“Letter to the unknown creatures who live deep in the abyss of the oceans”
Giovanbattista Tusa: The twentieth century has been the century of the Earth.
However, once the partitioning of the Earth and the extraction of fossil resources – in which even humans were transformed or turned into metals such as gold and silver – were exhausted, slave colonialism became the model for the new “conquest” of outer space.
This conquest replicates the old conquest of the Earth that characterised European modernity, which divided humans and non-humans into exploitable or unexploitable resources, or abandoned them as mere waste.
Paradoxically, the “astro-capitalist” outcome of fossil modernity has led to a kind of internalisation of extraterrestrial spaces, reducing them to areas of geo-political relevance and influence.
Thus, the twentieth century was marked by anxiety about the end of the Earth and by anguish over the beginning of an era without borders or boundaries, an era of astral colonialism that reproduces the same, identical Earth everywhere. Such anxiety about the end is linked to an image of the world as petrified ground, terra firma, which produces an image of the planet as a home – a space tailored to our needs. Yet, the planet is not a domestic or domesticated space; rather, it is the flux that flows through all living and non-living beings that cohabit it.
The twenty-first century might be the century of the Oceans, the century of the unappropriable force that has always shattered territories, fractured the earth, and caused continents to drift: an open sea, for everyone.
Françoise Vergès: Without the colonization of the seas and oceans, of all bodies of water, no slave trade, no colonial and imperialist wars, no sugar, no coffee, no tea, no precious wood, no cotton and no oil brought to satisfy Western demands for a good and comfortable, no diamonds and rubies for royal crowns, no troops sent to the colonies to crush anti-slavery and anticolonial revolts, no Big Stick policies, no Opium wars, no colonial soldiers brought to Europe to die in the white man’s wars…
Western colonization of seas and oceans was a historical necessity. In 1870, art critic, social reformer and Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, John Ruskin clearly stated the objectives of British imperialism: 'There is a destiny now possible for us, the highest ever set before a nation...This is what England must do or perish: she must found colonies as fast and as far she is able...”[1] Expansion and extraction as fast and as far possible required an unparallel maritime armed force, it was the British Navy. Seas were renamed and rigorously mapped, non-Western knowledge of navigating was either appropriated or dismissed, the ship industry flourished. Deep sea did not escape exploration and discovery, two notions intimately associated with colonization, and in 1872, the British government launched the Challenger expedition to map the deep sea. Maritime history belonged exclusively to white men mastering unruly waters. British brutal monopoly of sea power has been replaced by the US Navy which is expanding the colonization of seas and oceans, reinforcing its military bases, encouraging more deep-sea extraction, more surveillance, and more militarization as it is facing competition on sea. Battle ships still play a fundamental role in current imperialist and genocidal wars, as in guarantying trade monopoles and extractive racial capitalism.[2] Hence, Trump announcement on December 22, 2025, of the construction of a “new class of American-designed battleships that will be the most lethal surface combatant ever constructed,” came as no surprise. Standing with three pictures of ships “labeled with the name "Trump, USS Defiant" behind him, Trump declared that each will be equipped with “hypersonic weapons, lasers, cruise missiles and nuclear weapons”.[3] The “first Trump class battleship…will be an unambiguous statement of American commitment to maritime superiority with capability to distribute more firepower across the fleet than any other class of ship, for any Navy, in history.”[4]
Challenges to the colonial, imperialist and capitalist power over seas and oceans on the legal level are growing, exemplified by the long struggle of the inhabitants forcibly expelled from their island, Diego Garcia, by the British in 1965.[5] The UK separated Diego Garcia from the other islands of the Chagos archipelago and authorized the US Navy to turn into its biggest maritime base. Since then, Chagossians have fought in UK and international courts to have their deportation recognized, for reparations and the right to return.[6] What appears a greater threat to the colonization of the seas and a direct contribution to their decolonization have been concrete action. When in 2009, ships of a coalition of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China, suddenly declared a “War on Pirates,” and sailed into Somalian waters, attention turned to what had until then belonged to 18th century history, which historian and activist Marcus Rediker has told in Villains of All Nations. To escape the brutal and cruel discipline and exploitation of the imperialist British, French and US navy, sailors turned pirates and constructed their own distinctive egalitarian society, electing their officers, dividing their booty equitably, attacking slave ships and maintaining a multinational social order.[7] The 21st century Somalian sailors and fishermen also turned pirates to revolt against injustice and imperialism. In the early 2000s, they noticed that “European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean.” [8] “The coastal population began to sicken. At first, they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies,” and then people started to die.[9] Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, told journalist Johann Hari that: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it,”[10] adding that "There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."[11] Somalian fishermen taking action in their own hands, created the “Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia,” and took speedboats to wage a 'tax' on Western dumpers and trawlers. One of their leaders, Sugule Ali, said they wanted “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish or dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas.”[12] Calling them pirates and waging war against them was a way of hiding the real causes of their action but they were decolonializing their sea, fighting the extraction of their resources and the dumping of toxic waste. Another example of challenging the colonization of the sea and the complicity of commercial ships with the genocide in Gaza, has been the Yemeni Houthi attack on commercial vessels in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Red Sea, which block their entry to the Suez Canal. Already in November 2023, vessels had to take longer and costlier routes around Africa, and in 2024, according to Danish shipping giant A.P Moller-Maersk (Maersk), traffic through the Suez Canal has decreased 66 percent.
Increased militarization of the seas goes, billionaires’ dreams of constructing islands where they would escape the disasters they have created—poverty, climate catastrophes, genocides, wars, racism, fascism—and which they have no intention to stop, confirm the need for an internationalist agenda of seas’ decolonization. Neoliberal capitalism still needs to control seas and oceans—underwater cables are essential for communication; deep sea extraction for gas, oil, and other resources platforms are needed to feed the digital economy and must be military protected—murder and genocide do not come only from the drones and planes in the sky, but also from battleships which provide support. There is no way out of decolonial struggle, seas, oceans, all bodies of water must be decolonized to reach the abolition of all systems of racial exploitation. Pirates of the world, unite!
[1] https://www.britishempire.me.uk/newimperialism.html.
[2] https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2025-01-06/mediterranean-europe-russia-iran-16389467.html
[3] Ibid.
[4] “President Trump announces new battle ships,” December 22, 2025, https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/Press-Releases/display-pressreleases/Article/4366856/president-trump-announces-new-battleship/.
[5] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckdg7jjlx2go; Ann Runthar, “The (Un)Importance of Diego Garcia,” 19 Blue Depths, January 2025, https://bluedepths.substack.com/p/the-un-importance-of-diego-garcia; https://johnpilger.com/stealing-a-nation/.
[6] https://www.rfi.fr/en/africa/20241008-chagos-islands-returned-to-mauritius-but-tensions-over-evictions-persist; https://www.thenation.com/article/world/chagos-islands-mauritias-colonialism/.
[7] Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations. Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, Beacon Press, 2005.
[8] Johann Hari, “You Are Being Lied to About Pirates,” April 13, 2009, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.
[9] Johann Hari, 2009.
[10] Johann Hari, 2009
[11] Johann Hari, 2009
[12] Johann Hari, 2009.