This paper provides a broad overview of spatial, architectural, and sensory relationships between rats and humans on British and American vessels from approximately the 1850s–1950s. Taking rats as my primary historical actors, I show how humans attempted to prevent the movement of these animals between ports across three periods. Firstly, the mid- to- late-nineteenth century, where few attempts were made to prevent rats from boarding ships, and where a multiplicity of human/rat relationships can be located. Secondly, the 1890s–1920s, in which port authorities erected anti-rat borders to lock these animals on land or at sea. Finally, the 1920s–50s, where ships were reconstructed to eliminate all possibilities of rodent inhabitation and to interrupt their transit between ports. Ship rats, I argue, not only demonstrate the fragility of historical rodent-control efforts, but also encourage oceanic historians to consider how animals have negotiated and shaped boundaries between spheres of land and sea.

Through a literary-theatrical reading of international legality, this Article challenges the “settled script” produced by international legal scholars to frame and assess the legality of two historical events—the Grenada Revolution (1979–1983) and the U.S. Invasion of Grenada (1983). It does so by reading the Cold War as a sensibility performed by these scholars, one that recognized the operation of rival international legal orders and one that crafted a different script—Cold War Customary Law (“CWCL”)—to decide questions of international legality in a Cold War context. In addition to offering a new way to read the Cold War and international legality, this Article argues first that it is important to uncover this parallel and competing script of international legality operating at the time, and not dismiss it as unrelated political or ideological discourse, as it clearly influenced the interpretive logic and reasoning practices international lawyers deployed to frame what constituted legality in international law. Second, it argues that this Cold War sensibility in international legal scholarship on intervention and revolution predated the events in Grenada, and that if a different theatrical mise en scène is adopted—one which eschews “the short durée” or “evental history” of the settled script—this sensibility can be understood as being both continuous and discontinuous with rival imperial forms of international law operating in the Caribbean across time and place, where its discontinuities open up space to recover revolutionary Caribbean subjects of international law and a sensibility of shame in the present.

In this article, I make the claim that the time has come to re-situate the Gulf historically as part of the Indian Ocean world rather than the terrestrial Middle East. I explore the historical potential of thinking “transregionally” – of what it means to more fully weave the history of the Gulf into that of the Indian Ocean, and what the ramifications are for orienting it away from the terrestrially-grounded literature in which it has long been situated. The promise of an oceanic history, I argue, is both academic and political: first, it opens up the possibilities of new narratives for the Gulf’s past, suggesting new periodizations, fruitful avenues of historical inquiry, and new readings of old sources. But more than that, an oceanic history of the Gulf allows historians to push against the discourses of nativism that have pervaded the public sphere in the Gulf States.