Sign-In
Cart
The Blue Dominion: An Observer's Account of India's Maritime Reckoning
Paperback
Please select the version of book you would like to purchase.
ISBN13: 9798250838382
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Mar 5 2026
Pages: 310
Weight: 0.92
Height: 0.65 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Mar 5 2026
Pages: 310
Weight: 0.92
Height: 0.65 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
India has the world's seventh longest coastline, the second largest maritime workforce, and an Exclusive Economic Zone of 2.37 million square kilometres. For most of its post-independence history, it governed all of this as though the sea were an afterthought.
The Blue Dominion is the account of what happened when that began to change. Between 2003 and 2008, a Secretary in India's Ministry of Shipping inherited a maritime estate in quiet crisis - seventeen lighthouses flagged by the international monitoring authority for failing to show their specified light, dry docks operating at two-thirds of fleet capacity, fishing harbours whose breakwaters had been deteriorating for a decade without funded repair, and a vessel survey system recording deficiency closures that no one was verifying. The ocean economy's contribution to GDP stood at 1.1 percent. Norway, with an identical EEZ, was extracting twenty-two times that share.
The Blue Dominion is the account of what happened when that began to change. Between 2003 and 2008, a Secretary in India's Ministry of Shipping inherited a maritime estate in quiet crisis - seventeen lighthouses flagged by the international monitoring authority for failing to show their specified light, dry docks operating at two-thirds of fleet capacity, fishing harbours whose breakwaters had been deteriorating for a decade without funded repair, and a vessel survey system recording deficiency closures that no one was verifying. The ocean economy's contribution to GDP stood at 1.1 percent. Norway, with an identical EEZ, was extracting twenty-two times that share.
This book reconstructs what followed: the Coastal Asset Inventory that made the invisible visible, the budget campaign that translated documented physical need into the language the Finance Ministry could not dismiss, the vessel survey reform that moved a safety verification rate from 34 to 91 percent, the clearance of all seventeen IALA flags within thirty-one months, and the Blue Economy strategy document that articulated, for the first time in India's planning history, what the country's oceanic territory actually contained and what governing it seriously would require.
Written by an independent observer who spent six years in the research, the account moves between the institutional and the human - between the budget negotiations in Delhi and the lighthouse keeper who watched his light drift for nine years, between the Planning Commission meeting room and the Coromandel beach at four in the morning. It is a book about infrastructure, about bureaucracy, about the political economy of neglect, and about the specific, demanding craft of administration in a domain that records only what was done, never what was intended.
The sea is patient. This book is about the years India began, seriously, to deserve that patience.
Written by an independent observer who spent six years in the research, the account moves between the institutional and the human - between the budget negotiations in Delhi and the lighthouse keeper who watched his light drift for nine years, between the Planning Commission meeting room and the Coromandel beach at four in the morning. It is a book about infrastructure, about bureaucracy, about the political economy of neglect, and about the specific, demanding craft of administration in a domain that records only what was done, never what was intended.
The sea is patient. This book is about the years India began, seriously, to deserve that patience.
Also from
Vannan, Mani
Too Big to Survive: Jinnah's Princely Gambit and the World That Would Have Stopped It
Vannan, Mani
Paperback
$8.40
Rebuilding the Maritime Republic: From Shoreline Inheritance to Strategic Horizon
Vannan, Mani
Paperback
$15.60
THE LONG BLUE DOOR- If Columbus Had Turned Back: A Study in Probability, Power, and the Fragility of History
Vannan, Mani
Paperback
$18.00
Consciences in Crisis: A Global Anthology of 250 Sonnets from 105 Voices Amid the 2026 West Asian Flames
Vannan, Mani
Paperback
$12.00
Also in
Biographies General
Bluesland: Portraits of Thirteen Major American Blues Masters
Toby Byron (ED.)
Pete Welding (ED.)
Hardcover
$11.99
Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902 1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna
Hacohen, Malachi Haim
Hardcover
$236.28
The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome: 150 Bc0-400 AD
Freeman, Charles
Hardcover
$30.40
Make It a Double: From Wretched to Wondrous: Tales of One Woman's Lifelong Discovery of Whisky
Sackier, Shelley
Hardcover
From $12.99
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
Isaacson, Walter
Hardcover
$12.99
An Enemy Such as This: Larry Casuse and the Fight for Native Liberation in One Family on Two Continents Over Three Centuries
Correia, David
Hardcover
From $12.99
Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s
Howe, Sean
Hardcover
From $12.99
Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
Cooper, Christian
Hardcover
$11.99
The Secret Life of the Savoy: Glamour and Intrigue at the World's Most Famous Hotel
Williams, Olivia
Paperback
$17.05
The Badger: The Life of Bernard Hinault and the Legacy of French Cycling
Fotheringham, William
Paperback
$20.89
The Devil's Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich
Wittman, Robert K.
Kinney, David
Paperback
From $10.99
Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Womens Political Culture, 1830-1900
Sklar, Kathryn Kish
Paperback
$88.50
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
Purnell, Sonia
Hardcover
$10.99
Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
Ehrenreich, Barbara
Paperback
$9.99
Seafaring Women: Adventures of Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways, and Sailors' Wives
Cordingly, David
Paperback
$17.10
The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy: A Family Memoir of Scandal and Greed in the Meat Industry
Cherington, Gretchen
Paperback
$17.05
Gift of Power: The Life and Teachings of a Lakota Medicine Man
Erdoes, Richard
Lame Deer, Chief Archie Fire
Paperback
From $8.99
My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love
Dessa Wander
Hardcover
$9.99
Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice
Giuffre, Virginia Roberts
Hardcover
From $14.99
How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself
Lawson, Jenny
Hardcover
$26.10
Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor
Kuehn, Christine
Hardcover
$28.49
Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground
Dohrn, Zayd Ayers
Hardcover
$29.69
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast
Colloff, Pamela
Hardcover
$28.80
A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon
Fedarko, Kevin
Paperback
$19.80