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Two weeks ago, a 985-foot container ship called the Dali struck Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, leaving six construction workers presumed dead and shutting down the city’s port. “The crash,” Vanessa Ogle writes in the NYR Online this morning, “brought fresh attention to the global shipping industry.”

It is, she shows, “an opaque business.” The first decades of the millennium have seen a proliferation of “ghost ships”—“aging vessels with obscure ownership and questionable insurance arrangements.” Because their owners are often “hidden behind shell companies and their flags registered to tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions, [these] vessels regularly dodge sanctions, skirt labor laws, avoid taxes, trade in illicit goods, and flout safety standards.” The industry has been slow to regulate, Ogle argues, in part because of the prevalence of “flags of convenience registries, which permit shipowners of any nationality to register their vessels in a particular jurisdiction” and thus operate under lax local “labor and tax laws [and] safety and environmental standards.”

Below, alongside Ogle’s article, we have compiled a selection of writing from the archives about shipping, ports, and the maritime economy.

Vanessa Ogle
Shipping’s Shadow World

The shipping industry, which moves more than 80 percent of global trade, is poorly regulated, environmentally dangerous, and rife with labor violations.

E. Tammy Kim
The Safe Harbor

The longshoreman labor leader Harry Bridges may no longer be widely known, but his philosophy of inclusive, democratic unionism imbues much of today’s most ambitious organizing campaigns.

Maya Jasanoff
A Passage from Hong Kong

Four weeks at sea on board one of the world’s largest container ships.

Witold Rybczynski
Shipping News

“Shipping containers are a recent American invention. The first full-fledged example of container shipping occurred in April 1956, when a refitted World War II tanker, the Ideal-X, sailed from Newark carrying fifty-eight containers—actually aluminum truck bodies with the wheels removed…. On the face of it not a world-shaking event, yet it could be called the beginning of a revolution in transportation.”

Ghost Ship

a poem by
Charles Simic

I recall a window thrown open
one summer day
On a grand view of the bay
and a cloud in all that blue
As pale as the horse
Death likes to ride….

Jonathan Raban
The Threat from the Sea

“Legally speaking, a ship is much like a floating embassy, a detached chunk of the land whose flag it flies, so that seamen aboard a British ship are subject to the same laws that govern their brethren ashore. Mignonette was a registered British ship, and had the act of cannibalism taken place aboard the yacht, there would have been no question about whether an English court had jurisdiction in the matter. ”

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