Activity

The Suez Canal route, like so many other technological marvels of the nineteenth century invented to lubricate the machinery of empire, reproduced the empire itself through feedback loops and self-perpetuation mechanisms – popular revolts or starving labourers and peasants or indebted nations be da…

[...] In his account of the age of coal, On Barak explains the prevalence of British coal by the fact that products mined in Wales or Northern England could be exported to the colonies in ships that would otherwise have been in ballast (or not carrying cargo). The vast trade in British coal oversea…

But laws and regulations held in abeyance – as they are in free zones or special economic zones that so often flank ports – are also crucial in creating the pulsating economic macro-organisms that port systems are today