Thoughts on military mobilities, trade and capital accumulation, struggles over labour and citizenship rights in the making of transport infrastructures.
The Financial Times has been doing some fascinating investigative reporting on ISIS finances a great deal of which of course is of interest to me because of the ways in which it ties into the movement of commodities and products across territories. But what I want to write about here briefly is this wondrous map: Of […]
Ships fly a flag of convenience in order to avoid the regulatory arms of the state or transnational institutions. But here is a fascinating colonial precedent to the flag of convenience – from 1674: Thus, when the [East India Company] committees insisted in 1674 that a new Admiralty regulation, which required all English commercial shipping to […]
This wonderful piece by Keith David Watenpaugh reflects on why fishermen rescue migrants at costs to their livelihood: This last July, as the Mediterranean refugees were still being largely ignored by the EU,PBS Newshour’s Lisa Desai interviewed Captain Slaheddin of a Tunisian fishing boat that sails from the port town of Zarzis. As the captain […]
This post does not strictly have to do with shipping but it is fascinating and it has taken me on a tangent (and I love these tangents that end up weaving the world together). I am reading the memoirs of Violet Dickson, whose husband Harold Dickson (formerly Political Agent in Bahrain, latterly the Political Agent in Kuwait) served […]
So, not long ago, a graffiti artist, JR Artist, who flyposted a whole bunch of CMA CGM containers so that CMA CGM Magellan looked like this (at least until the next port where the containers had to be unloaded; I also wonder if they weren’t unloaded in the intermediate ports, what hell the crane operators […]
Charmaine Chua and I both took containerships roughly at the same time. She was much more involved: her trip took longer, on a different route, and she worked onboard. We talk about our experiences over at the Disorder of Things blog.
And yet these unbearable deaths are borne by those who turn away. As I am left mute with horror, I shall post these poems which I think speak to the deaths of so many in this watery graveyard: from Salt By Nayyirah Waheed you broke the ocean in half to be here. only to meet nothing […]
Silt Stephen Burt Things you know but can’t say, the sort of things, or propositions that build up week after week at the end of the day, & have to be dredged by the practical operators so that their grosser cargo & barges & boxy schedules can stay. The great shovels and beaks and the […]
This really is the best journalism about Somali piracy I have read. It is immensely sympathetic to the ordinary crewmen, many often belonging to the global South, who are the victims of the piracy. But it also shows the extent to which piracy itself is today a form of enterprise; with wage workers who are starving […]
Here is an account of an interesting obsession with containers… I wonder what Allan Sekula would have made of this love of the technological sublime: http://www.ediblegeography.com/container-spotting/ There are still many unanswered mysteries that the duo hopes to get to the bottom of in their research. Where are containers born? (Cannon pointed me to this video of a […]
