Brad’s Reviews > Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula > Status Update

"By invoking the state as a patron and protector [Omani] unions were making a Faustian bargain. Even when allowed to come out into the open, being beholden to the state means that the union's ability to disrupt the order of things is severely disadvantaged...work stoppages are seen not only as a challenge to the employer but also to state security."

Naturally, the mandate (or lack thereof) of the state matters...

"The aim of the [Gordon Clapp] mission, constituted under the auspices of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, was finding a solution that prevented the return of expelled Palestinians to their homes...This entailed finding jobs and new countries for the refugees. The Clapp mission secured the agreements of Ibn Saud and Aramco to hire a thousand displaced Palestinians."

"Vverifying blockchains can consume mind-boggling quantities of electricity and time, and their calculative processes are highly repetitive, inefficient, and wasteful...

The extent to which their failures or successes transform practices...can only be measured years after their implementation...These technologies ultimately centralise power through making its workings unintelligible, capillary, and ever-present."

"[Lloyd's of London's] Joint War Committee, other insurance underwriters, and members of the International Underwriting Association determine the world shipping hotspots and issue a list that enumerates wars, strikes, terrorism, piracy, and other possible risks. The list's opaque categories [define] which shipping routes are considered 'safe'...[influencing] shipping rates and routes, [and] security apparatuses."

"There were no roads connecting colonies and different parts of the same colony in a manner that made sense with regard to Africa's needs and development. All roads and railways led down to the sea."

- Walter Rodney, 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa'

"Global hegemons can get away with limitations on corporations that the governments of the global South could only dream about."

As the global North exercises political and economic leverage through mechanisms of "investor state dispute settlement", among other means, the global South is left with "enclaves of variegated sovereignty and liberal accumulation," from "free zones" ("offshore spaces but onshore").

Between dredging (underwater excavation of sand and other granular materials) and coastal 'reclamation' (more like misappropriation), the grafting of exponentially extractivist economic processes onto the steady, rhytmic natural cycles of ecosystems produces a dysfunctional, damaging and polluting result. This is even prior to the political fallout of altered maritime borders and literal downstream effects.

"In all these harbours, geopolitical and political decisions, -- rather than geographic advantage or 'neutral' economic calculations -- created the conditions for the work of commerce and maritime transport. All these transformations ripple globally."

Reposted because my OCD hates spelling errors. (:

"Kinship and trust alone did not suffice; trade networks also depended on legal frameworks and mechanisms for enforcement of contracts...Many of these routes and ports of trade became objects of European conquest precisely because of their abundance, the sophistication of their mechanisms of exchange, the depth of their infrastructures of trade, and their extensive and longstanding connections."