Blogroll
- Critical Logistics
- Fabulous and weird website full of all sorts of info
- Geographical Imaginations
- International Transport Workers' Federation
- Middle East Report
- Object Lessons (on containers)
- Oceans Beyond Piracy
- Paleofutures – good tech stuff
- Port to port
- Progressive Geographies
- Sapping Attention
- STS Blog at Oxford
- The Funambulist
- Visual Complexity
Categories
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Archives
Category Archives: ports
Block the Boat
One of the most trenchant points that Deb Cowen makes in her superb book, The Deadly Life of Logistics, is that labour mobilisation is a form of “obstruction” that is securitised by shipping companies and states and crushed, precisely because it … Continue reading
Posted in labour, logistics, Middle East, ports, transport
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Shipping Containers as Shelters
Shipping containers, as I wrote before, are fascinating things. Deb Cowen’s superb new book has on its cover an amazing photograph of shipping containers tumbling atop two destroyed cranes in the aftermath of the devastating 2011 earthquake in Japan. Shipping … Continue reading
Posted in construction, infrastructure, logistics, ports, war
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East India Company Routes
Excellent video animating East India Company 1798-1834… http://vimeo.com/43884291
The Bloody Business of War
I discovered something interesting that somehow I had managed to miss all those years ago about the massacre at Karantina… Years ago, I wrote in my first book (which was based on my PhD research) which also included stories about … Continue reading
Mohammad Al Fayed and the ports business
It seems like Mohammad al-Fayed (of Harrod’s fame – and obviously many other ventures) was also in the port business. In 1964, he entered a deal with Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti, whereby he invested $5 million in the … Continue reading
Shipping Alliances
The world’s top three shipping lines are, in order, Maersk (Denmark’s second largest company after Lego), MSC (a privately-held Italian firm), and CMA CGM (a French firm). Some time ago, they decided that they were going to start up an alliance, … Continue reading
Other uses of ships
The Guardian reports that the Libyan legislature has taken refuge in a Greek car ferry: A Greek car ferry has been hired as last-minute accommodation for Libya‘s embattled parliament, which has fled the country’s civil war to the small eastern … Continue reading
Posted in infrastructure, Middle East, ports, ships, transport, war
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How the (closure of the) Suez Canal changed the world
The segment of my January/February container-ship journey I am most anticipating is passing through the Suez Canal. Here is what Horatio Clare writes about his passage through Suez: Unfinished wars lie under all our horizons. The chart on which Chris plotted our … Continue reading
Posted in infrastructure, Middle East, militaries, political economy, ports, shipping conditions, ships, transport, war
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By the Sea
A truly beautiful book, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea is full of quiet insight about leaving home, about families, about illegal immigration, and about malice. It has a brilliant humour. Here is a bit about a madrasa, a chuoni on the … Continue reading
The docks as a non-place
Francisco Goldman and Jean-Claude Izzo speak to each other through their respective novels, The Ordinary Seaman and The Lost Sailors. Both are stories about waiting in the docks, literally, in a floating metal tub full of holes. Both tell stories within stories … Continue reading
Posted in capital accumulation, labour, logistics, ports, readings, seafaring, shipping conditions
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The Gamming 