The Hinterland at Sea

The hinterlands of contemporary global capital are as contested as those of the heydays of colonialism, but instead of as yet-to-be-developed, they manifest as overdeveloped, laid waste to. I explore what it means to live in a hinterland of abandonment by turning to Ben Smith’s Doggerland (2019), set on a windfarm in the North Sea in a dystopian future. This novel, I argue, not only literally places the hinterland at sea, but conceptualizes it as a realm of the at sea, of people, materials, and elements as constantly shifting and sifting in a struggle for survival unfolding at the scale of the protagonists’ lives and at that of the deep time narrative of water, which includes the prehistory of the North Sea as a landmass.