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The term '''thalassocracy''' (from the Greek Θαλασσα, meaning sea, and κρατία, meaning rule) 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). 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. Therefore, 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."
The word ''thalassocracy'' itself, deriving from the Greek ''thalassokratiā''—''thalassa'' meaning "sea," and ''kratiā'' meaning "rule" or "government"—first occurred amongst the ancient Greeks describing the government of the Minoan civilization, whose power depended on its navy. Herodotus spoke of the need to counter the Phoenician thalassocracy by developing a Greek "empire of the sea."

Contents

Examples

List of other examples

See also

External links

Examples

There are many ancient examples besides those mentioned above, such as the Sea Peoples and the Delian League. Asides from these, which were 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 Mar'' of the Venetian outlands bound by the sea. Near-contemporaneously, the Dubrovnik Republic can be seen as a "thalassocracy," a ''protégé'' of Venice.
The Dark Ages (c.500–c.1000) saw much 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

★ Ainu Confederation

★ Aleut Confederation

★ Balinese Kingdom

★ Brunei Sultanate

★ Bugis Confederation

★ Carib Confederation

★ Carthage

★ Chola Empire

★ Denmark-Norway (as separate Viking kingdoms and later as a unified empire)

★ Dorian Confederation

★ Haida Nation

★ Hanseatic League

★ Japanese Empire

★ Kingdom of Dublin

★ Kingdom of Majorca and Crown of Aragón

★ Kingdom of Navarre (controlled Normandy in the mid-14th century [1] and Greek lands in the late 14th century [2] and had outposts in Newfoundland in the late 15th and early 16th centuries) [3] [4]

★ Latin Empire

★ Lusignan Empire (NW France, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Kingdom of Cyprus)

★ Majapahit Empire

★ Mataram Kingdom and its successor, Kediri

★ Mataram Sultanate

★ Micronesian Empire

★ Minoan Civilization

★ Norman Empire (although based in Western Europe, it spread during the Crusades to the central and eastern Mediterranean) and its successor, the Angevin Empire

★ Oman-Zanzibar

★ Pergamon

★ Phocaea

★ Ryūkyū Kingdom

★ Sailendra

★ Srivijaya

★ Sultanate of Malacca and its successor, Sultanate of Johor

★ Sulu Sultanate

★ Swedish Empire

★ Taíno Confederation

★ Tlingit confederation

★ The Tribes of Galway

★ Tu'i Tonga Empire

See also

★ Colonialism

★ Imperialism

★ Transcontinental country

External links

★ The Fragility of Thalassocracy, Pericles to Heinlein.