Enough commentators have already shown how the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 1982 can be counted a triumph for the interest of maritime states in protecting and enhancing the mobility of their navies. This book is not to be added to that list, and it quite rightly directs its attention elsewhere. For the Convention does not mark the end of a period of change in the law of the sea. The process of claim, protest and acquiescence will continue, both outside the Convention, as customary law continues to evolve, and within it, as states parties seek to influence in their favour the development of many of the broadly formulated concepts and ambiguities created by it. Booth’s belief is that the Convention cannot halt the trend in the modern law of the sea towards the “territorialization” of coastal waters—indeed, he maintains that it has legitimized it. Coastal states will increasingly restrict the freedom of warships to navigate both within their territorial seas and, more especially, in their economic zones. At the same time, states will increasingly see their coastal zones as extensions of their land territories, so that, from the political point of view, the incursions of foreign navies will be treated as invasions. Legal and political impediments will thus be added to the pressures imposed by cost on the mobility of “blue water” and “medium range” navies.

The “territorialization” of coastal waters—especially the economic zone—is a central theme of this book; yet very little evidence is adduced to substantiate it. Booth does not analyse the claims which states have made to economic zones, nor the implementing legislation, to see if and how they regulate the passage of warships. He does not detail any steps which these states might have taken to make such claims effective; nor does he examine the responses of other states to these claims. Yet all this must be done if one is to know the cur