Ninety Percent of Everything

George sailed on a Maersk container ship from Rotterdam to Singapore and used the voyage to report on the container shipping industry: how ships are crewed, registered, insured and regulated, and why an industry that moves the great majority of world trade is close to invisible to the people who depend on it.

The reporting covers flags of convenience and the regulatory arbitrage they enable, the conditions and legal position of Filipino and Eastern European seafarers, abandonment of crews by insolvent owners, piracy off Somalia including detailed accounts of hostage cases, the environmental cost of bunker fuel and the effect of ship noise on whales, and the way maritime law leaves sailors outside most national jurisdictions. She interviews crew, shipowners, insurers, naval officers and rescue organisations.

The book is journalism, not economics. It does not analyse freight rates, shipping cycles, charter markets or the capital cycle that makes the industry chronically unprofitable, so an investor looking for the economics should go elsewhere. What it does supply is a grounded picture of the physical and legal infrastructure that supply chains depend on, which is directly relevant to anyone whose business assumes ocean freight works. Some of the specifics have dated: Somali piracy subsided after armed guards and naval patrols became standard, sulphur emission rules tightened in 2020, and the pandemic exposed crew change and port congestion problems the book anticipates only partly.