Maritime flows and networks in a multidisciplinary perspective

Abstract

Despite the huge importance of sea transport for world society and economy, empirical studies of actual maritime flows remain scarce in the literature. This chapter extensively reviews existing works in three ways. It first describes the late conceptualisation of maritime transport as a network compared with other transport arenas. Second, it introduces the wide variety of maritime data analyses and visualisations, ranging from broadly estimated sketches to advanced cartographies, across the whole academic spectrum from archaeology and climatology to geography and physics. Finally, the surge of maritime network analysis in the last decade is presented alongside the book itself and its contribution to current research.