ABSTRACT
The economic history of the shipping business is fascinating and illustrative. The real lessons to be learned are there in the midst of economic ups and downs, crises, warfare, technological shifts, political change, and more. The business cycle model is an essential topic in economics. At the edge, people have very large cycles composed of a series of smaller cycles, each with a peak, decline, recession, and recovery period. After 2007, some academic publishers began to use industrial document scanning facilities to transfer old hard copies to electronic databases. In 2009, the author collected several freight rate data sources and calculated a long-term continuous freight rate index. The centennial decline of the 1800s is a distinct topic in the history of economics and the interest of some Nobel Prize winners. For institutional economists, the 1800s is a unique example of how innovations and institutional changes have created productivity gains and changed the scene of global economics.
