Home Ports and Fast Sailing Ships: Maritime Settlement and Seaborne Mobility in Forming the Comparative Wests William M
Home Ports and Fast Sailing Ships: Maritime Settlement and Seaborne Mobility in Forming the Comparative Wests William M. Taylor ABSTRACT: The contribution of the sea and seafaring to the construction of modernity has recently been reappraised. Opposing narratives of the geographical (particularly terrestrial) and temporal co- ordinates of modernity’s progress, the fluidity of “ocean-space,” and “maritime criticism” have been proposed to challenge conventional readings of established archives and question consensual under- standings of the fundamental territoriality, geographic enlargement, and progressive development of nation-states. This essay questions how this reappraisal of the sea may be relevant to the study of the “comparative Wests.” Specifically, it considers how aesthetic and ethical possibilities for maritime crit- icism may reveal gaps or omissions in the historiography of the neo-European settlement and nine- teenth-century territorial expansion of the United States and Australia. My primary focus is Lewis Mumford’s writing on American culture, architecture, and design. I question how Mumford’s appropriation of nineteenth-century aesthetic criticism, particularly writing extolling the virtues of colonial American ships and seafaring, may be indicative of tensions at work between opposing organic and globalized, geographically closed and unbounded, moral and econom- ic perspectives on a nation’s progress, development, and growth—between a critical emphasis on “roots” of culture and “routes” of seaborne exchange. If it is true, as Philip Fisher asserts, that the story of American society is largely a history of the nation’s transport, then what stories do the systems and technology of seaborne mobility tell us? SAILING SHIPS (ALONG WITH SEAFARING AND NAVIGATIONAL PRACTICES) were one princi- pal means whereby neo-European settlement was established in the multiple “Wests” imagined and occupied by colonialists and, as such, were engaged in the negotiation of difference.
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