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

How do resources become through their cultural, political, and scientific surrounds? How do those surrounds become through practices of resource-making?

What, where, and for whom, is an oceanic resource frontier? How do oceanic resource frontiers reach across time and space, transforming in the process? 

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, the deep seabed became a frontier for resource-making through 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 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 trends, as well as their prehistories and afterlives, through the becoming of manganese nodules. Enfolding critical analyses of marine science, economics, politics, and law, the project offers new approaches to the historical and ethnographic study of the oceans.