Oceanic accumulation: Geographies of speculation, overproduction, and crisis in the global shipping economy

Abstract

Since the mid-1960s, the shipping sector has been characterized by periods of extreme economic growth and equally impressive periods of contraction. Maritime economists, analysts, and brokers refer to the contraction as the sector suffering from surplus capacity, or the problem of ‘disequilibrium’ between supply and demand. However, this explanation describes the symptom and ignores the other dynamics unfolding across space and time that undergird the condition of this ‘disequilibrium’: how value is produced in, and capital circulates through, the shipping sector, with a material set of implications for labor and the environment. Using empirical data on shipping markets alongside market reports and data collected from fieldwork, this paper brings into conversation two practices and places—Bangladesh’s shipbreaking yards and the laying up of ships in Singapore’s ‘outer port limits’—as a way to analyze the expanding scale of capital circulating in and through the shipping sector since the mid-1960s. Crucial to this analysis is the prioritization of the ship as fixed capital, how value is produced through this fixed form, and how fixed capital becomes devalued. The data also reveals the historical significance of shipbreaking and laying up ships in outer port limits for the reproduction of global capital on an expanding scale.