, whether the “Balkans to Bengal” complex proposed by Shahab Ahmed or the “Persianate Cosmopolis” described by Richard Eaton. An inventive and exciting attempt in this vein is promised in the work under consideration, itself a distillation of the author’s monumental Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World (1990–), a five-volume history (three so far completed) of what the author has described as the Indo-Islamic world. The frame is not limited (as is conventional) to the Indian subcontinent but aims to integrate the diverse landscapes around the Bay of Bengal and maritime Southeast Asia. Wink argues that the region was recognized as integrally comprised of Indias of various numbers and designations by Hellenic, Arabic, and European geographers, and marked, before the advent of Islam c. 700 CE, by Hindu and Buddhist polities. It was defined by two great frontiers: one, an arid zone dominated by nomads from central to south-central Asia (present-day Afghanistan), and the other, more amorphous maritime frontier of the Indian Ocean. Dominated by these zones of fluidity and mobility lay the settled agrarian inland and island states of the region. The nomadic conquest of the subcontinent in the early second millennium and the seaborne expansion of itinerant traders led to the birth of postnomadic Islamic subcontinental polities and commercially oriented maritime Muslim kingdoms; both these great frontiers closed with the consolidation of colonial power in the region by the beginning of the nineteenth century.

How people perceive their role in the natural environment. The Primorye paradox

In the North, Siberia and the Far East, most villagers live in close connection with nature, primarily through using renewable natural resources. However, there is hardly any coverage in literature as to how people position themselves in relation to the surrounding nature. Even when the issue is raised, it addresses only indigenous peoples, and not all local inhabitants without reference to ethnicity. People living in different types of localities tend to have dissimilar perceptions of their role in the natural environment. For urban residents, we propose dis-tinguishing four main self-perception types: outsider (stays away from nature), visitor (e.g., holidaymakers, athletes, and tourists), user (e.g., anglers and gatherers of wild plants), and protector (various eco-activists). Residents of small towns and densely populated rural areas tend to perceive themselves mainly as users. Where the population density is low and natural resources are vital for sustenance, the basic perceptions are master and son. Masters believe they have exclusive rights to use the surrounding natural resources and claim to be doing it responsibly. Perceiving oneself as a son is mostly common for indigenous peoples; their discourse about respect for nature stems not only from a rational, but also sacred attitude. Field research on the east coast of Primorye revealed a self-perception untypical for villagers. Many locals call themselves thieves of natural resources. This means the subjective perception, and not objective differences in practices (doing the same thing, a person in the Russian North can consider himself a master, in Altai — a son, and in Primorye — a thief). We propose three reasons for this “Primorye paradox”. 1) Weak rootedness of the local population, spurring its turnover, which, in turn, makes it difficult to integrate into the natural landscape. 2) Saturation of the surroundings with outsiders, preventing to perceive the territory as “one's own”. The main outsiders are seasonal fishing crews from elsewhere; the Chinese; and crews of North Korean fishing vessels, whom the border guards treat more loyally than the local fishermen. 3) Constant pressure from the supervisory authorities. Primorye has a high concentration of hunting, plant, and aquatic biological resources. Business based on procuring natural resources is profitable, but according to the State, it is mostly illegal. If one can remain unnoticed in the taiga, on the water such chances are next to none. The situation is aggravated by a variety of specially regulated territories (federal and regional protected areas, maritime frontier regime, hunting grounds with different status), which expands the range of supervisory authorities.

Dynamics of Maritime Trade along the Fako Coastal Belt of Cameroon: Ambiance, Challenges and Sustainable Combat Strategies

Maritime trade is dynamic and indispensable for economic growth and development around the World. This trade if not well monitored can become a threat to development considering the illicit and criminal transactions that surrounds the sector. In Cameroon, this informal trade has degraded customs income and promoted the infiltration of contraband goods into the country via local anchorage sites where custom services are weak. This trade has affected the State pricing policy of certain goods especially fuel. It is against this background that this study sets out to investigate, seaborne trade, and the illegal transactions that are common along the Fako coastal belt of Cameroon. Data for the study have been gathered from secondary and primary sources. Secondary data were gleaned from soft and hard copies of both published and unpublished documents, newspapers, and decrees relevant to maritime transport and trade. Primary data were sourced from field surveys where a simple random sampling technique was used to administer 278 copies of questionnaires to 10 localities along the Fako coastal belt of Cameroon using a convenient sample size. Supplementary primary data was gotten via interviews and observations in the three seaports along the coast. Results revealed that the Limbe, Tiko and Idenau ports though secondary, handles thousands of tonnes of cargo annually making Fako Division where they are located in Cameroon an eminent trading hub. Statistics from the Limbe Port Authority (PAL) indicated an increasing trend of export and imports annually in thousands of tonnes. The results shows that illicit seaborne trade is very common along this coastal belt with over 67 percent of the goods coming in from neighbouring Nigeria. The illicit product identified are petroleum products (46.2%), pharmaceutical products (30 %), food items (16.7%) and chemical fertilizers and others (5.3% and 3.8%) respectively. The results also revealed that in the year 2021 between January and August, over 18 cases of illicit goods were intercepted along this coastline with petroleum products destined to Limbe, Tiko and Idenau ports dominating. The reasons for the persistency of this illicit trade were corruption and the existence of a network of illegal organisation that transact the goods. This study recommends that custom and naval services be reinforced along this coastal belt to ascertain the type and originality of the products entering the country via the sea. Also, the State should investigate and dismantle illicit and organised illegal seaborne trade chains and charge officials at the maritime frontiers to be responsible and corruption free.

Sea routes, intelligence agents, and the social dynamics of the Sino-Korean maritime frontier during the Ming-Manchu conflict

This article examines the agency of local societies of the Sino-Korean maritime frontier in the circulation, utilisation, and management of intelligence that was intertwined with Chosŏn Korea’s subtle central-local relations in the international environment of northeast Asia during the Ming-Manchu conflict. It argues that the enhanced mobility of coastal populations in a highly pivotal sea space contributed to their multilateral espionage activity, within which their individual influence developed and deviated from state interests. This is exemplified by the wartime career of Ch'oe Hyoil, a Korean military man and intelligence agent residing on the Ŭiju coast, who shifted political identities and connected with multiple powers to acquire and transmit intelligence within the Ming-Manchu confrontation. His premediated escape to the sea in 1639 particularly illuminates the connectivity of coastal communities and the various roles of administrations at different levels in handing border espionage.

Constructing a defence line: The functional transformation of Evros/Meriç river

In recent years, the most dramatic episodes of the Greek-Turkish conflict have been taking place in the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean. In addition to the maritime frontier, a tense situation has emerged along the Evros/Meriç River, which currently serves as an artificially constructed defence line. This paper seeks to understand how the defensive role has emerged and how it achieved stability through nationalist policies, bilateral conflicts, and European encouragement. The study employs the constructivist theory of international relations to unfold the question which provides a theoretical background and methodological framework for analysing historical periods and related transformations. The paper argues that the river did not originally serve as a natural border but has taken on a “borderized” nature, a highly protected defence line which undermines the development of the whole Thracian region.

The objects and effects of non-party intervention before the International Court of Justice

AbstractThe International Court of Justice recognized the legitimacy of ‘non-party intervention’ under Article 62 of the Statute in its 1990 landmark decision on Nicaragua’s intervention in the Land, Island and Maritime Frontier Dispute (El Salvador v. Honduras). Such form of intervention ‘is not intended to enable a third State to tack on a new case, to become a new party, and so have its own claims adjudicated by the Court’. Its purpose is ‘protecting a State’s “interest of a legal nature” that might be affected by a decision in an existing case’. Whereas non-party intervention under Article 62 now forms part of the law in action within the Court’s system, its precise features and regime remain uncertain. Doubts concern the identification of its precise objects and the potential binding effects for a non-party intervener of the judgment issued between the original parties. The present article explores these issues in the light of the Court’s case law and state practice. It demonstrates that non-party intervention can have various potential objects, depending on how the intervener intends to influence the future judgment between the original parties. Building on the identification of these objects, it then questions the traditional construction denying any binding effect of the decision for a non-party intervener and argues that a judgment issued following intervention is binding as between the original parties and the intervener in so far as this judgment, whether expressly or by implication, decides issues related to the object of intervention.

Embodied Borders: The Sino-British Maritime Frontier, 1950–1957

Embodied Borders: The Sino-British Maritime Frontier, 1950–1957

Two Barbary Captives: Allegiance Through Self-Interest and International Networks, 1785–1796

The correspondence and diaries of two American merchant sailors, James Cathcart and Captain Richard O'Brien, who were held captive in Algiers from 1785 to 1795–96, bridge and complicate the two literatures of commercial-diplomatic and informal networks. During this period, the nascent American government and over one hundred of its citizens were held hostage by the North African "Barbary States" of Algiers, Morocco, Tripoli, and Tunis. Using the letters and diaries of the two most prolific captives, Cathcart and O'Brien, this article shows that the captives successfully penetrated diplomatic networks and the minds of sympathetic diplomats such as David Humphreys, who exploited the captives' plight to help his own longstanding campaign of fostering national identity. The captives similarly deployed the pragmatic skills and style of correspondence they learned as merchant sailors to self-interestedly weave their cause for liberty into the emerging national narrative. These interventions echoed the sentiments and rhetoric of participants in Shays's Rebellion (Massachusetts, 1786–87) and the Whiskey Rebellion (western Pennsylvania, 1791–94). Yet perhaps because of the very different (and, in fact, conflicting) goals of American captives in Algiers and rebels in rural Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, the ever-increasing scholarship on American captives in Barbary has overlooked how these nonelite citizens' campaigns were intertwined. Their shared political rhetoric and notions of national identity were developed and deployed thousands of miles apart, likely thanks to their shared backgrounds in self-interested participation in the revolution and the captives' ready access to newspapers and personal correspondence that kept them informed of domestic crises on the American frontier. Literary analysis of American captives in Barbary is typically juxtaposed with Indian captivity narratives, which is especially applicable to fictional Barbary narratives, and a much smaller number of published nonfictional accounts. The comparison does not hold for the more abundant short-form correspondence, which represents a more significant and untapped opportunity for scholarly analysis of the epistolary styles of the two most prominent American captives in Algiers, who echoed and engaged with the rhetoric and ideas of rebels on the young nation's terrestrial frontier as they were being held captive on the maritime frontier. This article argues that, through the captives' political rhetoric and canny exploitation of their positions in informal transnational networks, we can gain new insights into how nonelite citizens, whether in rural Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, or Algiers, drew on a shared language of liberty and expectations of popular participation in policy development to simultaneously influence the terms of national identity and reinvent themselves.

Power in Food on the Maritime Frontier: A Zooarchaeology of Enslaved Pearl Divers on Barrow Island, Western Australia

Use of Indigenous divers on nineteenth-century northwest Australian pearling luggers gave rise to a transregional apparatus of coercion, physical mistreatment, and arguably, slavery. Where accounts of conditions experienced by divers are limited to the documents of contemporary colonial men, our contribution explores a rare archaeological perspective. Zooarchaeological and taphonomic analysis of the Bandicoot Bay campsite, Barrow Island, evokes an exploitative labor relationship inherited from a wider colonial process yet actively renegotiated by its participants through subsistence practices. The operation’s pearlers selected a camp that advantaged concerns for labor organization and resource management while their divers seized opportunities for self-directed subsistence.

Routledge Handbook of Russian Foreign Policy by Tsygankov Andrei P. (review)

REVIEWS 591 of the ‘politics of the present’. However, thanks to his research for this book he ended up concluding that ideological factors played a larger role than he had initially assumed. Concerns about corruption and lack of transparency in Polish politics were genuinely held and played into the discussions about transitional justice, particularly on the right. On the other hand, politicians on the liberal-left were also guided by principle in their opposition to radical approaches towards truth revelation. For example, they viewed the court-based system established in 1997 as a fairer and more reliable method of proceeding. Overall, ‘protagonists on both sides were driven by a complex interplay of ideational and interest-based impulses and concerns’ (p. 187). Politicising the Communist Past also investigates a related debate about the significance of public support for more radical truth revelation policies. On the one hand, such support clearly existed and exists. On the other, Szczerbiak argues that issues of transitional justice were rarely salient on their own: they were significant to the public in conjuction with other concerns about transparency and honesty in Polish politics. This is a rigorously researched, clearly argued and solidly structured monograph which deserves to be in paperback as soon as possible. For the time being, readers of this review are advised to order it for their university library. UCL SSEES Anne White Tsygankov, Andrei P. (ed.). Routledge Handbook of Russian Foreign Policy. Routledge Handbooks. Routledge, Abingdon, and New York, 2018. xvi + 439 pp. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. £175.00. In view of the increasing importance of the study of contemporary Russian foreign policy and the growth in the academic literature seeking to describe and analyse it, the appearance of this volume is most welcome. Andrei P. Tsygankov’s Handbook comprises twenty-eight chapters by different authors, each critically examining the state of the field in the study of a particular facet of Russian foreign policy and including a bibliography. Tsygankov has divided the Handbook into four parts, each of which has an introduction written by him. The first part, which is perhaps the most weighty academically, concerns theoretical approaches to the field. The tools of foreign policy and some of the actors form the subject of the second part. The third and fourth parts examine policy towards particular states and regions and Russia’s interactions with international organizations, respectively. In the first part, Valentina Feklyunina provides an excellent chapter on constructivist approaches and identity issues. Viatcheslav Morozov discusses post-structuralist and post-colonialist interpretations. Realist studies are SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 592 examined by Elena Kropatcheva, who argues persuasively that neoclassical realism provides the most satisfactory of the approaches within the realist framework. John Berryman’s analysis of Russia’s geopolitical relationships from Kievan Rus´ to the present concludes that the treatment of Russia after the collapse of the USSR marked a missed opportunity to integrate it into international society. The role of Russian nationalism is considered by Luke March, who somewhat unusually but gracefully subjects some of his own work to criticism. Yuval Weber advocates the idea of Russia as a petrostate. In Part Two, Charles E. Ziegler writes what I think is the most useful chapter of the book. Entitled ‘Diplomacy’, it provides a description of the work of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, offering an overview of its policy. Other chapters deal with gas, the intelligence services, the military, cyberpower, and the media and public diplomacy. Nicolai N. Petro’s scholarly chapter on the Russian Orthodox Church argues that it has become the partner rather than an agent of the state. Among the highlights of Parts Three and Four, Natasha Kuhrt examines Russia’s ‘pivot to the East’. She finds the roots of this well before Western states imposed sanctions in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Kuhrt warns that in the future China may call on Russia for support in its maritime frontier disputes, where Moscow has so far managed to avoid entanglement. Ruth Deyermond’s careful analysis of Russia’s view of the Collective Security Treaty Organization shows how the body’s functions are evolving to include a capacity to resist...

AIS Politics: The Contested Use of Vessel Tracking at the EU’s Maritime Frontier

Automatic identification system (AIS) is a vessel tracking system, which since 2004 has become a global tool for the detection and analysis of seagoing traffic. In this article, we look at how this technology, initially designed as a collision avoidance system, has recently become involved in debates concerning migration across the Mediterranean Sea. In particular, after having briefly discussed its emergence and characteristics, we examine how through different practices of (re)appropriation AIS, and the data it generate, have been seized upon, both to contest and to sustain the exclusionary nature of borders, and the mass dying of migrants at sea to which it leads. We do so by referring to forms of data activism we have contributed to in the frame of our Forensic Oceanography project as well as to situations in which AIS has been mobilized by xenophobic groups to demand even stronger exclusionary measures. At the same time, we point to the multiplicity of actors who participate in the politics of migration through AIS in unexpected ways. We conclude by highlighting the irreducible ambivalence of practices of appropriation and call for persistent attention to one’s own positioning within the global datascape constituted by AIS and other data.

Mughals and the ‘maritime dynamic’ along the maritime frontier in Gujarat, c.1572–1759

The literature relating to the nature, scope and legacy of the engagement of the Mughals with the maritime space in the early modern era is beset with certain inadequacies. The consensus has it that a sophisticated commercial system functioned along the Gujarat coast, centred at Surat, largely independent of the presence of the Mughals per se in the region. This article re-examines the role of the Mughals to reveal a more dynamic picture that accounts for the paradoxes that riddle current understanding of this vital aspect of Mughal history.

Access to fisheries in the maritime frontier of Palawan Province, Philippines

Globally, capital investments are intensifying extraction and contestation over resources in frontier spaces, yet most discussion has focused on terrestrial frontiers. This paper shifts this focus to bring a scaled political ecology approach to examine the access dynamics of fisheries trade in the maritime frontier of Palawan province, the Philippines. We adapt the linked concepts of access and exclusion to highlight how access dynamics unfold at multiple scales. At the local scale, social relations of class and ethnicity serve as important markers of difference that inform control over access to fisheries resources. At the regional scale, we show how engagement in fisheries trade is also shaped by broader historical and geographical contexts of migration and land use change. Access dynamics unfold at multiple inter‐related scales to heavily influence the differentiated social outcomes of expanded fisheries trade.