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This introduction proposes an anthropology of global cargo circulation by placing the maritime shipping industry at the center of global capitalism. With “container economies” we refer to the maritime global circulation of cargo that is sustained by an undervalued labor force, dependent upon unstable logistics infrastructures and driven by speculative capital. Container economies, we argue, are produced by adding, moving, and destroying value through the maritime supply chain. In this introduction, we reflect upon the implications of containerization and its wider consequences for logistics labor. We argue that maritime logistics and labor is best understood by taking into account their wider networks of dependency expressed through kinship relations, ethnicity and coexisting regimes of value.

This article discusses crisis, and responses to crisis, in the global maritime industry. In order to stay ‘afloat’ in recession times, ship owners increasingly opt for Flags of Convenience. During research aboard a mixed nationality crewed cargo ship, I observed how a local crisis of a flag change impacted on the ambience and social cohesion onboard, and how crewmembers responded by reinforcing ties to their families back home. By showing how crises and their responses play out on multiple levels, the article argues that the ship's ‘local’ population, despite its apparent isolation, is deeply embedded in global events and processes.

This article uses ethnography from onboard container ships to show how seafarers as a workforce at the center of global capital circulation are increasingly confined inside their mobile worksites. Drawing on theories of the transformation of time and space as internal to the logic of globalization and capitalism, the article argues that the increased mobility of goods, as facilitated by developments in maritime logistics, has decreased the mobility of the seafarers in charge of moving these goods across the world. The article proposes “containing mobilities” as a term for thinking through the particular contradictions and inequalities of mobility that shape the everyday life of the workers at the heart of the global system of mobility and transport that constitutes the maritime supply chain.

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