Nineteenth-century London was not only the greatest city ever known but it also had an immense port. Sarah Palmer explores how London’s maritime dimension, which included major industries, shaped London physically, economically, socially and profoundly affected the lives and livelihoods of many inhabitants. Until now, the relationship between London and its port has not been sufficiently explored by either the many London historians or by the relatively few historians of the Port of London. Port engineering, architecture, shipbuilding and port labour have received much attention, but are generally considered in isolation from the wider London context. She draws on such existing studies, as well as much new material based on archival research, to provide a wider perspective.

The transition from sail to steam shipping shaped the later-nineteenth-century Port of London. When limited to river trade and traffic, steamers had little effect on facilities. Once improvements in technology extended the economic viability of steamers on ever more distant passages, larger and deeper docks were needed. This led to existing facility improvements and downstream docks. The new steam port, served by major shipping lines, depended on barge transhipment of cargoes to waterfront wharves, which flourished as a result. Trade volumes responded to metropolitan population growth, but the national share remained stable or fell. Wool and grain replaced sugar as leading trades. Re-export business declined. The capital’s relationship with the port changed. In the 1860s, its perceived importance led to the rejection of an eastern Thames embankment. In the 1880s, Tower Bridge went ahead.

Follows the further decline of American trade in the Mediterranean and the physical decline and death of the three consuls, all of whom become somewhat disillusioned with the United States and the State Department while unsuccessfully trying to insure that their families can continue to prosper in the Mediterranean.

Traces the decline of the American trade in the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic Wars. Discusses the downfall of many American merchants in the region and the need to shift to new economic stragegies.

In 2015, a robust strain of slash fiction began to explore the nature of the intimacy shared between aides-de-camp Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens during the American Revolution. Comparing this vast body of writing to popular genres of eighteenth-century fiction, this chapter frames the phenomenon known as "Historical Lams" (Lams being a portmanteau formed by fusing the first syllables of each surname) as the great queer epistolary novel that got away. More precisely, I examine how literary fandom surrounding the Hamilton-Laurens bond ultimately theorizes the cultural function of fiction through eighteenth-century discourses integral to the rise of the novel. I conclude by arguing that this literature offers a valuable framework for reconsidering the world-building potential of reception in the making of queer pasts.

This chapter considers the problem of ‘heavy freight’, a problem posited by Anthony Snodgrass in the 1980s concerning how Greeks might have moved heavy goods like marble around the Greek world. A dataset of freestanding marble statues is presented, where the size and the shape of these statues is used to consider how much marble might have been used in the Greek world during various economic production processes. After estimating the scale of the industry, this chapter uses spatial network modelling to consider some of the routes along which marble might have been transported on the sea, using a rules-based system that ships will always have gone the most direct route from-anchorage-to-anchorage. The shape of these networks is then discussed in light of their implications for our understanding of the whole of the Greek world.

This chapter builds on the discussion of product shipping from the previous chapter, but by introducing a different sort of product: commodity or semi-luxury goods (in the words of Lin Foxhall), things transported in ceramic amphoras that were also loaded onto ships. The distribution of pottery from across various sanctuaries and urban sites is considered to make the point that certain sites ‘specialised’ in various products, and that there might be evidence for Greeks selecting certain products for import or export. This element of choice is indicative of a wide amount of economic knowledge circulating in the Greek world that is not immediately materially visible. Spatial network modelling is conducted for this dataset too, revealing similar shapes to those from the previous chapter, and making the case for possible ‘piggy-backing’ of goods shipped from similar production sites to points of consumption.

The practice of imagining idols within romantic and sexual relationships, known as “shipping,” is central to the global fandom of K-pop, allowing fans to develop affective relationships with celebrities through practices such as writing fan fiction. In particular, shipping that reimagines boy groups such as BTS within romantic or homoerotic relationships is especially common as a method of articulating fandom and exploring sexual agency, thus producing spaces within Korea’s patriarchal society where women’s sexual desires can be safely explored. International aspects of BTS shipping, particularly within Japanese and Anglophone fandom spaces (in Australian and the Philippines), is then analyzed. While BTS shipping in Japan tends to conceptualize homoerotic relationships between men via sexual practices and behaviors divorced from identity, Anglophone shipping tends to instead overtly deploy LGBTQ identity politics. Nevertheless, both practices possess queer potentials that allow fans to affectively explore their sexuality. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of shipping in affirming the presence of queer fans within global K-pop culture.

Chapter 3 examines regional trade networks, drawing on archival records of import and export tax duties assessed in the ports of Veracruz, Havana, and Cartagena. Contrasting regional trade with transatlantic trade—which was larger than regional trade by volume and value and has thus occupied most scholarly attention—I show that ships moved between Veracruz and the Caribbean Islands and mainland littoral with greater frequency than they did between Veracruz and Europe. Shipping within the Mexican-Caribbean was also not entirely a byproduct of transatlantic trade, as we often imagine, but a distinct circuit following its own seasonal patterns. Focusing on seasonality and other “soft” factors, I argue that rather than seeing regional trade simply as a secondary consequence of transatlantic trade, we can see it as a primary means through which people in the Mexican-Caribbean world created material links to one another and participated in a common commercial system.

The main reason for the long-lasting popularity of Lego bricks is their versatility. A back-of-the-envelope calculation will reveal that six bricks of 2 x 4 studs can be combined in almost 1 billion ways. And because Lego bricks made today still interlock with those first made in 1958, the year the toy was first patented, the possibilities for creative play are, quite literally, innumerable.

Two years before the patent that would turn Lego into the world’s favourite toy company, a man called Malcom McLean made the same discovery as Ole Kirk Christiansen, the inventor of Lego. McLean was not in the business of making children’s toys, however, but of shipping goods. On 26 April 1956 he was watching his idea come to fruition: in Newark, New Jersey, a crane was lifting fifty-eight aluminium metal boxes into an old tanker ship.

Modern means of transportation and communication along water, rails, and roads had a profound impact on the economic and social development of China from the mid-nineteenth century onward. After the arrival of the steamship in the 1840s and the telegraph in the early 1860s, railroad construction began to emerge slowly at the close of the century, followed by bus and motor traffic bringing about macadamized city streets and highway expansion, with a modest level of air traffic taking off in the 1930s. This chapter addresses the structural changes in transportation and communication that characterized the transition from the last decades of the Qing empire (1644–1911) through the Republican period (1911–1949) to the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

The crusading activity of Venice, more than that of any other participating society, was influenced by other activities and concerns, due to the range and depth of its commercial and strategic interests in theatres of conflict and along transit routes. Its role was reshaped over time by shifts in the geographical configurations of both crusading activity and Venetian interests. In the early decades of crusading, in which the forces of the maritime powers autonomously complemented the activities of other crusaders, crusading action was mingled with the assertion of Venetian prerogatives in the Adriatic and the Byzantine sphere. The shift from land to sea routes linked the role of the maritime cities increasingly to transport and escort of the armies of others, and hence to their geographical position as nodes on transit routes. The diversion to other routes of many of the crusaders from its natural catchment area as a port undercut Venice’s crusading prominence in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the signal exception of the Fourth Crusade. Venice’s participation in late medieval crusading was constrained to varying degrees by the distribution of its territorial and commercial interests in the areas dominated by different powers.

The IMF has not traditionally paid much attention to climate finance, but started publishing reports on climate finance from 2010. Nonetheless, the IMF output on climate finance provides an important insight into the case of economisation. The chapter starts with an outline of the IMF’s relatively limited output on climate finance, which initially focused on the mobilisation of climate finance and later more broadly on fiscal policies. The way in which the IMF linked climate finance to fossil fuel subsidies and carbon pricing is indicative of its view that climate change is best addressed by pricing emissions. As is explained in the subsequent section, this approach is shaped by the Fund’s worldview and its focus on fiscal policy, and its initial impetus to address climate finance has come from institutional interaction and policy entrepreneurs within the bureaucracy. Finally, the IMF’s approach had identifiable direct consequences only on the international level, particularly on the G20.

The previous chapter explored the pivotal role of the ISDA Master Agreement in the evolution of the OTC derivatives markets and highlighted the combination of legal techniques behind the various ‘self-help’ remedies in this contract. These contractual remedies, which culminate with Close-out, are designed to manage disruption arising during the lifespan of a derivatives contract without requiring recourse to the formal procedures associated with enforcing rights under general law. While versions of these self-help remedies appear in many types of financial contracts, including in market standard syndicated loan agreements and in the terms and conditions of debt securities, they have reached unmatched levels of sophistication in the derivatives context. As such they have been referred to in a recent English case as amounting to ‘an exclusive code’ under which parties manage the implications of a breach of contract, to the exclusion of the general law. As is now well-documented in the literature addressing the transnational qualities of modern finance, these arrangements underpin the cross-border markets in OTC derivatives by promoting autonomy from national insolvency law, a strategy which has, in turn, enjoyed generous regulatory treatment. The questions to which this chapter now turns is what role is left for the courts in relation to such a tightly designed, closely maintained and ‘exclusive’ contractual framework, and, as a starting point, why such litigation arises in the first place.