Blog

Cities are creatures of their routes. Venice grew rich because galleys from Alexandria docked at the Rialto; Bruges faded when Antwerp took its trade;...

Pepper and nutmeg once justified fleets, forts and wars. A hold full of Malabar pepper could clear a voyage, and the Dutch traded claims to Manhattan ...

Cut a short canal and you redraw the economics of continents. The Erie Canal collapsed the cost of moving Midwest grain and made New York the American...

Roughly a fifth of world oil squeezes through Hormuz, a strait narrow enough to swim across. Malacca carries Northeast Asia energy lifeline, Bab el-Ma...

The Silk Road moved silk at camel speed; today cables move the equivalent of libraries in milliseconds, but the logic rhymes. Data routes still follow...

In 1956 Malcom McLean loaded 58 trailer bodies onto a converted tanker, and freight transport began a quiet rewrite. The standardized box cut port lab...