The term
thalassocracy (from the (
thalassa), meaning sea, and κρατείν (
kratein), meaning "to rule", giving θαλασσοκρατία (
thalassokratia), "rule of the sea") refers to a state with primarily maritime realms—an
empire at sea, such as the
Phoenician network of merchant cities. Traditional thalassocracies seldom dominate interiors, even in their home territories (for example:
Tyre,
Sidon, or
Carthage). It is necessary to distinguish this traditional sense of
thalassocracy from an "empire", where the state's territories, though possibly linked principally or solely by the
sea lanes, generally extend into mainland interiors; under such a definition, empires such as the
British Empire were not thalassocracies.
The term can also simply refer to
naval supremacy, in either military or commercial senses of the word "supremacy." Indeed, the word
thalassocracy itself was first used by the
ancient Greeks to describe the government of the
Minoan civilization, whose power depended on its navy.
Herodotus also spoke of the need to counter the Phoenician thalassocracy by developing a Greek "empire of the sea."
Examples
The Phoenician trade routes in the Mediterranean.
There are many ancient examples besides those mentioned above, such as the
Delian League. Aside from this, which was an empire based primarily on naval power and control of waterways and not on any land possessions, the
Middle Ages saw its fair share of thalassocracies, often land-based empires which controlled the sea. Among the most famous is the
Republic of Venice, conventionally divided in the fifteenth century into the
Dogado of Venice and the Lagoon, the
Stato di Terraferma of Venetian holdings in northern Italy, and the
Stato da Màr of the Venetian outlands bound by the sea:
"This was a scattered empire, reminiscent, though on a very different scale, of the Portuguese and later the Dutch empires in the Indian Ocean, a trading-post empire forming a long capitalist antenna; an empire 'on the Phoenician model', to use a more ancient parallel"
Nearly contemporaneous, the
Republic of Ragusa can be seen as a "thalassocracy," a
protégé of Venice.
The
Dark Ages (c.500–c.1000) saw many of the coastal cities of the
Mezzogiorno develop into minor thalassocracies whose chief powers lay in their ports and their ability to sail navies to defend friendly coasts and ravage enemy ones. These include the variously Greek,
Lombard,
Angevin, and
Saracen duchies of
Gaeta,
Sicily,
Naples,
Pisa,
Salerno,
Amalfi,
Bari, and
Sorrento. Later, northern Italy developed its own trade empires based on
Pisa and especially the powerful
Republic of Genoa, that rivaled with
Venice (these three, along with Amalfi, were to be called the
Repubbliche marinare, i.e. Sea Republics).
It was with the modern age, the
Age of Exploration, that some of the most remarkable thalassocracies emerged. Anchored in their European territories, several nations establish colonial empires held together by naval supremacy. First among them was the
Portuguese Empire, followed soon by the
Spanish Empire, which was challenged by the
Dutch Empire, itself replaced on the high seas by the
British Empire, whose landed possessions were immense and held together by the greatest navy of its time. With naval arms races (especially between
Germany and
Britain) and the end of colonialism and the granting of independence to these colonies, European thalassocracies, which had controlled the world's oceans for centuries, ceased to be.
List of other examples
See also
