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Politics of scale: Colossal containerships and the crisis in global shipping
Author(s) -
Leivestad Hege H⊘yer,
Schober Elisabeth
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
anthropology today
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.419
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-8322
pISSN - 0268-540X
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8322.12650
Subject(s) - shipyard , port (circuit theory) , profitability index , politics , economy , shipbuilding , profit (economics) , scale (ratio) , economies of scale , business , economics , political science , history , engineering , finance , marketing , geography , law , archaeology , cartography , electrical engineering , microeconomics
This article addresses overcapacity and crisis in global shipping through the case of the HMM Algeciras , the world's largest containership inaugurated in 2020. When she left the South Korean shipyard where she was built, the HMM Algeciras (with a size of two soccer fields) could carry 24,000 twenty‐foot equivalent units (TEUs) across the world's oceans. By following the mega‐containership's links to two South Korean shipping companies, Hyundai Merchant Marine and Hanjin Shipping, and her connections to a southern European port, the authors unpack some of the current flip sides of global maritime shipping. In this article, the authors argue that the promise of profit and endless growth, which has led to overcapacity in global maritime shipping, is spurred on by what they call ‘false economies of scale’. Claims of the future profitability of colossal containerships are, they argue, state‐driven political performances of scale.