Sinews of War and Trade. Laleh Khalili
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Arabia rising from the steamy shores. CMA CGM ships only bunker (or take on fuel) in certain countries because they get better deals in some ports, but also because the bunkering fuel in some ports is reputed to be adulterated.1 Both Corte Real and Callisto flew the British Red Ensign flag and had to follow European and British rules on sulphur emissions and other environmental regulations. Therefore, they could only take low-sulphur, untainted, uncontaminated bunkers on board. This also limited which ports were deemed appropriate for refuelling.
| Port | Annual bunker sale (millions of tonnes) | Last year available |
| Singapore | 42.4 | 2014 |
| Fujairah | 24.0 | 2013 |
| Rotterdam | 10.6 | 2013 |
| Hong Kong | 7.4 | 2012 |
| Antwerp | 6.5 | 2012 |
Table 1.1 – World’s biggest bunkering ports2
The differences in routes indicate that the delivery of specific commodities from a port of origin to a destination does not necessarily determine the path of travel. The specific qualities of ports that become nodes of trade matter: how updated their facilities are, how deep their harbours, what bunkering services they provide. Global factors also matter: a fall in trade saw many containers being shipped to China entirely empty. The volume of cargo shipped from one site to another in turn determines freight rates on those routes. The price of oil affects bunkering rates and therefore the unit cost of transportation by sea. But a ship’s route is not the outcome of a series of rational calculations. CMA CGM is, in some ways, distinct from the other European shipping firms with which it competes. The firm has Middle Eastern roots, with its founders hailing from Syria and Lebanon. A quarter of the company’s shares are, at the time of this writing, held by a major Turkish shipping and mining conglomerate, the Y ıldırım Group. CMA CGM has also long had shipping alliances with United Arab Shipping Company, the firm originally owned by several countries of the Arabian Peninsula. Many of CMA CGM’s hubs and smaller feeder ports (ports that receive transhipments from the hubs) are in the Middle East, and the sinuous routes that connect its European and Asian termini often snake through North African, Arab, and Turkish ports.
The routes that shipping companies or naval guards or international antipiracy organisations devise, for everyday shipping as well as in seas designated dangerous, so often seem ‘naturally’ made. Unlike markings on land, which the earth holds across time and space, the crossing of ships on the deep leaves little trace but the foam that forms in the wake. Yet shipping routes – or, more accurately, their representation on charts and maps and in the myriad documents of corporate planning – have a solidity, a durability that their marine ephemerality belies.
A range of political factors (including technological changes, economic calculations, and social upheavals) can spell the end of one route and the birth of another over the course of time. In the age of steam, ships are not beholden to wind and current patterns as they were in the age of sail, and routes are determined by the ports strung along them. Some ports remain constant and important: Jeddah, as the port of Mecca, has always mattered in the making of pilgrims’ sea routes and has been a crucial stop on the Red Sea, despite being flanked by perilous coral shoals. Aden was one of the earliest imperial coaling stations for Britain and for nearly a century and a half its most important strategic port in the Indian Ocean. The emergence of Jabal Ali (and its smaller cousins Khor Fakkan, Port Khalifa, Hamad, and Salalah, among others) in the Arabian Peninsula calls for an explanation: what accounts for such a proliferation of destination ports, when the population of the Peninsula is only around 60 million?
The answer is that everything from technological change – the coming of steam and the invention of telegraphs, tankers, container ships, and internet cables – to the end of empires and the emergence of new nation-states can shift the contours of these routes across the water. But this doesn’t happen in a uniform way. The technological innovations that remake communication and transportation sometimes reinforce existing routes and, at other times, redraw them. In the Arabian Peninsula, especially before the coming of oil, pilgrimage and the Suez Canal were the factors that determined where sea routes were pinned to the land.
But routes are not only prescribed by the exigencies of travel. What cargo is carried, and from where and in what volumes, determines the rates charged for routes. Routes are not only evanescent paths through the sea or lines upon the map, but also a series of calculations about costs and freight rates. The moment routes are quantified by way of pricing, they – the routes themselves, not what travels on them – can also become commodities to be speculated upon. So many of the ingredients of route-making in the age of sail shaped the paradoxes of our permanently transient routes; today, many of those old routes are embodied in the digital pathways of market models.
Admiralty Charts and the Making of Routes
Proudly, as always, the ships will set sail
for Madras, Algeria and Singapore;
in an office bent over some nautical maps
I’ll make calculations in ledger books.
Nikos Kavvadias, ‘Mal du Départ’
In the wheelhouse of the freighters on which I travelled, Admiralty Charts corresponding to our coordinates were spread on a table and updated every hour with a notation in pencil tracing our sea route. The wheelhouse abounded with electronic devices, and the captain and his officers directed the ship using global positioning systems (GPS) and radar. Nevertheless, the conventions of seafaring – at least for this shipping company – required that the ship’s officers regularly update these gorgeous charts. The charts recorded depths, forbidden areas, coastal zones, submarine ammunition dumping grounds, port approaches, and less frequent and often fascinating notations about whales, anomalous magnetic zones, volcanic activity, and treacherous reefs that had been sighted but not confirmed. On this route, the one legend that was repeated consistently across all charts was a warning about taking care with dragging the anchor along the seabed for fear of snagging submarine cables and pipelines.
The charts were a palimpsest of past pencilled routes, erased and replaced on every trip. The lines seemed to follow more or less the same latitudes and longitudes on every trip. Like the rhumb lines which connected ports on seventeenth-century European maps,3 these pencilled lines showed the persistence of certain routes. Many – at least those that have not been erased by war or ‘natural’ disaster or a gradual decline in the importance of a port – are hundreds of years old, if not older. Some connect the harbours of the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian coast to their counterparts on East African or Indian shorelines, and further to Southeast Asian archipelagos and China. Others trace coastal connections around the Peninsula, or across narrower seas – the Red Sea, for example – and on to nearby shores.
Before the age of steam, sailing ships were largely captive to currents, winds, and especially to the monsoons of the Arabian Sea, whose winds dictated the direction of travel for ships. The ‘huge sum of free energy provided by the monsoons’4 was at once the most significant barrier to and the biggest advantage for determining the timing and routes of maritime trade. The monsoon systems allowed the ships to sail with the winds, and because of the predictability of the seasons, monsoon winds determined the dates for sailing to and from the facing coasts of the western Indian Ocean. The south-western monsoon blows from June through September from the Himalayas towards the Arabian coasts. The north-eastern monsoon sweeps from the Horn of Africa towards the shores of India. The winds bring ‘rainwater running in rills’ (in Rabindranath Tagore’s evocative words). High swells vibrate through the bones of seafarers and wash over the decks of dhows. On a container ship, heavy-bottomed and cargo-laden, all one feels is a gentle sway that slightly changes the calibration of your walk. Even a ten-metre swell is dwarfed by a megaship’s high freeboard: the distance of the deck from the waterline can be as far as fifteen metres above the surface