Contested seas: Legitimacy, local power and resource exploitation in the territorialisation of early modern galicia maritime space

Abstract Until the twentieth century, the sea remained largely beyond clearly defined and widely accepted forms of state sovereignty and, consequently, beyond the reach of a coherent and widely applicable legal regime. Nevertheless, the activities of local communities required rules and institutions to manage maritime exploitation, meaning that the sea was far from an empty or ungoverned space. The concentration of settlements along the broad estuaries of northwestern Spain presents a particularly compelling case study, as the convergence of multiple ports within the same maritime space acted as a catalyst for a local process of territorialisation and appropriation of the sea, largely independent of both state structures and international legal debates. This article aims to examine the various models of territorialisation and governance that emerged from conflicts and agreements among coastal communities, highlighting the importance of local entities in generating bottom-up scales of authority at sea.