There is a kind of romance around piracy. It is the romance of anti-authority figures and of a life lived not just in the margins but outside the boundaries. Just think about the masses of novels and films about piracy and the scholarship (and I will eventually write about Marcus Rediker’s extraordinary work). Or think […]
Sitting on a rooftop overlooking container ships leaving the port of Beirut and sailing into the haze of the Mediterranean and other container ships powering towards the port from the west makes me VERY VERY happy I am going to be spending the next few years of my life working on ships, ports, and shipping. […]
Dubai Ports World runs London Gateway which will be competing against Felixstowe and Southampton to be the top container port in the UK. Like many other DPW concerns, there seems to be an iron (or ham-) fisted determination to not let workers unionise – although protests seem to have stymied this effort for now. I am hoping to visit the […]
Regimes of land tenure and ownership must form significant elements in the development of ports. How quickly do these regimes change? What are the processes by which title deeds are issued, exchanged, bought, and sold? Are there demonstrable differences between the land tenure regimes in the different countries of the Middle East? And differences […]
I am ashamed to admit that I was a latecomer to the magic of Allan Sekula. Far too much of a latecomer. I discovered his stunning work on shipping and transport, last year; he died in August last year. His amazing film Forgotten Spaces stays with you, flashes of sound, slivers of images, whole stories, the mood […]
