IN THE NODULE PROVINCES: A HISTORY OF THE OCEAN THAT MINERALS PROMISED

Deep-sea sciences and deep-sea laws evolved through one another over the mid-20th century. How are resource-making and ocean governance mutually implicated? 

How did the way that ideas about material abundance were conceived in the mid-20th century engender a working vision of the ocean that makes a more full and just vision of abundance impossible to envision? 


This dissertation takes up these questions in the context of deep-sea manganese (now called polymetallic) nodules, asking how historicizing the history of ocean science’s outsides might bear on resolving lasting challenges to collective oceanic governance.

Though once again making headlines as a potential mineral resource frontier, manganese (polymetallic) nodules have commanded interest since the 1870s, and especially since the late 1950s. During the 1960s, against a background of deep seabed resources, the deep ocean simultaneously became a both resource environment and a site broadly deemed in need of governance.

This happened throug interactions between and among a variety of trends: growing postcolonial presence in international politics, Cold War resource security impetuses, several types of anxiety over governance and the conflicting use of the high seas’ economic potential, and an increasing scientific understanding of the deep-sea as geologically and biologically lively, to name a few.

This project maps these interactions across the work of economic geologists, engineers, geochenimists, ecologists, resource economists, and ocean politicians, and locates the legacies of mid-century ideas about seabed minerals in 

As a critical analysis of the mutual becoming of ocean science and ocean law, the project offers new approaches to the historical study of oceanic and other shared environments, while also offering paths forward through staid conflicts in seabed governance.