Neutral Shipping Research Articles

Black Sea, grain, and two humanitarian corridors: unblocking Ukrainian shipping amid the Russian invasion

ABSTRACT Since the start of the full-fledged Russian invasion, Ukraine has attempted twice to unlock its Black Sea ports, both of which took place after significant changes during hostilities. The initial attempt, the Black Sea Grain Initiative of 2022–2023, facilitated by the UN, employed mediation techniques from the hybrid stage of the conflict 2014–2022. The unilateral humanitarian corridor (since 2023) relied on Ukraine’s military capabilities to prevent Russia from interfering with neutral shipping. This was combined with the efforts of international partners and businesses. The article examines the advantages and disadvantages of each approach to ensuring neutral shipping in conflict zones.

Black Sea Grain initiative: bringing lawfare to conventional armed conflict

ABSTRACT The Black Sea Grain Initiative (BSGI) signed between Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey under UN auspices reflected continuity of the long-standing Russian hybrid approach to interference with the freedom of navigation in the Black Sea. The BSGI was an attempt to resolve the threat of a global food crisis associated with the Russo-Ukrainian armed conflict. It applied unique legal and organizational solutions to create and operate a maritime humanitarian corridor. However, it avoided addressing the fact of the Russo-Ukrainian armed conflict and the applicable laws thereof. As a result, the agreement developed a specific set of rules related neither to peacetime nor to armed conflict regulation, enabling the parties to exploit its provisions as lawfare instruments, thereby negatively affecting the initiative's outcomes. This article examines BSGI implementation to determine the pros and cons of such an approach for ensuring neutral shipping during armed conflicts in the maritime domain.

The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy by Jonathan Singerton

Reviewed by: The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy by Jonathan Singerton Eric Grube Jonathan Singerton, The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2022. 366 pp. Jonathan Singerton's The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy accomplishes a revolutionary feat: centering agents and actors from Habsburg lands within the transoceanic processes and upheavals that marked the early revolutionary Atlantic. Singerton argues that Habsburg inhabitants were neither diametrically opposed to the ideals and movements of the revolutionary era nor hermetically sealed off from them. He thus overturns any teleological assumptions that this dynasty—which would wage war against Revolutionary France and would come to embody post-Napoleonic conservatism—rejected outright the American revolutionary project and the fledgling United States. Instead, Singerton argues that merchants, trade representatives, diplomats, [End Page 111] bureaucrats, royals, soldiers, and everyday subjects were integral to the story of the new republic's foundation. Singerton also successfully identifies, narrates, and interprets the bi- and even multilateral dynamics at play, showing how American revolutionaries shaped Habsburg imperial calculations, capital speculations, and material transactions. Singerton succeeds in his main goal of reorienting our sense of who, what, and where constitutes Atlantic history, but he also succeeds in a much more nuanced way: taking what might lend itself to a "traditional," top-down story of high-stakes diplomacy and presenting it from economic and cultural perspectives. Singerton's economic and cultural emphases shed light on the multifaceted sinews stitching together international with intercontinental connections and domestic with foreign affairs across the two sides of the Atlantic. Each chapter examines the topic from a particular optic, ranging from Habsburg intellectual and religious discourses concerning the Americas before the revolution to legal histories of neutrality and neutral shipping that turned the Austrian Netherlands into a wartime commercial nexus. The military stories on offer explore epistolary evidence of eager volunteers from Habsburg Europe seeking to place themselves under Benjamin Franklin's command, while Singerton also presents convincing data concerning commodity exchange between American ports and the Habsburg entrepôts of Ostend, Trieste, and Livorno. His work also rightfully places cultural history front and center, diving deeply into the intricacies of statecraft protocols and etiquette, the perceived breach of which could have had monumental ramifications. His focus on regional histories reveals fascinating tensions between bureaucrats in the Austrian Netherlands and ministers in the metropole of Vienna. What's more, he uncovers the complex international elements at play, as many of these conversations and networks played out via Tuscan networks (among others) in Paris. The resulting book is a tour de force, one that showcases the plurality of ways in which Habsburg inhabitants not just flirted with American revolutionary ideas and overtures but often actively sought to capitalize on new opportunities for mercantile gain and diplomatic prestige. Regardless of a given reader's research focus or interest, one can find in Singerton's work a multitude of fresh ways to conceptualize Habsburg and Atlantic histories. While The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy certainly soars, there are a few ways in which Singerton could have elevated the work to new heights. At times he seems at risk of overplaying his hand regarding the roles of Habsburg inhabitants in the early revolutionary Atlantic. The [End Page 112] extent to which the trade bubble at Ostend burst when the American War of Independence concluded, when other ports again became viable nodes of exchange, could suggest this U.S.-Habsburg trade was neither sustainable nor as desired as is suggested. Indeed, the monograph seems to have a tone of "opportunities lost" by the failure to solidify diplomatic recognition and formal trade agreements between the Habsburg realms and the United States until the nineteenth century. But perhaps in context, these agents saw a rejection of such options as their best strategies for advancement. It would also be interesting to read more about how internal fissures and distinctions within Habsburg holdings—territorial, legal, administrative, and customary—influenced the American Revolution or were in turn influenced by the American Revolution. Singerton addresses these in detail regarding the Austrian Netherlands and Vienna, plus the intra-imperial jockeying for trade between agents in Ostend and Trieste. And he excels...

DEVELOPMENT OF A COMMUNICATION PLATFORM TO SUPPORT CONSENSUS-BUILDING AMONG STAKEHOLDERS IN SHIPPING DECARBONIZATION

The carbon neutral shipping should be achieved no later than 2050. However, technologies for the propulsion and the fuel systems are not established, the fuel supply chain is not established and regulations for decarbonization are under discussion in IMO. Designing the carbon neutral ships in this transition phase has difficulties with these undetermined conditions. The optimum design of carbon neutral ships and the optimum time to install these to the market could be achieved with the cooperation across the sectors from shipyards, shipowners, operators, and more stakeholders including the government with clear provision of satisfactory profits or decarbonization results to each sector. Under this recognition, the simulator to provide the decarbonization data and cost estimation during this transition phase was developed together with the communication system to determine the best solution for all stakeholders. This paper shows the concept and prototyping results of the communication system.

Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding by Hannah Farber

Reviewed by: Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding by Hannah Farber Jessica M. Lepler Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding. By Hannah Farber. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 349 pages. Cloth, ebook. If you insure an early American mercantile voyage, make sure to stow some cats on the boat; legend suggests you may need to literally put your "Catts in a bag" (246 n. 9) as evidence that you took the customary feline precaution against rats.1 You will not find this term in your insurance policy, but you will be expected to know it as part of the lex mercatoria—the purportedly universal, unchanging, and unspoken "laws of merchants" (19) that governed trade and maritime risk in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. You, dear reader, will need this tip because, in Hannah Farber's Underwriters of the United States, "you" are a character. This powerful new book about the hidden role of marine insurance in the establishment of the United States begins with a prologue written in the second person that explains how you—in the shape of a fictional, wealthy, white, male, married, Bostonian shipowner of 1800—manage the risk of a round trip to the Caribbean. Sailing the seas during the first half century of U.S. national history meant navigating a world at near-constant war. To insure against wartime spoilation—when a combatant illegally seized neutral ships and cargo—as well as more predictable damage (like that caused by rats), merchants pooled the risk of their community's voyages, gathered information, and signed contracts securing each other's assets. The process could be called "underwriting" (13), a term that also meant supporting an undertaking. The people and companies who underwrote the seafaring risk of American merchants—a group Farber describes as "marine insurers" (13)—are the subject of Farber's study. Despite a few intriguing case studies of famous (or infamous) insurers such as the revolutionary "financier" (14) Robert Morris or the scandal-prone Jacob Barker and his associates, however, this is not really a history of individuals or their companies.2 Farber's book, in her terms, is [End Page 467] about "a practice, not a class" (22), and prioritizes questions of "how" over "why" or "who." The practice that most interests Farber includes the range of techniques insurers used to engage in an unusual kind of "regulatory capture" (22) in which the industry predated the polity. For centuries, insurers acted within, beyond, and around the laws of countries to enforce the lex mercatoria's control over maritime trade. In the Age of Revolutions, when the sovereignty and stability of states were up in the air, the governmental role of insurers became especially apparent because insurers' governance of the seas was often more solid than the laws of the land. Shifting their practices to accommodate changing contexts, insurers employed the tools of their trade "opportunistically" (21) to assist in ushering the new United States into existence and solidifying its sovereignty. Accordingly, Farber describes the development of both the U.S. maritime insurance industry and the nation state as a "process of coformation" (22). Farber couples this big-picture analysis of "state making" (21) with the investigation of the everyday practices that constituted the early American insurance business. For example, she considers how insurers "wielded numerical calculations as weapons" (24). The mere suggestion that insurers' rates were based on complicated mathematics could convince customers and concerned citizens not "to question their decisions" (25). Appearing to be objectively actuarial, insurers could hide profit motives and political interests behind their seemingly mundane practices of quantification. This kind of everyday insurance practice is immediately foregrounded by Farber's second-person prologue. These first eleven pages also establish the purpose of the book for two different sets of readers of early American financial history. For one, the prologue explains the complex maritime insurance industry in a format accessible enough to be assigned to undergraduates. Meanwhile, for those immersed in the field, the book's opening section positions Underwriters of...

The use of force against neutral ships outside territorial waters

AbstractThis article examines when states are allowed to use force against neutral merchant ships outside territorial waters. This is regulated by both international humanitarian law and the prohibition of the use of force, which apply concurrently to naval warfare. The prohibition of the use of force imposes narrower limits than international humanitarian law, in the sense that certain actions that have traditionally been permitted under international humanitarian law are contrary to the prohibition of the use of force. The prohibition of the use of force exempts uses of force based on UN Security Council resolutions, consent and self-defence. Where there is no UN Security Council resolution or consent, self-defence remains the only option, and self-defence does not give a right to direct the use of force towards third states or their ships. Therefore, the right to self-defence does not permit blockades outside territorial waters or visit and search operations that are not founded on specific suspicions against individual ships, even though such operations may be permitted under international humanitarian law. These conclusions are supported by an examination of state practice and opinio juris, where the few relevant instances that do exist have met with widespread protests from other states.

Progressive Collapse Analysis of Intact and Damaged Ships under Unsymmetrical Bending

This study examined the hull girder strength of intact and damaged ships by adopting the incremental-iterative method for progressive collapse analysis, which was extended to the general case of the unsymmetrical bending of beams with an arbitrary cross-section. The sources of an unsymmetrical loading, including rotation of the loading plane and section asymmetry caused by structural damage, are described. A fast and robust procedure is presented to determine the translation and rotation of the instantaneous neutral axis at each curvature increment when applying Smith’s progressive collapse analysis method. A series of analyses were conducted on a double hull VLCC and a bulk carrier, considering various loading plane angles and damage conditions. The decrease in ultimate strength and the influences of rotation of the instantaneous neutral axis and ship heeling are discussed. The proposed method can be used for a rapid and rational assessment of the hull girder strength under adverse conditions.

Alternative Fuels and Technologies for Short Sea Shipping

Awareness of the consequences of excessive greenhouse gas emissions in maritime transport has prompted research on the use of alternative fuels and technology, towards environmentally neutral ship propulsion, which has resulted in a number of possibilities. This review provides a systematic overview of the current state of use of ship propulsion and alternative options from the aspect of costs, infrastructure, regulations, availability, environmental protection, technology and the perspective of complete decarbonisation by 2050.

Bremen, Harderwijk und die Zuiderzee

Bremen, Harderwijk and the ZuiderzeeThe Harderwijk peace treaty of 8 May 1446, negotiated by envoys of the duchy of Burgundy and the Hanse town Bremen and ratified by duke Philip the Good of Burgundy on 8 July 1446, brought to an end a war which had lasted for four years, during which Bremen had waged war on the Burgundian territories of Holland, Zealand, Flanders and Brabant in order to gain compensation for ships and goods which had been captured (mainly by privateers) in the conflict between Holland and the Wendish towns (1438– 41). During the latter conflict, neutral ships were been seized if they were suspected to be carrying Dutch or Flemish goods – a practice which also affected skippers and merchants from Kampen, Harderwijk and Deventer. Therefore Kampen repeatedly took the initiative to midwife an agreement between Bremen and Holland. At first, this failed to produce an acceptable result because Flanders could not be included. In the end, however, the negotiations in Harderwijk in April and May 1446 succeeded in bringing the war to an end. Bremen and Stade obtained financial compensation, to be funded by the towns of Holland and Zealand. Evidence of direct connections between Bremen and the Zuiderzee towns begins in the 14th century and concerns quarrels with citizens of Kampen and Deventer or the naturalization of immigrants from the Zuiderzee towns in Bremen. Beginning in the 12th and 13th centuries, vessels from Holland, Utrecht and Flanders on the one hand and from Bremen and Stade on the other used the shipping route via Vecht, Almere (later Zuiderzee) and Vlie for traffic and trade. From the 13th century, merchants from Bremen and from the Zuiderzee are found side by side in Norway and Scania trading in fish. In the 15th century, merchants of Kampen bought grain in Bremen, whereas merchants of Bremen purchased cloth in Deventer. Furthermore, Kampen, Deventer and Zwolle mediated in Bremen’s quarrels with merchants from Osnabrück and Cologne, with the town of Groningen and especially with Antwerpen. In the 16th century, the political and economic situation of the Zuiderzee towns changed radically, as they were first incorporated into the state of emperor Charles V, and then joined the Republic of the United Netherlands. At the same time, Bremen’s trade shifted to West Friesland and Amsterdam. Thus the intermediary position of the Zuiderzee Hanse towns – poised between Bremen and Holland – came to an end.

The Papers of James Madison: Secretary of State Series ed. by Mary A. Hackett, and: The Papers of James Madison: Secretary of State Series, Volume 11: 1 January 1806-31 May 1806 ed. by Mary A. Hackett

Reviewed by: The Papers of James Madison: Secretary of State Series ed. by Mary A. Hackett, and: The Papers of James Madison: Secretary of State Series, Volume 11: 1 January 1806-31 May 1806 ed. by Mary A. Hackett Kevin Butterfield The Papers of James Madison: Secretary of State Series, Volume 10: 1 July 1805-31 December 1805. Edited by Mary A. Hackett et al. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Pp. xxxviii, 784. $95.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-3571-3.) The Papers of James Madison: Secretary of State Series, Volume 11: 1 January 1806-31 May 1806. Edited by Mary A. Hackett et al. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2017. Pp. xxxvi, 690. $95.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-3971-1.) In the early days of President Thomas Jefferson's second term, in 1805 and 1806, James Madison was capably handling the many demands that came with running the State Department. He instructed and strategized with representatives of the United States serving abroad at a time when the stakes, particularly in European diplomatic relations, were growing ever higher. He coordinated issues of territorial governance, an especially difficult and important task in the recently acquired Louisiana territory. And he managed the comings and goings, angry demands, and humble requests of international diplomats assigned to Washington, D.C., men who were always difficult, often vain, and usually dissembling in one way or another. Through it all, Madison was also a loving husband, a confidant second-to-none to the president, and a serious thinker who turned, as he had in 1787, to intensive study of history to help resolve present-day troubles. All of these things are in abundant evidence in Volumes 10 and 11 of the ongoing Secretary of State Series of The Papers of James Madison, both of which are filled with invaluable documents and impressive editorial insights. In Madison's correspondence with ministers such as John Armstrong, James Monroe, and James Bowdoin, dispatched to those European nations that most immediately affected the geographic and commercial aspirations of the young United States—Napoleon's France; its enemy, Great Britain; and its subservient ally, Spain, respectively—we see a secretary of state confident in his role and fairly clear about U.S. goals, particularly regarding free trade and the acquisition of Spanish-held territory in North America. But Madison remained somewhat uncertain about the best means to pursue those ends. In the late summer and fall of 1805, for example, Jefferson and Madison discussed seriously the prospect of seeking an alliance with Great Britain against Spain and France. Before long, such an idea would seem ridiculous. Over the course of the eleven months covered in these two volumes, the balance of power in Europe could scarcely have been more in flux, and the [End Page 152] United States watched closely. Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz at the end of 1805 left the Continent more in his hands than ever before. And that resounding French success, of course, came just weeks after the great British naval victory at Trafalgar, which, from an American perspective, added great consequence to existing British policies restricting (often by forcibly seizing) neutral ships trading during this time of war. Madison had already spent months researching and writing an argument for why those British actions were a violation of long-standing international law. Invoking the so-called Rule of 1756, which held that neutral ships were not allowed in a time of war to access any trade previously denied them in peacetime, the British government and the Royal Navy clamped down on American shipping and trade. And Madison, for both practical and philosophical reasons, would have none of it. His lengthy An Examination of the British Doctrine, Which Subjects to Capture a Neutral Trade, Not Open in Time of Peace appeared anonymously for sale and on the desks of Congress in January 1806, and it appears in Volume 11, annotated, along with the relevant notes and sketches made during the preceding months, so that Madison's exhaustive research into treaties and legal arguments can be better understood and appreciated. Madison was a diligent historian when given a practical problem to explore. And...

Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, The Pastor Who Defied the Nazis by Matthew D. Hockenos

Reviewed by: Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, The Pastor Who Defied the Nazis by Matthew D. Hockenos Mark Edward Ruff Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, The Pastor Who Defied the Nazis. By Matthew D. Hockenos. New York: Basic, 2018. Pp. 336. Cloth $30.00. ISBN 978-0465097869. Already in the 1930s, a mythology took shape around the German theologian, Lutheran clergyman, and cofounder of the Confessing Church, Martin Niemöller (1892–1984). Lionized as a resistance hero, Niemöller came to feature prominently in virtually every account of the Protestant Church Struggle and eventually in almost all larger accounts of National Socialism. He appeared as the conscience of the "true" German nation and spirit unseduced by Nazism. Even today, schoolchildren learn of the famous he lines he penned—in several versions—in the late 1940s which begin: "First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Communist," and conclude: "Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me." Early biographies, the last appearing in 1984, the year of his death, unsurprisingly served up hagiography, even though Niemöller throughout his lifetime had proven to be an extremely controversial figure who had earned the enmity and scorn of the American State Department in the late 1940s and 1950s because of his desire for peace with the Soviet Union. Matthew Hockenos's new biography provides a much-needed critical reappraisal. "Once the legend is stripped away," he writes, "Niemöller necessarily disappoints"; for he was "on the wrong side of history for much of his life" (264). Based on an analysis of Niemöller's papers, this biography retraces its subject's missteps. Before launching his theology studies in 1920 at the University of Münster, Niemöller had eagerly served in the German navy in World War I as a submarine commander, even boasting of his success in torpedoing enemy and neutral ships in attacks that claimed dozens of lives. Niemöller was—and remained for crucial portions of his life—an ardent nationalist. His faith in the fatherland remained unflagging even in the aftermath of German defeat. His decision to follow in the footsteps of his father and become a Lutheran pastor was inspired not by a strong sense of vocation (we learn that he had taken up farming in 1919) but by nationalist zeal. Niemöller despised the seemingly godless Weimar Republic and saw Christianity as the best means to renew the beleaguered German nation. This nationalism never left him, even during the darkest years of the Third Reich. He praised Hitler for his foreign policy successes. From his concentration camp cell in 1939, he volunteered for the navy, demanding in vain to be reinstated [End Page 396] to his old naval post. Six further years of imprisonment did not disabuse him of his conservative principles. In June 1945, he infamously declared at an American-led press conference in Naples that Germany was not yet ready for democracy. His conservatism was accompanied by antisemitism, as was the case for many of his fellow Protestant clergymen, including even those with prominent roles in the Confessing Church. In the fall of 1933, he argued that Christians needed to accept converted Jews into their churches, but only "at great sacrifice, given all that the church had 'to bear under their influence'" (100). But Hockenos explains that Niemöller was not a racial antisemite; he harbored instead a theological anti-Judaism, preaching in 1935 that the Jews "brought the Christ of God to the cross" (117). What then led a conservative Lutheran, one loath to challenge state authority and so ostensibly unsuited for resistance, to be perceived by no less than Hitler as the ringleader of clerical opposition? Hockenos shows that it was Niemöller's anger at attempts to Nazify the church and to impose on German Protestantism ideas he deemed heretical: the excision of the Old Testament, the insistence that Jesus was an Aryan-Nordic warrior, and a "large-scale propaganda scheme for Christianity" (82). Niemöller accordingly came to oppose the Nazis' implementation of the Aryan paragraphs, which in the...

American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution by A. Roger Ekirch

Reviewed by: American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution by A. Roger Ekirch Terri Diane Halperin (bio) KEY WORDS Mutiny, HMS Hermione, Caribbean, British Navy, Fugitives, Extradition American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution. By A. Roger Ekirch. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2017. Pp. 320. Cloth, $30.00.) In American Sanctuary, A. Roger Ekirch tells the riveting story of mutiny, murder, escape, and retribution in its full detail. He connects the fate of HMS Hermione sailors to the partisan politics of the United States in the late 1790s. It is a story not just about disgruntled and ill-treated sailors, but it is about fundamental issues of American identity and governance—such as personal liberty, national sovereignty, citizenship, alien rights, and separation of powers. Ekirch asserts that the story of a British mutiny “powerfully influence[d] the momentous election of 1800” and more significantly, “helped to shape the infant Republic’s identity” (xii). He divides the story into three parts, which are bookended with a preface and prologue and an epilogue and coda. In the first part, Ekirch tells the story of the February 1797 mutiny aboard the Hermione in a vivid, page-turning account. He gives a good sense of how small yet expansive the world was for naval and merchant fleets and crews. The [End Page 356] frigate sailed throughout the Caribbean with a diverse crew from the British Empire, Africa, and Continental Europe. Ekirch estimates that there were about twenty Americans aboard, fewer than half of whom were probably impressed into service. He describes life in the Royal Navy and the cruel treatment by the Hermione’s erratic and impatient captain. After the mutiny, the remaining crew sought refuge in a Spanish port where they surrendered the ship in exchange for their freedom. Many crew members eventually returned to the seas and dispersed throughout the Atlantic, which offered many havens for the fugitives. The British could not abide disobedience in their navy and thus pursued the mutineers with singular focus. Yet, by late 1798, they had captured and hanged only a handful. The British believed that the over 100 men who were still at large were mostly in America or on American ships. In the second part of the book, the story of the Hermione comes to the United States. Tensions were running high between the U.S. and Great Britain with regard to the treatment of neutral shipping and the issue of extradition, particularly in regard to Hermione’s crew. In a detailed discussion of affidavits, judicial opinions, position papers and letters written by cabinet members, and newspaper pieces, Ekirch explores the English minister’s extradition requests and fugitives’ trials and connects them to the broader political debate and to process. There was no settled method for considering extradition requests: Would they go through the judiciary or the executive? Both processes and various combinations were used. Here, Ekirch turns his attention to the most famous of the mutineers—Jonathan (or Nathan) Robbins, which may have been an alias for the mutiny’s leader Thomas Nash—whom the United States extradited and the British subsequently executed. Ekirch dismisses the question of Robbins’s identity because regardless of whether Robbins was a native-born American, a naturalized American citizen, or the Irishman Thomas Nash, the issues surrounding his extradition were the same. These issues encompassed the integrity of American citizenship, alien rights, and the right to resist tyranny—either British or American. Thus the Robbins affair adds another dimension to the Federalist and Jeffersonian Republican divide. Ekirch’s treatment of the partisan debate of the 1790s will be familiar to most readers. The Federalists were suspicious of immigrants and favored good relations with Great Britain. The Republicans were more committed to immigrant and alien rights. Ekirch has some sympathy for the Federalists’ circumstances. The United States was already engaged [End Page 357] in the Quasi-War with France, and thus if the Federalists refused to cooperate with the British they risked widening the conflict to include Britain. Generally, Ekirch’s sympathies lie with the Republicans. The last part of American Sanctuary examines Robbins’s impact on American politics...

Sweden’s Early-Modern Neutrality: Neutral Vessels, Prize Cases and Diplomatic Actors in London in the Late Eighteenth Century

Abstract Early modern shipping under neutral flags was an activity that required many capacities, combining practices from three different fields: commerce and shipping, diplomacy, and international law. This complexity of neutral shipping is the reason why traditional diplomatic history paid limited attention to it, despite the fact that shipping and prize cases consumed much of the attention and time of diplomats of neutral nations. The neutral agents had to be able to understand, communicate and move between all three fields. This article studies seizures of Swedish neutral vessels by British privateers and the Royal Navy between 1770 and 1800, including the years of the War of American Independence and the French Revolutionary Wars. It provides examples of how exchanges between different field actors—e.g. shipmasters, ship-owners, merchants, agents, lawyers, naval officers and diplomats—were communicated and understood from the perspective of Sweden’s representatives in London.

Navigating Through Torpedo Attacks and Enemy Raiders: Merchant Shipping and Freight Rates During World War I

During World War I ocean freight rates rose to extraordinary levels. Using a new monthly dataset it is shown that freight rates can be well explained by economic activity, commodity prices, war risk and world tonnage in the period 1912 to 1916. In the first two years of the war part of the British merchant fleet was directly controlled by the Government but neutral shipping was basically free to operate as normal. In this period neutral shipping accounted for about one third of British imports. In the final two years of the war a much stricter regime of freight control was introduced that resulted in the withdrawal of a large proportion of neutral shipowners from British and Allied trade. Together with the mounting losses of tonnage due to the German submarine campaign this created an acute shortage of carrying capacity and reduced imports. It is argued that the policy of freight control may have rested on a misconception of the role of freight rates as a source of the high wartime inflation.

Chasing the enemy under neutral cover: French seizures of Danish ships in Nantes during the Directory period

This article considers neutral shipping from an actor-centred perspective. It begins with the study of four cases of Danish ships seized by French privateers in the Atlantic in 1797 and 1798, which were subsequently judged and condemned in Nantes. The points of conflict between the practices of neutral commerce and the legal framework are investigated to determine how the fate of a neutral ship vacillated between good prize and release, between seizure and freedom. The central issue was how to prove the true neutral nature of a venture. Even if the fate of a neutral ship theoretically depended on national legislation, in reality the final judgement of a neutral prize depended to a certain extent on local interests, particularly local investment in privateering. In that respect, the condemnation of the richest prizes was a very important financial issue for the local society in Nantes. This was why the privateers tried to take advantage of the slightest fault to prove the enemy character of their prize, whereas the neutral captain and his lawyer pleaded the sincerity and the good faith of the expedition. As this article shows, the ultimate fate of an intercepted neutral ship was determined by a complicated interplay of factors: local mercantile activities, legal interests and diplomatic priorities, which combined to make each case special.

‘No law ever prohibited neutral caravans in time of war’: The fragility of neutral shipping in the late eighteenth-century Mediterranean

This article examines the case of the Quintus, a Swedish brigantine engaged in caravan trade to Southern Europe, which was captured in 1797 by a French privateer in the Mediterranean and carried to Spain. The ship was condemned in first instance by the French consul, released in appeal by the civil court of the department of Bouches-du-Rhône in Aix-en-Provence, and finally judged anew by the Prize Court in Paris. The analysis of the documents produced by the courts, of the correspondence of the Swedish consul at Marseille, and of a lawyers’ treaty discussing the case clearly points to the fragile status of neutral shipping in a context in which there was a wide range of interpretations of the right to take prize. In examining the discourses that developed during seizures and judgments, the article suggests that the blurred border between neutral and enemy shipping gave birth to a large ‘grey zone’ which can be conceived as a legal, geographical, political and strategic space in which individuals deploy complex strategies and negotiate norms that ultimately make neutral trade possible.

‘In apparent disagreement with all law of nations in the world’: Negotiating neutrality for shipping and trade during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

This Forum deals with maritime trade and shipping conducted by three neutral maritime states in the French Revolutionary Wars: Sweden, Denmark and the United States. The five contributions, based on specific cases of neutral shipping, illustrate the complementarity of neutral and belligerent trade and shipping, and so the significance of neutrality for the continuity of commerce in wartime. The introduction discusses eighteenth-century concepts of neutrality, as neutrals and belligerents understood it. Moreover, it provides a background narrative of the French Revolutionary Wars from the perspective of these three neutral states.

Swedish merchant shipping in troubled times: The French Revolutionary Wars and Sweden’s neutrality 1793–1801

This article focuses on Swedish merchant shipping in the first decade of the French Revolutionary Wars, when Sweden, due its neutrality, expanded its trade and shipping. The article attempts to balance two contradictory views of neutral shipping: that of high risks of seizure by belligerents, and that of wartime profits. Three different perspectives are employed to demonstrate the complexity of neutral shipping business. Registers of ship documents ( fribrev and Algerian sea passes) show the relatively limited impact of political events on shipping activities. Legal documents in diplomatic correspondence illustrate practically how the cases of seized ships were handled on both political and court levels. The debate in print on the case of ship Maria (the convoy affair of 1798) indicates how the issue of neutral prizes became incorporated into the political discourse on international relations and law of nations.

‘However illegal, extraordinary or almost incredible such conduct might be’: Americans and neutrality issues in the Mediterranean during the French Wars

This article examines the conditions under which American ships sailed into the Mediterranean during the French Wars (1793–1815), particularly in the late 1790s after the signature of peace treaties with the Barbary States. Theoretically, such treaties should have enabled Americans to take advantage of two factors: the increasing demand for neutral transport in this area, and the reorganization of international trade flows precipitated by European warfare. In fact, American ships in the Mediterranean still faced major difficulties, especially with French and Spanish privateering, against which United States’ agents and consuls tried to protect them. They not only struggled with the contradictory principles of neutrality applied by different states, but also with the private interests of belligerent privateers, consuls and judges. At the same time, American merchants and captains were tempted to cover trades which belligerents might consider illegal. Commercial realities blurred traditional concepts of national allegiance and affiliation. Based on primary sources, this article argues that neutrality should be conceived within an evolving system of relations in a given region, rather than as a clear-cut, objective legal determination of the status of neutral shipping and the maritime trading rights of a given flag.

Svensk sjöfart, neutralitet och det väpnade neutralitetsförbundet 1780–1783

Swedish Shipping, Neutrality, and the First League of Armed Neutrality,1780–1783.The purpose of this article is to follow two contradictory perceptions of neutrality in the political discourses of the mid-eighteenth century. One perception drew on the philosophy of natural law and the beneficial view of trade and sociability; here neutrality was perceived as a good and moral basis for peaceful inter-state relations. The second perception derived from the mercantilist view of international trade as an alternative means of warfare; here neutrality was perceived as a shameless exploitation of warfare. It is argued that the concept of neutrality went through an important development in the period between the Seven Years’ War and the American War of Independence, and that the Danish writer Martin Hübner played an important role in this development. Hübner’s view of neutrality, drawing on both discourses, became embodied indirectly in the declaration of the First League of Armed Neutrality in 1780, composed during the American War of Independence. The League was the joint action of three neutral countries, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, intended to stop the British harassment of neutral trade and shipping. When Sweden joined the League, it acknowledged this new concept of neutrality as part of its foreign policy.