The Glasshouse

From Turkish raiders who occupied an island in the Bristol Channel in the seventeenth century to questions about patrolling the Mediterranean sea now – New Generation Thinker Michael Talbot asks how can power be exerted over water? What do borders mean in the featureless desert of the ocean? These were questions faced by the Ottoman Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries when an imaginary line was used to create a legally enforced border at sea for the Sultans in Istanbul who called themselves “rulers of the two seas”, the Black and the Mediterranean.