Thoughts on military mobilities, trade and capital accumulation, struggles over labour and citizenship rights in the making of transport infrastructures.
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, P3, that would have allowed them to share vessels, thus streamlining which ports they would […]
Derek Gregory has a post that weaves together Deb Cowen’s new book (which I await anxiously) and Charmaine Chua’s post, and loads of important links to Derek’s own work on military logistics.
Charmaine Chua writes on the politics of logistical chokepoints: Sped along by transport deregulation and an associated wave of firm competition and consolidation, the containerization of bulk goods now allows a single dockworker to do what it took an army to accomplish in the past. Innovations in production technologies, such as flexible production, demand-driven manufacturing, […]
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 town of Tobruk. The 17,000-ton Elyros liner has been deployed, complete with its Greek crew, […]
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 approach to the canal shows Egypt, the Sinai, the southern end of Israel an Gaza. […]
There is a deep fascination with shipping containers… The best reading on all of this is of course the classic The Box by Marc Levinson – but recently there are a lot more links. Here are a few more: This piece on the 60th birthday of the container – including great conversations with a longshoreman, a […]
Given the centrality of the sea to the work of colonisation and empire, I love this Turkish graffito my friend Pascal photographed in Istanbul: Update: Pascal’s friend says this Deniz is Deniz Gezmiz… Good pun, in that case!
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 island of Zanzibar: Chuoni, that was where we went to learn the aliph-be-te so we […]
The Super Hornet bombers that dropped 8 500-pound JDAM bombs on Islamic State forces in Iraq had flown from the aircraft carrier USS George H W Bush, afloat in the Persian Gulf. It is one among at least 5 Navy ships and 3 ships belonging to the US Marines in the Gulf right now. The news struck me because […]
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 within stories – which is what you do when you are waiting. And waiting. When […]
