Born 200 years ago, Herman Melville was globalisation’s first great bard

STRIKING MATCHES on their rope-roughened palms, the burly whalers who chase Moby Dick seem unlikely avatars for modernity. But in an important, even prophetic way, that is what they are. The crew of the Pequod are a wondrous deputation “from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth”. Sailors of at least 13 nationalities are “federated along one keel” with Captain Ahab: Chinese and Tahitian, Icelandic and Portuguese. Their creator, Herman Melville—who was born 200 years ago, on August 1st 1819—was the first great writer of the age of globalisation.

The 19th century witnessed an unprecedented international circulation of people, goods and ideas. Sailors were at the forefront of this exchange, crossing and re-crossing oceans in a “devious zig-zag world-circle”, as Melville put it, constantly exposed to exotic lands and strange customs. A shortage of manpower and the dangers of the sea meant captains often cared little who shipped with them, provided they were able mariners. This was a cosmopolitanism of necessity rather than ideology, a grassroots phenomenon largely overlooked by contemporary authors.