Activity

It may come as a surprise that sand is one of the world’s biggest traded commodities by volume (if not value). Of the nearly 59 billion tonnes of material mined every year, 68 to 85 per cent is sand and gravel. The world consumes more than 40 billion tonnes of sand a year – used for construction, l…

The effects of land reclamation are not solely ecological. As shorelines shift and maritime cartographies change, so do sea borders, exclusive maritime economic zones, and other topographic features that are transformed into legal and political categories. Land reclamation can bring with it dispute…

[...] Many famous London trading houses had offices in Aden, including Cory Brothers, who by the end of the nineteenth century were the most important coal traders in the London docks. The best-known shipping companies of Aden in the early half of the twentieth century were owned by Antonin Besse a…

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…