Just as there is no necessity that land should be fenced off and privatised, so too is there nothing necessary or natural about the idea that the sea should be open to all-comers. For many coastal communities around the British Isles, prior to the Acts of Enclosure, it was assumed not only that the land should be under local communal control, but also that neighbouring stretches of the sea should come under the jurisdiction of local people. Another way of putting this is to say that there was a system in place of 'customary rights' to both land and sea, through which those communities who worked the land and the sea acted as guardians or stewards.

Ancient Irish 'Brehon law' for example, enshrined the customary rights of communities not only to land holdings, but also to the sea - out to a distance of 'nine waves'. The Norwegians also had complex systems of small-holding coupled with self-regulation of fishing grounds. And beyond Europe, as the Australian social scientist Nonie Sharp informs us, many traditional coastal communities had their own versions of customary rights over land and sea, as in the case of the Maori of Aotearoa (New Zealand) or the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders of Australia.

A lot of work had to be done to convert common lands into private and enclosed property, and a great deal of suffering followed from this dispossession and imposition of restrictions. Similarly, it took work to wrest the guardianship of local waters from coastal communities in England, Ireland (and many other places around the world), in a process that could be as painful and demoralising as the loss of customary rights to common lands. In the case of the seas, it was not as simple as converting waters under customary control into free-for-all waterways: instead it was most often a matter of conversion into territorial waters - that is, sea under the jurisdiction of the state. In theory, it was the 'high seas', beyond territorial waters, that were designated 'free'.

But even this notion of the freedom of the high seas is more complicated, and more fraught, than it might first sound. For in practice what this usually meant was that those with the power and the resources to command the seaways took control and asserted their right to 'freely' traverse the oceans - often against the resistance of others who wished to claim the seas for themselves, or to protect their own local interests. And it was the British in particular who, during the late 18^th and 19^th centuries, attained the naval supremacy to dominate the world's oceans; to enjoy a freedom of movement without precedent in maritime history. At the same time that enclosure was being enforced on the home turf, then, a new kind of wide-open, unrestricted mobility was being enacted at sea - across much of the watery surfaces of the planet.

So let's come back to the idea of the British as an 'island race'. It's a notion that's laced with tension, even contradiction, I want to suggest, because it rests on a distinction between a certain construction of land and sea, between the value of being settled and the value of roving the world, between 'roots' and 'routes'. One of the ways this tension expresses itself most strongly is in the very idea of the British being one 'race', or one people or even one culture. For one of the outcomes of travelling the world, of having many 'routes', is that it brings you into frequent and sustained relationships with other people. And this means that things get mixed up. Things move, ideas move, people move. British people go to other places, people from other places end up in Britain. In this way, the very idea of being a single people rooted in the land starts to get itself muddled: roots get tangled with routes, the idea of being embedded begins to get unsettled.

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