The Non-HistoricalOcean
The first general history of the Arctic was published as late as 2012 and treats the Arctic Ocean parsimoniously, mostly as an environmental and climatic phenomenon.[772] The late arrival of an historiography of the Arctic can be explained as a default outcome of its largely colonial status and its peripheral relations to major states and powers, partly by the absence of the standard actors with whom historians associate methodological relevance.
Arctic territories, populations and events have, in some exceptional cases, been counted as legitimate elements of the histories of states, especially Russia/USSR, where the northeastern sea route to Asia has become a national priority under Soviet power and especially since the 1930s when the special institution to govern the route and a large adjacent territory of the Arctic, Glavsevmorput, had been organised along with considerable research facilities. The Arctic Ocean has to some extent been part of the history of companies, such as the Hudson’s Bay Company or the London Muscovy Company. In particular, it has become part of the history of exploration or woven into Arctic sub-fields such as Arctic anthropology, archaeology, religious studies or the Danish sub-specialty of Eskimology or elsewhere Inuit studies.[773] Very rarely, if at all, have historians felt inclined to research and write, or even compile comprehensive pan-Arctic histories. When some attempts in this direction were started only quite recently they appeared in sub-specialties focusing on science, environment, geography, geopolitics or other fields where the Arctic was considered a more relevant category than it was in more general histories of, for example, power, legislation, war, political and social life.[774]This is, hence, even more true for the Arctic Ocean, which, it may be argued, has not yet been made the subject of a historical analysis or narrative in its own right.
This does not exclude that there are many historical events and structural processes that have occurred in, on, or in relation to the Arctic Ocean - only that they have not been organised into any template narrative. Historiography of the Arctic Ocean has to some extent arisen, or come in demand, in relation to the interest in ‘new mediterraneans’ where multiple states find themselves sharing certain common interests or predicaments around a particular sea. This is a policy-related interest stemming from changing geopolitics post-1989. The history that has just started to emerge has sometimes been told from a ‘territorial political economy’ lens, with influence from world-systems theory, the spatiality of capitalism and political-geographic work on the history of territoriality.[775]It is not the first time that there has been a search for Arctic narratives in phases of territorialisation. When they occasionally did include the Arctic Ocean, they were commonly starkly nationalist. The quintessential example is Fridtjof Nansen, who had barely embarked upon his heroic journeys in Norway, Greenland and in the Polar Sea, when he started collecting paraphernalia on exploration and seafaring, including charts, and published widely on the subject of polar travel, especially the comprehensive In northern mists.[776] Knud Rasmussen, the Danish explorer-hero, performed similar nationalist work for the Danish Greenland colony.[777] Based partly on his own extensive dogsled Thule expeditions, which touched on coastal cultures of the North American Arctic and vernacular knowledge compiled from them in the 1920s, he published Polarforskningens Saga [The saga of polar exploration] as volume six of ‘The Conquering of the World’ book series in 1932.[778] In Sweden Adolf Erik Nordenskiold also collected books, manuscripts and maps, and then wrote himself into the great tradition. His facsimile-atlas to the early history of cartography with reproductions of the most important maps printed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was co-translated by his polar explorer colleague Clements Markham at the British Admiralty.[779] In the Canadian context one could think ofVilhjalmur Stefansson, leader of controversial expeditions, and maker of a Canadian northern mythology, especially with his book The northward course of empire (1922), which launched the prospect of massive development on the Arctic northern rim with bustling ports, trans-Arctic sea and air routes, and Alaskan agriculture.[780]
The history of Arctic maritime exploration makes up a library of something that is almost a genre of its own.[781] Add to this the travelogues and the memoirs, and polar self-chronicling easily outstrips that of scientists in general, chiefly because of the conditions of the book market, where, still-rare polar books and charts became collector’s items already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and were a major trade in the nineteenth.
The country where the Arctic Ocean meant the most was Russia, given the long trading distance for Russian export products, and consequently oceanography and research on fisheries was very active there since the nineteenth century. It also stimulated works of geography and fiction and the Arctic Ocean was from a fairly early stage a central element in the emerging national narrative and passed on as such from Tzarist to Soviet Russia. The Arctic sea served as a projection of national imaginaries and the stage for past achievements and future visions.[782] As late as 1926 a reputable Russian geologist working in Siberia, Vladimir A. Obruchev, used a paradise myth on earth beyond the Arctic ice in his science fiction novel Sannikov's land. He based the novel on scientific hypotheses from geology and anthropology and proclaimed the possibility of indigenous people living on a warm volcanic island beyond the ice. He symbolically pushed Siberia into the Arctic Ocean and in his own way justified Soviet territorial claims for Arctic islands.[783]Since 1989, and increasingly since the formation of the Arctic Council in 1996 - with eight member states, all sharing territory within the Arctic circle - work on Arctic Ocean imaginaries has, almost by force, turned their interest towards more integrative and less nationalist approaches, although underlying national interests have remained strong. It could certainly be questioned whether the Arctic Ocean can be fully compared to other new mediterraneans. This has coincided with the rise of interest from geographers and historians and environmental humanists in the sea as a space with a history. Just as the modern era has been characterised by a conflicting set of dynamic and contested spatiality on lands, so has it been marked by a conflicting set of spatial functions at sea. Evidence is marshalled from legal texts, literary and artistic creations, cartographic representations, advertisements, commercial and military history and policy debates. It has been proposed that lessons learned from the history of the ocean may be applied to other emerging spaces, such as cyberspace, which are also characterised by difficulty in adapting to the institutions of state governance.[784]