Reviews
The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Maya Jasanoff (Penguin Books, New York, 2018, 400pp, illus, notes, index, isbn 978-0-14-311104-7; $18pb) For a professional seafarer who now writes and teaches almost exclusively about the sea, an apparent flood of recent books about the ocean and maritime literature raises some important questions. Is there really an unusual number of maritime books lately, or does it seem that way because that’s what I am used to reading? Do people who write about mountains see mountain books everywhere? I’ve wondered before how blockbusters like Sebastian Junger’s Perfect Storm, Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea, and James Cameron’s Titanic indicate a twenty-first-century return to the ocean as a subject of public interest, but Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch belongs to a slightly different genre. Like several recent very successful books that blend extensive research and personal travelogue—for instance Philip Hoare’s The Whale, The Dawn Watch is both Conradian literary biography and cultural history set within an unrestricting frame of memoir. Jasanoff, the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University, opens the book with a prologue provocatively titled “One of Us” (a reference to Conrad’s Lord Jim) with “[i]t was hard to get to Congo.” Beginning with details of her own difficulties traveling to the site of Conrad’s notorious Heart of Darkness, described by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe as “an offensive and totally deplorable book,” and which as a student young Barack Obama struggled to defend reading, is a further provocation. The Dawn Watch is an attempt to reintroduce Conrad’s work to a globalized and networked generation born after 9/11, but even more to demonstrate how the Polish-British expatriate seafaring writer whose career straddled the Victorian and modern eras can be read as “one of us”—an important contemporary figure. This effort is never heavy-handed but only partly successful: the past is still a foreign country, and they do things differently there, but the result is a much more enjoyable book. Rather than explicating a dense academic argument for Conrad’s relevance, Jasanoff brings a novelist’s sen56
sibility and a storyteller’s flair to her thoroughly researched biography. The advantage of her experience as a public historian (her previous books include Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850, and Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World) is the ease with which she blends the details of Conrad’s life with both the genesis and
and they stay mostly in the background in the book, but her maritime experience is unquestionably an important element that will appeal to many. The (relative) ease of her travels provide an apt counterpoint to the difficulties of maritime travel during Conrad’s time and help her illustrate the global perspective of his work. It is to her credit that she resists generalizing those brief experiences as a passenger into sweeping claims about Conrad’s “magic monotony of existence between sky and water … the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread—but whose only reward is the perfect love of the work” (Lord Jim, Chapter II). A new paperback edition should make this award-winning book accessible to an even wider readership. Colin Dewey, PhD Vallejo, California Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires, and the Conflict That Made the Modern World by Andrew Lambert (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2018, 424pp, maps, illus, notes, gloss, appen, biblio, index, isbn 978-0-30023004-8; $30hc)
content of his fiction, which she recognizes is a project begun by Conrad with his self-mythologizing works, The Mirror of the Sea and A Personal Record. Without diminishing their impact, Jasanoff makes an enjoyable and accessible page-turner of the complicated details previously available in dense standard biographies such as Zdzislaw Nadjer’s 1983, Joseph Conrad: A Life. The real genius of her book is in making the cultural history of Conrad’s century tangible to contemporary readers—even in the recognition, aboard the tiny river freighter Primus I on the Congo river, that “for all the analogies, the early twenty-first century isn’t the late nineteenth.” Jasanoff traveled from Asia to Europe as a supernumerary aboard the containership CMA CGM Christophe Columb, a voyage of four weeks, and less comfortably, 1,000 miles down the Congo River from Kisangani to Kinshasa, “with full-time escorts,” as part of her research to “better understand a central part of Conrad’s life and writing.” She wears her travels lightly
Ships were built at particular places as a result of national, political, economic, social, technological, and industrial dynamics. They created a maritime microcosm; a societal network of activities ashore to prepare them to cross seas and oceans, the side-effects of which were broad labor issues of maritime affairs. Their activities became maritime economics and commerce. Seagoing vessels enabled or precipitated naval, diplomatic, and military events leading to imperial expansion and global cultural interaction. The by-products were navigational science and technology, as well as maritime technological skills and usages. All of this was chronicled through maritime art and maritime literature. —Andrew Lambert, Seapower States Andrew Lambert presents a thoughtprovoking description of the historic rise and fall of sea power and seapower states. In this, his latest book, he initially eluciSEA HISTORY 167, SUMMER 2019