ABSTRACT
Seaborne trade has a central place in our lives in the twenty-first century. Walk into any shop, and much of what you see will have come from overseas. Between 1950 and 2005 sea trade grew from 0.55 billion tons to 7.2 billion tons, an average of 4.8% per annum. This expansion was the result of the most fundamental redesign of the world’s political and economic arrangements since the industrial revolution. The rapid economic growth and increasing consumer wealth which drove this change were, as we saw in Chapter 1, initiated at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 which established the economic foundations for a period of economic stability which allowed companies and investors to operate freely across the globe. Three important developments helped:
● The world was progressively opened to free trade. The European empires were dismantled in the 1950s, removing a network of bilateral trade preferences, followed by the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the opening of the Chinese economy to free trade in the mid-1990s.
