Currents of Empire: Oceanic Space, Colonial Encounters, and Ecological Consciousness in British Maritime

Abstract

The ocean represents the most enduring archive of the empire, inscribing upon its depths the legacies of conquest, encounter, and ecological transformation. Far from being merely a backdrop, the maritime realm in British literature functions as a dynamic agent-shaping identities, challenging imperial certainties, and mediating human-nonhuman relations. This paper, titled Currents of Empire: Oceanic Space, Colonial Encounters, and Ecological Consciousness in British Maritime Literature, undertakes a comparative analysis of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Employing the critical frameworks of the Blue Humanities, supplemented by postcolonial and ecocritical perspectives, this study explores how oceanic space reflects and refracts the ideological currents of empire. In Coleridge’s work, the sea emerges as a supernatural adjudicator, enforcing a proto-environmental ethic. In Conrad’s narrative, it serves as a volatile crucible of moral crisis, where imperial authority struggles against the fluidity of circumstance. Woolf’s depiction of the littoral zone portrays it as a liminal threshold-a site of memory, perception, and quiet resistance to linear colonial narratives. By tracing the evolution of maritime imagery from the metaphysical awe of Romanticism to the fragmented coastal consciousness of Modernism, this paper asserts that British maritime literature encodes a shifting epistemology of the sea: one that captures both the allure of dominion and the humbling acknowledgment of ecological interdependence. The ocean, constantly mutable yet enduring, remains a site where the currents of history, culture, and the environment converge in an ongoing state of flux.