ABSTRACT
For almost a century, area studies, just like any other social science, depicted the world as a natural arrangement of bounded societies surrounded by national borders. Surprisingly, for a short time the world resembled this geographical imagination. This chapter investigates the spatial patterns of supply chain capitalism through an engagement with infrastructure, logistics, and supply chain management technologies. Emerging global orders are territorial and the territories of contemporary economic entanglements are global. The logistics revolution of the early 1970s entailed a radical reorganization of production and supply and mobilized a different spatial choreography of trade. Logistics served to mobilize uneven geographic positions by connecting them through chains. However, mobilizing these diverse positionalities involves arduous work. With the emergence of global terminal networks, an administrative and spatial fragmentation of formerly state-run public monopoly ports was triggered. The organizational endeavour to terminalize the port has repercussions that go far beyond an economistic take on port geography.
