Cargo shipping, as emblematic stand-in for globalization, peddles a seductive imagery of frictionless transnational trade and just-in-time logistics. This article charts the intensive work required to produce this fantasy of frictionless trade around the Atlantic port of Lobito, Angola. In a context where imports have dropped by 50 percent to 60 percent since due to lower oil prices, this article traces how actors involved in making this import-dependent economy work deal with the seeming failure of promises of transnationally connected economic growth.
Frictionless global trade is both a precondition and an ideological foundation of what is commonly and ahistorically glossed as globalization. In line with this theme section's call to ethnographically investigate the complex technological machinery and human labor required to move the goods along the maritime logistics chain, this article looks at the considerable work involved in producing and upholding this seductive imagery of frictionless global trade.
More specifically, in the context of Angola, the article examines the tensions that arise from the gap between the promises by technical and regulatory reforms to facilitate customs declarations and speed up maritime imports and the increasingly grim realities of a blocked import economy almost at a standstill.
Focusing on the way importers, customs brokers despachantes , and customs agents improvise to straddle the new efficiency imperatives of technical and regulatory innovation amidst inflation and dwindling foreign exchange reserves, this article charts the intensive labor required to make goods flow.
Indeed, for the container economies under scrutiny in this issue, the port of destination is, barring transshipment and cabotage, not only a physical port but most often also a port of entry into a national territory. For goods to move across the sea, someone has to order them, pay for their shipping, and receive them. However, to retrieve the goods from the port, they have to be cleared through customs.
