THOROUGHFARES Noun ‘a road or path forming a route between two places.
Maritories are spaces of need; ports-of-call, or thoroughfares, settlements created purely to supply seafaring entities, state-sanctioned, ‘illegal’, or corporate with provisions, such as the historical case of St Helena. Maritories are sanctuaries: they provide the legal, economic, and ontological framework for indigenous people, such as the Kawésqar in Chile, or the inhabitants of Nūsāntara in Singapore, to reclaim their sovereignty and nurture their ancestral homelands. Maritories are sacred spaces where the stars, and the land merge with the sea. Maritories are spaces of desire and escapism; exit strategies, or utopian zones for anarcho-capitalist intentional communities, such as the Seasteading Institute.
Despite the maritime origins of the concept of sovereignty in seventeenth century Europe, the dominance of terrestrial-based nation states has obscured the importance of aquatic spaces in shaping political landscapes. Sanctuaries for indigenous knowledge, colonial plunder and neo-colonial utopian thinking, porous zones that question our terrestrial bias, maritories are ambiguous ontological spaces that collapse the past into the future, and invite us to think about the notion of sovereignty, belonging, care and responsibility in a world of rising sea levels.
‘A better understanding of the underlying dynamics of this Aeolian Exchange and particularly the role of key maritories might explain why some environments underwent extensive transformation more than others. St Helena, for instance, used as a frequent watering and provisioning place for first Dutch and then English East Indiamen was altered out of all recognition, allowing “Paradise” to “become a desert” in the words of Joseph Banks who visited the island in 1771.128 Other ports-of-call, such as the Canary Islands, facilitated the transoceanic transfer of tropical plants like sugar, coffee and bananas around the world.129 Maritory was linked to maritory and continent to continent by winds and the ships that sailed between them were often the unwitting Arks responsible for many of today’s terrestrial ecosystems.’
(BANKOFF, GREG. “Aeolian Empires: The Influence of Winds and Currents on European Maritime Expansion in the Days of Sail.” 2017)
‘The mobility of nomadic Indigenous people has been systematically constrained over time by states seeking control over peripheral spaces and people. This is evident in the case of the Kawesqar nomadic ‘people of the sea’ who have been subject to a century of attempts by the Chilean state to spatially fix their movements over both their terrestrial territories and marine ‘maritories’.
(Barrena, J., Harambour, A., Lamers, M., & Bush, S. R. (2022). Contested mobilities in the maritory: Implications of boundary formation in a nomadic space. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space)
The Vending Machine
The vending machine as an entity that marks time by gradually becoming more empty. The vending machine as a point of call and need, set up at thoroughfares, whether the need is holy water or whale meet. In 2013, Coca Cola started equipping their vending machines with temperature sensors that would drive up the prices of water in poor areas when temperatures rose as a way of price gauging for the global marking.
The very first vending machine was created by Hero of Alexandria to automate the process of dispensing holy water at thoroughfares; when a coin was introduced via a slot on the top of the machine, it dispensed a set amount of water for ablutions. This was included in his list of inventions in his book Mechanics and Optics. When the coin was deposited, it fell upon a pan attached to a lever. The lever opened up a valve which let some water flow out. The pan continued to tilt with the weight of the coin until it fell off, at which point a counter-weight would snap the lever back up and turn off the valve.