ABSTRACT
Recent years have seen intense research activity in the modelling and analysis of complex networks, mainly driven by the availability of new large-scale databases for social, biological, and technological networks. Maritime transport networks are one area where these new ideas and techniques have found fertile ground. This chapter analyses a database generated from Lloyd's Shipping Index, a weekly publication of cargo ship movements by Lloyd's List, over the period 1890 to 2008. Because cargo shipping is the dominant transport mode for world trade, it is of great economic relevance for understanding the importance of the nodes. The importance measured in two ways: the number of vessel calls; and the degree, defined as the number of ports that the node is connected to by at least one arriving or departing ship. The unweighted and weighted degree distributions are an important feature of a network's topology and have often been used as circumstantial evidence for mechanistic models of the network's evolution.
