ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on regional shifts in the geographic distribution of maritime routes and port hierarchies over the period 1890-2008. It discusses the uneven diffusion and impact of technological innovation, the long-term evolution mechanisms of ports, port systems and maritime networks, the disaggregated distribution of global trade in relation with wider economic and geo-political changes, refining previous attempts on the matter. Most of the time, Lloyd's List is used for genealogic investigations, to retrieve a given ship or voyage based on someone's memoirs, for underwater archaeology, such as to inventory the exact location of ships sunk in Irish waters over the period 1741-1945, or to analyse the activity of one given port on the basis of vessel calls, such as Whitby over the period 1700-1914. Only in the very late 1990s, a systematic analysis of containership movements listed in Lloyd's Voyage record was proposed at the global scale to reveal the macro-structure of the maritime network based on graph theory.
