For its first 5,000 years, the language which eventually became English remained firmly geographically anchored in the Northern Hemisphere. The first expansion of English as a native language into the Southern Hemisphere was not until 1659, when it arrived on the remote island of St Helena, about 15° south of the equator in the South Atlantic. There was no further movement of English until the 1780s, when it arrived in Australia and then, during the 1800s, into the Pacific.

Disputes where title over high-tide features or mainland territory is disputed are not uncommon in the international legal landscape. Two sets of overlapping claims are created in disputes in which the issues of dispute to title and disputed waters are combined: one set that pertains to the land territory as such, and the other to the maritime zones the land territory is entitled to. Sovereignty claims by States to a high-tide feature or land territory are almost invariably followed by making claims to the maritime zones that they are entitled to, thereby creating a second layer of overlapping claims that relate to the adjacent waters. But what are the rights and obligations of States in disputed waters located off disputed land territory? This chapter establishes the implications that follow from that there is a combination of the elements of sovereignty and the claiming of maritime zones from the same basepoints of a disputed land territory, for identifying the applicable legal framework in disputed waters off its coast. For example, the applicability of Articles 74(3) and 83(3) LOSC is limited in cases where claims are measured from the same disputed land territory, creating disputed waters in the process.

The European war quickly escalated into a world war, owing to the global nature of European colonial empires, commercial interests, and naval presence. The entry of Japan, honoring its alliance with Britain, caused the fighting to spread to East Asia and the Pacific islands. Admiral Graf Spee’s squadron abandoned Germany’s Chinese base at Tsingtao (which Japan took in November 1914), then steamed eastward across the Pacific to the coast of Chile, where Spee defeated a British squadron off Coronel in November before being crushed by another British squadron off the Falklands in December. While Japanese, Australian, and New Zealand troops occupied Germany’s Pacific island colonies, British, French, and Belgian forces attacked Germany’s four African colonies. Three of them fell quickly, but in German East Africa (the future Tanzania), troops under Lettow-Vorbeck resisted Allied forces for over four years, until the Armistice. During and after the pursuit of Spee’s squadron, Allied (mostly British) warships swept the world’s oceans of German cruisers, ending the naval war beyond European waters and the North Atlantic. This decisive success facilitated the unimpeded movement of men and supplies from around the world to bolster the Allied cause in Europe, and led Germany to embrace unrestricted submarine warfare.