Shipping and globalisation
Niels P Petersson, Professor of History at SHU, tells us about his work on shipping.
Ships transport 90% of everything we produce and consume, as writer Rose George explains in a very readable book. Periodically, news reports about a major disruption to shipping, such as the blockage of the Suez Canal by the container ship Ever Given in March 2021, draws wider attention to the importance of the shipping industry to our economies and daily lives. But how exactly has shipping as a business and infrastructure developed historically, and when did it acquire such a crucial importance? This is a question I and some colleagues tackle in our volume Shipping and Globalization in the Post-war Era: Contexts, Companies, Connections. Our research covers topics such as the rise of Asia as a centre of the world’s shipping and ship building, the international law of shipping, decolonisation, case studies of successful and unsuccessful container shipping companies, and the links between the shipping industry and the wider economy and society.
In my own chapter, I look at the crucial role played by engineers’ and managers’ knowledge and strategy in the development of Ocean, a leading UK-based shipping company that pioneered container shipping on its Far Eastern routes and later left the industry to turn itself into a broad-based logistics business. I am not normally a business historian and I learned a lot working with a body of sources and theoretical concepts that were new to me.
Merseyside Maritime Museum Archives
I also greatly enjoyed writing the concluding chapter where I discuss what the history of shipping can tell us about the rhythms of globalisation over the course of the 20th century and also attempt a comparative overview of the three company case studies in the volume.
Taken together, our chapters highlight the contribution of the shipping industry to the transformations in business and society of the post-war era. Without shipping and its ability to forge connections and networks of a global reach, the modern world would look very different.
Thanks to the support offered by SHU and my co-authors’ institutions, it is an ‘open access’ publication – while the physical book still costs money, everyone can download and read an electronic copy free of charge.
- Niels
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