Introduction: The rescuing sovereign at sea

Abstract

This forum explores how maritime rescue has historically been bound up with questions of sovereignty. The contributions approach both concepts as constituted by concrete practice, normative order and cultural symbolism, tracing how efforts to save lives at sea became intertwined with law, morality and political authority. It is argued that maritime spaces have long served as laboratories for the articulation of sovereign power, while lifesaving practices simultaneously challenged and reinforced state legitimacy. Covering a wide chronological, geographical and thematic span – from nineteenth-century lifeboat organizations to imperial infrastructures, international arrangements and present-day border regimes – the articles situate the history of maritime rescue within broader debates on sovereignty, humanitarianism and normative orders.

The contributions to this forum discuss historical connections between maritime rescue and sovereignty. We propose to understand both of these terms as constituted by concrete practice, normative order and cultural symbolism. We also hold that there is historical interest in studying these connections. At first sight, the matter may seem simple – international maritime law defines promoting the functioning of search-and-rescue services as a duty of all sovereign maritime nations. ¹ Thus, the promotion – whatever exactly that may entail in practice – of lifesaving at sea has been elevated to being part of a bundle of duties that legally define sovereignty. Yet, on closer inspection, and especially from a historical point of view, the problem is multilayered and intricate. It broaches the broader problem of how different normative orders intersect, or fail to do so, and how these intersections and failures evolve over time.

The forum starts out from the assumption, to be underscored by the contributions, that the normative orders of particular relevance for the problem at hand are morality and the law, more so than the norms emanating from, say, religion, aesthetics or etiquette. The articles tackle questions concerning the interrelations of these orders and their relations to a history of maritime space-making and statehood. It is a given that the law impinges on this theme. Ever since the famed debates between Hugo Grotius and John Selden on the openness of the seas in the seventeenth century, the matter of maritime space has been a prime topic of international law. How morality enters the fray, however, is less obvious. We contend that the history of maritime rescue and lifesaving cannot be separated from moral meanings, and that these meanings had transformative power for the way in which maritime space was understood as subject to normative orders. The morality concerned is, more precisely, that of humanitarianism, as a broad array of social movements addressing the will to alleviate ‘suffering at a distance’, as Luc Boltanski formulated the central aspect that set humanitarian morality apart from older, often more religious forms of in-community charity and aid. ² There is a history of humanitarianism informing the imagination of statehood and sovereignty via the ambition of spatial ordering contained in the ‘distance’ to be bridged by the respective relief effort. Both humanitarianism and legal sovereignty have tangible practical dimensions as well as discursive and imaginary ones, and both are historical, marked by ruptures and continuities. Over time, these histories converged on the assumption that sovereignty should also include humanitarian responsibilities. This would suggest a line of development through which a particular moral culture became embedded in the self-understanding of modern statehood. Maritime normative orders – above all moral and legal ones, though religious and other systems of meaning cannot be left aside entirely – offer a kind of laboratory for exploring these wider ramifications. In order to proceed with this exploration, however, it is apposite to offer some remarks on the understanding of the basic terms.

Sovereignty

Sovereignty, in its most basic sense, denotes the capacity of an entity – often a state but also, for instance, an individual, a people or a nation – to serve as the final authority, and thus ruler, over others. ³ Sovereignty is never simply a legal term but a genuinely political one, and it is difficult to establish what its conceptual and metaphorical uses are. Authority is not simply a matter of power recognized as such, but of power recognized as legitimate, grounded in a wider idiom of norms, values and ‘oughts’, alongside positive law. This authority can concern the power to decide, the power to legislate or the power to suspend the validity of legal rules. Sovereignty, in its ‘Westphalian’ understanding, has also been treated as the basis of international law – as a system of regulating access to the conclusion of contracts within a class of sovereigns. Moreover, the term has denoted not only the capacity to decide, but also the power to act, ⁴ and, in particular, to implement and control a certain order within a defined space or territory – in the studies that make up this forum, maritime space – with the objective of shaping predictable and regulated patterns of interaction among the actors, whether individuals, groups or institutions. Sovereignty is tied to territory as defined by the exclusive validity of the norms set by a given political power. Within a territory, not only the sovereign state but also a wide variety of relevant actors participate actively in the ordering process. Historically, in cases where the governance of global maritime spaces, such as those of shared commercial routes, was at stake, ⁵ ‘powers of stewardship’ could be given to non-governmental or intergovernmental entities in order to prevent territorialization by a particular sovereign. ⁶

While, historically, some philosophers, rulers and policymakers have emphasized the absoluteness, perpetuity and indivisibility of an ideal form of sovereignty, more recent research has insisted on its several dimensions; ⁷ its relationships with a multiplicity of other powers and non-state actors; ⁸ the difference between the question of the scope of the powers of various political bodies and the effective means of public authority; ⁹ and, more generally, its ‘fuzzy, contingent, and situational’ nature in practice. ¹⁰ In maritime history, this type of research has been pioneered by Lauren Benton, in particular, who asked how geographical circumstances have created ‘layered’ forms of sovereignty within empires since the early modern period. The sea – as eluding territorial control and being ‘a space trending from lawlessness to regulation’ in early international law – takes on a prominent role if the problem of sovereignty is brought to bear on the history of empire. ¹¹

Maritime spaces, then, are shaped by complex constellations of divergent legal, moral, political and economic norms, in which sovereignty manifests itself in often precarious ways. A case in point is the history of general average, which offered a model for the communal sharing of liabilities and had surprisingly far-reaching ramifications for maritime legal histories. This was one of the earliest transnational legal norms in maritime commercial life, recognized by courts and legislations across early modern Europe, ¹² and it illustrates how sovereignty at sea was never purely about command and coercion, but also about adjudicating risk, enforcing transnational norms, and embedding moral and economic principles into the practice of rule. ¹³

Recent global histories of maritime law have taken this insight further by showing how economic practices and normative orders intersected in complex ways. From different angles, scholars have emphasized how practices of securitization, salvage, wrecking and lifesaving contributed not only to local economies but also to the very construction of sovereignty. ¹⁴ At the same time, studies of international maritime law highlight the tensions and compromises embedded in treaties and regulations, as well as the ways in which they sought to bridge – or sometimes paper over – the divergences of legal traditions. ¹⁵ The sheer complexity of maritime law also raises the question of how these varied legal histories have interacted with the history of moral norms, especially in relation to humanitarian imperatives that reshaped the meanings of lifesaving at sea. Drawing on these insights, this forum situates its contributions at the intersection of legal, moral, economic and political history to explore how sovereignty at sea has been negotiated through practices of lifesaving, salvage, safety and security.

Scholarship has shown convincingly that sovereignty is an insurmountably historical category and, within its recent history, it appears to have gravitated towards an ever-stronger orientation to territoriality. This concept does not simply refer to the land under a state's control, but also to the ways in which states define land, water and air as national territory or ‘state space’, thereby linking a particular people to a particular place. ¹⁶ In the transnational encounters of European and non-European states and non-state collectivities within the framework of colonialism and empire since the early modern period, exclusive legal control over territory became a key marker of sovereignty, as Douglas Howland and others have argued. ¹⁷ From this focus on territory, it was only a small step to emphasizing the border over other aspects of territoriality – a shift that occurred from the late nineteenth century onwards. At this point, novel technologies of identification, citizenship and immigration control, along with novel infrastructures of traffic, allowed sovereignty to be defined ever more clearly through the function of controlling who may or may not cross a territorial boundary. ¹⁸

The end of empires reinforced this tendency, as novel national borderlines proliferated. Nandita Sharma has emphasized that it was a defining feature of the ‘Postcolonial New World Order’ of nationally sovereign states to deploy technologies of territorialized governmentality for excluding those deemed ‘not of a place’, or at least to regulate their movement through the very conduits that sustain postcolonial power. ¹⁹ Kalyani Ramnath has shown how boat refugees and migrants in the Bay of Bengal region during the Second World War and the subsequent decolonization era found themselves in liminal spaces, neither fully included nor excluded by new national frameworks, underscoring the distinction between citizenship and political belonging. ²⁰ As Irial Glynn argues in this forum, a territorialized understanding of sovereignty meant that solidarity was only one factor among others in state responses to refugees at sea between 1979 and 2001, when it supported respective foreign policy goals. This function of sovereign order appears to have come to dominate at least the political understanding of sovereignty in recent decades. This is the case to such an extent that Glynn ponders the question of whether the discourse of moral duties to rescue has not been moving on to notions of the need to save sovereignty itself, in light of the perceived new porosity of borders.

If sovereignty has been at the forefront of many campaigns and frequently a winning slogan in the international politics and concomitant political ideologies of a putative post-globalization moment in recent years, this appears to be largely due to its links to territory, borders and space. ²¹ Contemporary interest in the relations between sovereignty and lifesaving has been provoked, in particular, by the ambivalent trend of the securitization of maritime borders through the rescue and interception of migrants and refugees at sea. ²² This situation is shaped by the legal peculiarities of maritime borders and ensuing sovereign responsibilities and duties, as well as by the supranational pooling of sovereignty, as, for instance, in the case of the European Union. ²³ The situation is not unique to Europe. Similar developments can be observed elsewhere, with Australia a frequently cited example. ²⁴ Tellingly, the maritime border protection operation of the Australian Border Force to stop arrival of asylum-seekers was launched in 2013 under the name Operation Sovereign Borders. ²⁵ In relation to the recent situation of boat migration to Europe, Itamar Mann has argued how normative orders appear to be designed, in part, for their own subversion, creating strategies of neglect alongside regimes of care. He describes these as ‘legal black holes’, such as those produced by ‘border externalization’, through which states shift enforcement to extraterritorial zones where human rights law appears to have been suspended. ²⁶ Offshore migrant-detention and asylum-processing centres have been used for decades by the United States (Guantánamo) and Australia (the Pacific islands of Manus and Nauru), and several European countries are currently attempting to establish similar facilities, despite rulings by national and European courts that question their legality. In turn, novel humanitarian movements for saving lives at sea have emerged to operate in the gaps left, and created, by international legal practice. As Mann and Julia Mourão Permoser have argued, even zones of state neglect can open up windows of opportunity for the activities of these movements. ²⁷ Yet these movements, tailored to their particular ‘single issues’, also produce their own zones of, one might say, humanitarian neglect (for example, Mediterranean versus Saharan crossings or lifesaving versus subsequent support). The career of territorial sovereignty thus has an impact on moral culture as well. This is a problem that requires historical explanation.

Sovereignty and morality

Sovereignty has for a long time been connected with the discourse and practice of morality. As a term that points to the political power and right to legislate, sovereignty has a close resemblance to the concept of autonomy, understood as the self-imposition of law. The deliberation of the moral subject becomes the territory of self-rule: just as a state governs its territory, the moral subject is imagined as sovereign over their own decisions. Moral thought throughout the early modern period belaboured the question of whether reason alone was a sufficient guide to what was right or wrong, good or bad, in the sphere of human action, or whether divine law was also required. Another issue was whether the divine lawgiver – God himself – was actually bound, in his actions, by some inherent structure of practical reason, or not. Efforts to free morality from the supremacy of theology ran in parallel with political thought traditions that developed the modern idea of sovereignty as the question of who holds ultimate legislative authority. ²⁸ For this reason, autonomy in the moral and sovereignty in the political sense are, as it were, joined at the hip. Both involved a move away from relying on theology as the highest source of authority over normative orders of all kinds. Carl Schmitt, when he defined sovereignty as the power to decide over the state of exception and related this definition to older political theology, was not wrong to point to the lingering significance of the conceptual heritage of theology in modern political thought. ²⁹ Yet, characteristically, he overlooked the proximity of morality to sovereignty altogether. His theory of sovereignty was almost as infatuated with its own reductionist elegance as it was with political violence. History supplies a rather messier set of criss-crossing trajectories.

Significantly, morality, too, has undergone a development that renders it increasingly oriented towards something akin to territoriality. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, notions of bringing relief to distant suffering strangers became key to the understanding of collective societal agency. Movements promoting a variety of issues were seemingly united in their concern for the suffering of others in the name of ‘humanity’. Far from constituting a single telos towards which all humanitarian movements gravitated, these initiatives often developed independently of one another, shaped by their specific locations and cultural or social contexts. ³⁰ Causes included caring for victims of certain social conditions, such as slaves, orphans, sex workers, people with mental illness, alcoholics or prisoners, just as much as for victims of catastrophic events, such as wars (wounded soldiers on the battlefield), disasters (for example, famines), colonial genocide (the ‘protection’ of indigenous peoples becoming a concern from the 1830s onwards) and everyday accidents (the provision of ambulance services), to name some of the most prominent examples. ³¹

The study of what underlying motivations drove social movements – often overshadowed by their better-known figureheads such as William Wilberforce and Henry Dunant – to support these humane causes has produced a number of often interconnected theories. In recent decades, the eighteenth-century rise of the discourse of empathy (for instance, in the role of emotionally charged descriptions of bodily suffering in literature) ³² has been suggested as one explanation for the emergence of a humanitarian sensibility. Other accounts point to modern capitalist and imperial market relations, ³³ as well as Enlightenment-era philosophical and literary stagings of moral sentiment. ³⁴

However, as Ron Po shows in his contribution to this forum, organized forms of humanitarianism were not confined to the West. With his case study of the Zhengnitang lifesaving association in Qing China, he argues that Chinese lifeboat humanitarianism was linked to a tradition of local philanthropy and communal engagement imbued with Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist principles. This Chinese tradition of lifesaving was also evoked – whether accurately or as part of a strategy of self-legitimization – by some western lifeboat associations as an origin story for rescue practices. This highlights the global-historical underpinnings of the humanitarian impetus in European history.

Crucially, humanitarianism is always tied to the idea of bridging a distance that has previously eluded moral agency, creating a frontier for the pertinence of moral law and extending the authority of moral norms piecemeal. Distance is the primary point of entry for the global-historical meanings of humanitarian morality. Humanitarianism becomes a medium through which European societies, and others, can reflect on far-flung connections, their disorder and potential ordering.

For abolitionism, the moral distance was spatial in a palpable, physical sense, as in Europe at least the movement was dominated by the idea of the remoteness of the transatlantic colonial world. In shipwreck-relief efforts, distance was the often unbridgeable, if not particularly extended, space between the wrecked ship and shore. In other contexts, distance could also be metaphorical, such as the social separation between, say, the upper classes and the poor or between social ‘honesty’ and ‘infamy’.

In this way, the particular culture of morality that emerges through the growth and multiplication of humanitarian movements shares in the territoriality that is also increasingly demanded of sovereignty. What emerges is a form of moral territoriality around the ‘single issues’ of humanitarian movements, the particular causes they address and the ‘good projects’ they pursue. ³⁵ Humanitarian movements typically emerge around a form of public campaigning that addresses an area of moral neglect, where a long-standing practice of abuse or lack of care exists for reasons of opportunism and insufficient agency. It is abolitionism that in some regards holds a claim to being the first modern humanitarian movement on account of its relative abandonment of the exclusive rights of denominational communities to organize charitable activities and its pioneering use of an argument around consumer guilt. ³⁶

Abolitionism also aimed, with stunning immediacy, at legislative reform, not limiting its claims to changing the normative order within the sphere of morality alone. Yet such a legal ambition was not necessarily a feature of humanitarian undertakings. As Henning Trüper shows in his contribution to this forum, shipwreck relief, as a coeval concern of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, showed no inclination to press for legislation. When legal order came to impose itself on the humanitarian practice of rescue, the result was a situation of normative intricacy. It is thus important to keep in mind that humanitarianism is not necessarily oriented towards the establishment of human rights. ³⁷ For a similar reason, it would be rash to assume that military intervention, in some form or another, functions as a telos of the humanitarian movement. Interventionist initiatives were concomitant with the entire history of humanitarian movements in the late modern period – early nineteenth-century naval action against the slave trade and against piracy might be mentioned as the most pertinent example of maritime intervention in this connection. ³⁸ Yet, for many causes, military force was evidently never considered.

In the historiography of humanitarianism, the issue of rescue in maritime contexts – in its different forms as abolitionist naval interventionism, lifeboat movements, sailors’ rights and improvement movements, and, increasingly today, movements for the protection of boat refugees and for the ecological protection of marine life and the sea itself – has only recently been gaining traction. ³⁹ Some authors have problematized the specific character of maritime humanitarianism, emphasizing how its moral imperatives and practices are shaped by the techno-material (meteorological and hydrological conditions) and sociolegal specificity of the sea. ⁴⁰ The existence of these factors reconfirms the ‘archipelagic’ nature of humanitarianism, as an aggregation of selective, ungeneralizable and even sometimes inconsistent single issues whose particularities and even contradictions are often sidelined in the wish to describe a single-origin, general humanitarian movement. ⁴¹ An example of humanitarian inconsistency can be found in reactions to the individual initiatives to provide aid for Vietnamese boat refugees with rescue ships launched in France and Germany in the late 1970s; they encountered hostility from more established ‘territorial’ (in both senses of the word) international humanitarian organizations. ⁴²

The comparison of different types of humanitarianism sheds light on the peculiarities that constitute the singularity of a morally good cause. Each humanitarian movement defined its own area of pertinence, where norms were shaped differently from one single issue to another. For the abolitionists, it was not enough to say that slavery was morally wrong; it needed to be outlawed. By contrast, for the advocates of shipwreck relief, keeping the law out of their sphere of concern was crucial, as the imperative of saving the shipwrecked they sought to establish demanded the readiness of volunteers to risk – and, in extreme cases, sacrifice – their own lives to save complete strangers. The law of war alone had been regarded as entitled to command such risk-taking, but only for the benefit of one's own polity or sovereign. Hence, morality was considered the sole force that could establish effective norms of this kind outside of the context of warfare. Only in the twentieth century, as Trüper argues in his contribution, did a ‘legal rupture’ occur: moral norms were, in part, replaced by a disorderly plurality of laws and a legal duty to rescue, but only when no self-endangerment was necessary. Morality did not simply lose some of its significance as a normative order; its meanings were also transformed. The genealogy of norms, broadly understood, helps explain how present maritime emergencies are interpreted and processed.

One prominent example of legislation in this genealogy is discussed by Gard Paulsen in his article for this forum. His analysis shows that the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea of 1914 not only must be considered as one of the starting points for subsequent international efforts to regulate maritime safety in the twentieth century, but can also be read backwards, as the culmination of complex forces and interests pursued by state and economic actors, as well as legal and technical experts. Sovereignty here appears to be profoundly enmeshed with the activities of social agents that create normative orders, in a sort of private–public partnership avant la lettre. There is a highly significant epistemic component to such orders, both on the moral and the legal levels. The territorialization concomitant with the international legal order, as comprising all of the world's maritime space, is bound up with these preceding partnerships.

Lukas Schemper's contribution, which connects the history of maritime safety and lifesaving with the history of imperial forms of rule in the nineteenth century, seeks to shed light on the role of imperial politics in the (pre)history of this territorialization. His article not only demonstrates how maritime safety structures supported informal and formal forms of imperial expansion, but also shows that the ability to operate these structures provided a ‘standard of civilization’ on which empires could agree. ⁴³ This, in turn, led to various forms of inter-imperial collaborations. Beyond the vertical hierarchy of sovereign and less-than-sovereign states, there was a horizontal sharing of sovereignty between empires.

A humanitarian sovereign?

The recent uptake of interest in the history of rescue in maritime contexts suggests that research on humanitarianism is often shaped by presentist concerns. Issues such as the drowning of refugees and migrants while attempting to reach safety or improve their living conditions, or the impact of pollution and anthropogenic climate change on both the maritime environment and its human denizens or visitors, have provided a new impetus for studying the history of rescue in these contexts. ⁴⁴ This impetus seems to stem not least from the tight mesh woven between humanitarian concerns and the understanding of sovereignty at sea. Have these normativities become amalgamated, then, so that the presentist concern is, in fact, one about a humanitarian sovereign of sorts?

Historically, humanitarian issues – in maritime and other contexts – were primarily the concern of private social movements precisely because they were initially of little interest to institutions of the sovereign state or exceeded its tax-based resources. Lifeboat humanitarianism, which, unlike some other forms of humanitarian activity, focused on transporting victims to safety and administering first aid rather than delivering assistance within long-term, stationary communities of care, serves as a salient example. ⁴⁵ The first voluntary local lifeboat organizations in Europe were created in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, followed by nationally organized voluntary movements and organizations in almost all western maritime states, with the British Royal National Lifeboat Institution of 1824 in the vanguard. ⁴⁶ It appears, however, that the state was increasingly influenced by – and also expected to appropriate – this type of agency. This reality manifested itself in several ways. One concerns the figure of the sovereign him- or herself. Nineteenth-century sovereigns, predominantly monarchical but in later times also republican or dictatorial heads of state, accepted requests from humanitarian organizations in general, and lifeboat organizations in particular, supporting their causes as beneficial to the state and its population. ⁴⁷ A case in point, as shown by Nebiha Guiga's article in this forum, is the Empress Eugénie’s patronage of the French lifeboat organization, Société Centrale de Sauvetage des Naufragés. Another example is Nazi Germany, where, from 1935 to 1945, Hitler assumed the patronage of the Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Rettung Schiffbrüchiger (German Society for the Rescue of the Shipwrecked), the only ‘independent’ voluntary organization for which he chose to assume this type of position. ⁴⁸ Guiga points to the ways in which this orientation towards the sovereign structured the charity market of lifeboat movements, the donations they received, and the way these donations were acknowledged and publicly represented. Here, Guiga's contribution illustrates how the creation of the Société Centrale de Sauvetage des Naufragés was closely connected to the political regime of the Second Empire and its various commercial and imperial interests, and how the monarchical state dominated the hierarchy of values connected to benevolent donations. Po's contribution, in turn, offers a counterpoint. He argues that, in the development of the Zhengnitang lifeboat association in late imperial China, private philanthropic organizations were more important than close relations with the state.

Besides this mostly symbolic – if transactional and mutually beneficial – function of sovereign patronage, the sovereign also intervened more directly in matters of lifesaving. As Johannes Lehmann has demonstrated, focusing on examples from late eighteenth-century German principalities, sovereign edicts specifically decreed the rescue and resuscitation of apparently dead persons. This required suspending the widespread taboo of touching (seemingly) dead bodies, which were considered to be contaminated, for instance, by suicide, crime or an unclear cause of death. In the declaration of these ‘small states of emergency’, Lehmann sees an example of how, following the works of Michel Foucault, in the late eighteenth century, the rescue of life became the object of political governance and a basis for sovereignty. ⁴⁹ The establishment of organized forms of rescue indeed coincides with the emergence of biopolitical governance. Humane and maritime rescue societies concerned with different lifesaving causes often framed their appeals as beneficial to preserving the human resources of the state. ⁵⁰

To some extent, the current handling of boat refugees and migrants also illustrates the dual, even contradictory, nature of Foucault's ‘biopower’ – a form of agency both over the sustenance of individual lives and over the population, with medical and surveillance technologies increasingly determining border management. Indeed, border regimes present themselves not only as systems of control and surveillance but also as protective spaces concerned with migrants’ welfare. Authorities present holding centres as providing accommodation and facilitating integration. In this framing, state interventions such as maritime interception, detention or deportation are couched in the dual language of security and humanitarianism. The border thus becomes a site where sovereign power is articulated in moral terms – ‘moral sovereignty’ – with emergency measures legitimized through an appeal to shared values and the promise of safeguarding both citizens and migrants. ⁵¹

Meanwhile, the meaning of lifesaving is itself experiencing a transformation in political, moral and legal contexts. Over the past few decades, there has been a significant broadening of the discourses of rescue and protection. This expansion goes beyond the traditional focus on safeguarding human life to include the protection of marine life and the sea itself, recognizing them as particularly threatened components of the Earth system. While the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea frameworks of 1958 and 1982 (I and III) contain provisions for the protection of the marine environment, there are no enforcement mechanisms to ensure compliance. ⁵² There have been recent attempts – notably, the 2023 ‘Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction’ – to strengthen the Convention’s role as a ‘protectorate of life’. In particular, the negotiation of a new regulatory framework for the protection of the deep sea, a space formerly characterized by freedom of exploitation, has caused resistance on the grounds of national sovereignty for two decades – but eventually entered into force in January 2026. ⁵³ The moral and biopolitical status of human life, then, appears altered, less decidedly set apart as unique in its normative status. Finally, anthropogenic climate change, which threatens the future existence of entire island states for instance, has brought to the fore the question of whether territorial sovereignty itself needs rescuing – or whether this is the wrong question to ask, since lived histories and political spaces extend beyond the neat cartographies of sovereign borders anyway. ⁵⁴

While this forum stays within the confines of an exclusive concern with the saving of human lives, the moral language of humanitarianism and legal language of territorial sovereignty can increasingly be seen as expanding into the domains of the non-human. ⁵⁵ Animal protection, to be sure, has long been part of the archipelago of humanitarian single issues, with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Britain, founded in the same year as the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, being as consistently directed towards legislative initiatives as the abolitionists. It is therefore not new for humanitarian morality to seek to overcome the distance between the human and the non-human. Yet, in recent decades, the sea itself – as a multitude of habitats and a system of natural processes, such as the mid-oceanic currents – has moved into the focus of the moral language of rescue and into some of the legal ordering around rescue as well. The history of the humanitarian sovereign, as it emerged in the nineteenth century and developed over the twentieth, is arguably far from over. Whether this history will play – in the manner in which present-day societies understand themselves and in the normative orders they may develop to counter disorderly realities – the role of a pioneer, or that of a preventer, is an open question. It remains to be seen whether, as life on a planetary scale appears increasingly threatened, the humanitarian sovereign has a role to play. We believe that the studies collected in this forum, as contributions to a history of the present, will contribute to a better understanding of these problems.