Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss the exploratory mappings for the ERC 4-Oceans Atlas of intersections between warfare, piracy, privateering, trade, fisheries, gyres, ecologies and climate during the pre and early modern period, when the size of the human footprint on global oceans increased significantly.

Paper long abstract:

The European discovery of the northern and southern hemispheres of the Americas in the fifteenth century inaugurated the age of mercantile capitalism sparking bourgeoning imperial and mercantile wars over ‘New’ World gold, silver, furs, fish, and timber. The discovery of Northwest Atlantic fisheries and the opening the world’s oceans as major theaters of trade and war led to significant ecological impacts: “the development of ocean-going sailing ships, the biggest and most complex machines” ever built “enabled Europeans to establish their control over almost half the world” during their era of imperial expansion, leading to an unprecedented need for oak and other hard woods: “at the beginning of the eighteenth century the building of a warship could consume 4,000 trees- and for smelting iron. Forests were being depleted faster that they could regrow.” The manufacture of ordnance and gunpowder outfitting period ships also consumed trees and agrarian land at unprecedented rates. At the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, English furnaces were smelting 1000 tons of ordnance, whilst her government’s “saltpetremen” confiscated fields fertilized with manure to harvest the sodium nitrate required to produce military grade gunpowder for the Royal Navy. The inauguration of early modern oceanic trade and warfare occurred during the Little Ice Age, when temperatures in the North Atlantic experienced a pronounced decline from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century due to the impacts of orbital forcing, shifts in oceanic circulation, low solar radiation cycles and increases in volcanic eruptions releasing particulate matter into the Earth’s atmosphere.