Read the ocean like a strategist!

If you work in international trade, logistics, supply chain, or policy, you already know the deep frustration: you're reading a freight rate spike, a port closure, a sanctions announcement — and you have the data in front of you, but you're not quite sure what it means at the strategic level. Or you're following a geopolitical development — a Chinese port acquisition in the Mediterranean, an Arctic route claim, a new sanctions regime — and you understand the politics, but the operational and commercial implications stay blurry.

That gap between the logistics layer and the strategic layer is the problem this course was built to solve.

I designed Maritime Power & Trade because the best analysts I've seen in this space — the ones who genuinely move the needle in oceanic shipping companies, government agencies, think tanks, and trading firms — don't live in one silo. They can read a Baltic Exchange Index and a foreign ministry press release in the same breath, and they understand how each one speaks to the other. That capacity isn't intuition. It's a trained analytical framework. And it can be taught.

What we do in this seminar is build that framework systematically. We start with the physical world: the corridors, hubs, and chokepoints that make the ocean an infrastructure — because geography doesn't negotiate. Then we work through the commercial machinery: how alliances concentrate market power in container shipping, how dry bulk and tanker markets behave differently and why, who actually controls the quays at the world's critical terminals. Then we turn to state strategy: China's port investment network, sanctions as a maritime weapon, the Arctic's emerging competitive geometry. And finally we stress-test everything against real disruptions — Red Sea, Panama Canal, COVID — and structural forces — decarbonisation, cyber risk, climate — that are already reshaping the system.

I want to be direct about what this course asks of you: it is a graduate-level seminar, not a survey. You will be expected to engage with real data, argue from evidence, and build analytical products — including a scenario exercise and a capstone strategic assessment — that reflect the complexity of actual professional problems. If you're willing to do that work, the payoff is a genuinely integrated way of thinking about global trade that very few practitioners in any field currently possess.

If you're ready to stop seeing maritime trade as either a logistics puzzle or a geopolitics story — and start seeing it as both, simultaneously, the way the world actually works — I'd be glad to have you in the seminar.