Two important reference works can be consulted for basic information about events, actors and references: Robert Headland, A chronology of Antarctic exploration: A synopsis of events and activities from the earliest times until the International Polar Years, 2007-09 (London, 2009) and Beau Riffenburgh, ed., Encyclopedia of the Antarctic, 2 vols.

(New York and London, 2007). Histories of the Southern Ocean and Antarctica are arguably still dominated by work that concentrates on exploratory and scientific ‘firsts’ and heroics. While strong in narrative, they can lack the conceptual and analytical concerns of historians. Alan Gurney’s two books covering the period before 1900 are strong narratives on the major scientific and exploratory efforts: Below the convergence: Voyages toward Antarctic, 1699-1839 (New York, 1997) and The race to the white continent (New York, 2000). Two classic texts in this vein worth consulting are Hugh Robert Mill, The siege of the South Pole:The story of Antarctic exploration (London, 1905) and E. W. Hunter Christie, The Antarctic problem: An historical and political study (London, 1951). Elements of the Southern Ocean’s history can be found in general histories of Antarctica. See David Day, Antarctica:A biography (Oxford, 2012) and Tom Griffiths, Slicing the silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (Sydney, 2007), Griffiths’ work being particular sensitive to environmental and cultural history concerns. Adrian Howkins also gives the Southern Ocean attention in the context of the polar regions and within an environmental history framework in his The polar regions: An environmental history (Cambridge, 2016). For a general overview of the history of science, see G. E. Fogg, A history of Antarctic science (Cambridge, 1992). The history of sealing is best entered through Briton Cooper Busch, The war against the seals: A history of the North American seal fishery (Kingston, 1985), Rhys Richards, Sealing in the southern oceans, 1788-1833 (Wellington, NZ, 2010), and A.

B. Dickinson, Seal fisheries of the Falkland. Islands and dependencies:An historical review (St. John’s, NL, 2007). Given the paucity of written materials, the archaeological literature on Antarctic sealing is also worth consulting, see Michael Pearson and Ruben Stehberg, ‘Nineteenth century sealing sites on Rugged Island, South Shetland Islands’, Polar Record, 42 (2006): 33547. On the history of whaling in the Southern Ocean, the first stop remains the magisterial work by J. N. Tonnessen and A. O. Johnsen, The history of modern whaling, trans. R. I. Christophersen (Berkeley, CA, 1982), a condensed and translated version of a larger four-volume work in Norwegian. Two recent works that engage with current conceptual concerns in international history, environmental history and the history of science are D. Graham Burnett, The sounding of the whale: Science and cetaceans in the twentieth century (Chicago, IL, 2012) and Kurkpatrick Dorsey, Whales and nations: Environmental diplomacy on the high seas (Seattle, WA, 2013). On both whaling and aspects of scientific research in the interwar years, also see Peder Roberts, The European Antarctic: Science and strategy in Scandinavia and the British Empire (New York, 2011). The contemporary history of the ocean has, as yet, not been intensely studied by historians, though scholars from other social science disciplines have given significant attention. From an international politics perspective, though a little dated, see Peter J. Beck, The international politics of Antarctica (London, 1986). From a geography perspective (and more specifically, a critical geopolitics perspective), see Sanjay Chaturvedi, The polar regions: A political geography (Chichester, 1996) and Klaus Dodds, Geopolitics in Antarctica: Views from the Southern Ocean rim (Chichester, 1997). For an environmental history perspective on the recent period, see Alessandro Antonello, ‘Protecting the Southern Ocean ecosystem: the environmental protection agenda of Antarctic diplomacy and science’, in Wolfram Kaiser and Jan-Henrik Meyer, eds., International organizations and environmental protection: Conservation and globalization in the twentieth century (New York and Oxford, 2016), pp.

268-92. Polar Record (since 1931) and The Polar Journal (since 2011) are the two principal journals on polar matters, and include many specialist and detailed articles on the Southern Ocean’s history - furthermore, Polar Record also contains a great deal of contemporaneous and primary materials on the ocean’s history. The Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, maintains a comprehensive bibliography of the polar regions, which is easily consulted. An important collection of documents relating to the government and diplomacy of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean is W. M. Bush, ed., Antarctica and international law: A collection of inter-state and national documents (London, 1982). The websites of the International Whaling Commission (www.iwc.int) and the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (www.ccamlr.org) are also valuable resources for primary materials, including regulations, reports, conference materials and scientific materials.

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Source: Armitage David, Bashford Alison et al. (eds.). Oceanic Histories. Cambridge University Press,2018. — 338 p.. 2018

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