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EMPIRES OF FLOW CONTROL  
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Nicholas Mulder
May 14, 2026
The New York Review of Books
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*
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*
*
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_ The modern idea of the freedom of the seas is collapsing in the
Strait of Hormuz. _

A plate from a volume of Johann Theodor de Bry and Johann Israel de
Bry’s India Orientalis chronicling Dutch imperial expansion in the
Indian Ocean, circa 1598–1613, Wikimedia Commons

 

In September 1507 the Portuguese conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque
sailed his small fleet to a point off the coast of Hormuz Island, in
the narrow bottleneck that provides access to the Persian Gulf.
Negotiations between the Portuguese and the independent Kingdom of
Hormuz broke down quickly, and the small tributary state of Persia
sent hundreds of oar vessels and dhows to attack the intruders. In the
ensuing naval battle, Albuquerque’s advantage in heavy artillery
enabled his fleet to sink most of the opposing ships. When the white
flag was flown over Hormuz, its teenaged king, Seyf Ad-Din, promised
the Portuguese a large tribute and permitted them to construct a fort
on his island. For the Hormuzians, submission to the military
protection of a distant maritime power was the price to pay for
continued prosperity. For Portugal, Hormuz was the latest node in the
global empire of maritime transit that it was establishing from the
Strait of Gibraltar to Malacca.

Five hundred years later, maritime trade continues to be the lifeblood
of our world economy, and the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca remain two
of its central valves. Forty-five percent of all seaborne oil trade
and around a third of all global maritime trade passes through these
two straits; ships sailing out of the Persian Gulf alone carry one
fifth of the global oil and gas, a third of the worldwide supply of
fertilizers
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large amounts of petrochemicals, and essential shipments of helium,
sulphur, and aluminum. Since the end of February Iran has responded to
the US–Israeli war by using its drone and missile arsenal to close
this passageway of vital importance to the global economy. Trump has,
since mid-April, imposed his own blockade on the Islamic Republic, a
tense situation in which the besiegers are besieged.

Iran’s influence over the Strait of Hormuz has highlighted what was
already becoming an inescapable fact
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US is not the only state to wield economic leverage over others. For
decades the centrality of the US dollar granted American policymakers
a unique form of sanctions power. But as Washington resorts to
economic pressure more regularly and with fewer constraints, other
countries have developed not just evasion routes but economic
counter-weapons of their own. To stem Trump’s global tariff
offensive, last year China deployed a system of export controls on
refined rare earth minerals, forcing Trump into a commercial truce.

Many political commentators today describe these sites of
leverage—American financial sanctions, Chinese rare earths, and
Iranian straits interdiction—as “chokepoints.” It is an
evocative term, suggesting that power is the ability to strangulate
others into submission. But the more useful concept to grasp how
economic pressure functions in the Hormuz War is that of flow control:
the ability to manipulate crucial points of transit to determine who
gets to receive how much of what, when they receive it, and under what
conditions. The point of such manipulation is usually not to choke off
or block traffic, but to regulate it and profit from it. For passage
through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran was as of early April demanding a
toll payment of about $1 per barrel of oil—an effective fee of 1 to
2 percent of most cargo values at prevailing prices.

Flow control mechanisms exploit not so much total deprivation but
rather careful management of access. This is precisely why they work
better than brute-force blockades: in the long run, economic weapons
are most effective not when they exert maximum pressure—a course
that often produces evasion, substitution, or defiance—but when they
balance coercion with the continued encouragement of exchange through
a critical valve. Sanctions, blockades, and export controls rely on
interdependence and flow rate in the way that fires require heat and
oxygen: without it, they fizzle out.

The Hormuz conflict has been compared to the Suez Crisis of 1956, on
the assumption that the outcome will be pivotal to the US’s status
as the most powerful country in the West, but in material terms the
nascent system of flow control in the strait will affect the populous,
fast-growing economies of South, Southeast, and East Asia most
severely. These trading states are particularly exposed to the erratic
consequences of US primacy, yet they are also distinctly incentivized
to protect globalization from any interference. Now they are starting
to think through how to organize their exchange in a world market
shorn of US preparedness to defend it. Given the importance of Gulf
energy imports to their economies, several large Asian states,
including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, the Philippines,
Vietnam, and China, have already made arrangements about transit with
Iran. For them the urgency of securing access to energy outweighs the
risks. Other countries, such as Singapore, have refused to bargain
over freedom of navigation, insisting that openness is a nonnegotiable
condition of maritime trade through international waterways.

How strong a post-American network of global trade could become, and
what its internal balance of power would be, remains uncertain. But
its rise should not be a surprise; there are, after all, deep
historical traditions of economic exchange across the Eurasian
continent and its oceanic and maritime approaches. It was precisely in
Hormuz, on the cusp of modernity, that advanced methods of flow
control as well as the modern doctrine of freedom of the seas
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arose, as Europeans attempted to break into the commercial circuits of
the Indian Ocean. And it is there, today, that these ideas stand to be
remade, as both the United States and Iran impose new fees, charge
protection rents from their allies, and attempt to sell access to the
wealth of other nations.

*

Flow control existed well before Albuquerque’s foray into the Strait
of Hormuz. From the 1430s onward, Denmark had demanded tolls to
transit through one of the straits connecting the Baltic to the North
Sea. Ships plying the lucrative Baltic trade in grain, furs, flax,
herring, wool, and pitch were required to call at the Danish fortress
of Kronborg in Helsingør, a location immortalized by _Hamlet_. After
their conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottomans likewise
exploited their hold on the Turkish Straits, which connected the Black
Sea and the Mediterranean. To this end they elbowed out the Venetians
and the Genoese, who had long dominated the Black Sea trade in slaves
and grain, and limited passage to their own merchants and a select
group of approved foreign traders.

Denmark and the Ottomans benefited from the good fortune of geography.
Portugal was a poor agrarian country with a craggy coastline, harsh
soil, and few natural resources. Driven by messianic fervor and
mercantilist greed, the Portuguese spent a century clawing their way
eastward. Starting with their seizure of Ceuta on the North African
coast in 1415 and the capture of Malacca in present-day Malaysia in
1511, _conquistadores_ cobbled together a multi-oceanic polity that
was more geographically far-flung than any previously constructed,
eclipsing the Phoenicians, Athenians, Carthaginians, Venetians, and
Genoese.

Portugal’s empire of flow control hinged on points of ingress and
egress along the sea route to the Indies: Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau,
São Tomé, Socotra and Hormuz, Diu, Goa, Malacca, and later Macao.
From these points, it could guard access to maritime straits, gulfs,
bays, and river estuaries, and beyond them to rich hinterlands. In
some places the Portuguese attacked local states, as Albuquerque did
the Hormuzians and later the Sultanate of Malacca. But as they moved
east and came up against the strength of China and rival Japanese
states, the Portuguese had to tread more carefully; they could secure
commercial access only by paying taxes to the Ming emperor and
respecting local customs.

A plate from a volume of _India Orientalis_, circa 1598–1613
Wikimedia Commons

The main object of Portuguese flow control was the merchandise that
had long moved freely across the Indian Ocean. The Persian, Gujarati,
Vijayanagara, Bengali, Acehnese, and Omani merchants in these waters
found themselves forced to pay transit fees to Portuguese customs
administrators. Not unlike the US Treasury in its use of sanctions
waivers today, Portugal arrogated to itself the right to determine how
other nations could and could not trade with one another, issuing
special licenses called _cartazes_ permitting Indian Ocean transit.
The major difference was that the Portuguese customs houses at Hormuz,
Diu, Goa, and Malacca also served to generate income. As the historian
Sanjay Subrahmanyam has described it, the _cartaz_ system was
initially “a means to channel Asian trade through Portuguese
revenue-systems, and helped swell the customs-duties taken at these
ports,” but over time it “also emerged as a politico-diplomatic
instrument, which could be offered to Asian rulers in exchange for
reciprocal privileges and concessions.” Portugal’s maritime
dominance underpinned its flow control, and this in turn conferred
commercial power in the Indian Ocean and beyond.

Hormuz was one the most valuable customs houses around the Indian
Ocean. The English merchant and explorer Ralph Fitch observed in 1583
that the island was

the driest island in the world; for there is nothing growing in it but
only salt; for their water, wood, and victuals and all things
necessary come out of Persia, which is about 12 miles from thence….
In this town are merchants of all nations, and many Moors and
Gentiles. Here is very great trade of all sorts of spices, drugs,
silks, cloth of silk, fine tapestry of Persia, great store of pearls,
which come from the isle of Bahrein, and are the best pearls of all
others and many horses of Persia, which serve all India. They have a
Moor to their King which is chosen and governed by the Portugals.

This Western domination of the Indian Ocean was deeply resented by
Muslim merchants, who longed to restore the relative freedom of trade
they had enjoyed prior to Albuquerque’s arrival. In the 1550s
Ottoman fleets began to raid Portuguese ports in the region, and in
1566 a fleet of galleons bearing pepper from the Sultanate of Aceh on
Sumatra used the protection of armed Ottoman galleys to bypass the
_cartaz_ system and reach the Red Sea. The emergence of an Islamic
free-seas alliance marked the beginning of the end of Portugal’s
selective closure of the Indian Ocean. Ever larger numbers of Islamic
traders found ways to circumvent the European controls.

Persia’s regional power was restored by emperor Abbas, the fifth
shah of the Safavid dynasty. Abbas sent diplomatic envoys to the
Russian tsar and the kings of Poland and Spain to help him fight the
Ottomans. But it was his alliance with England that allowed him to
take to the offensive against the Portuguese, whom he evicted from
Bahrain in 1602 and expelled from the port of Comorão in 1615
(renamed Bandar Abbas—“Port Abbas”—as a result). Finally, in
1622, four English warships helped Persia to retake Hormuz.

*

By this time other European merchants and imperial adventurers had
begun to follow the Portuguese into Asia, seeking to break into the
lucrative intra-Asian trade. The Dutch were the most aggressive of
these maritime powers. In 1603 a vessel from their East India Company
seized the treasure-laden Portuguese carrack _Santa Catarina_ in the
Singapore Strait.

This episode sparked a legal case that would produce the modern notion
of freedom of the seas. Troubled by the violence with which the
confiscation had occurred, the Dutch East India Company’s Mennonite
shareholders sued the board in court. To defend itself, the company
hired Hugo Grotius, a brilliant young humanist and budding lawyer.
Grotius’s defense of the state-sponsored piracy of Portuguese goods
rested on the argument that the sea and its fruits were the common
property of mankind, and could never be “closed” by any one state.
Grotius held it as legitimate to attack any nation that tried to
maintain such an unjust “closed sea” (_mare clausum_) in violation
of what he called _mare liberum_.

Three centuries later, Grotius came to be considered the father of
international law; at the time, however, he was simply trying to
justify Dutch commercial warfare against another European power. But
issues of trade and navigation in peace and war were certainly at the
center of the law of nations. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth
century, the principle of mare liberum frequently clashed with the
desire of powerful states to control all maritime traffic. In most
wars the neutral countries would invoke freedom of the seas to protect
their trade, while the belligerents would insist on their right to
blockade all ships bound for enemy harbors, port cities, and
coastlines. (No naval power was a more adamant blockader than Britain,
which seized more than 35,000 enemy ships across fourteen wars fought
between 1652 and 1815.)

Even if countries at war could be convinced to loosen their blockades
to the benefit of international commerce, there remained the problem
of critical waterways with two shores controlled by a single power.
The Ottomans were forced to allow Russian ships through the Turkish
Straits after they were defeated by Catherine the Great in the
Russo–Turkish War of 1768–1774. But the sultan preserved his power
to charge these vessels fees for transit permits (_İzn-i sefînei_);
the same right of paid passage was later granted to vessels from
Austria, Britain, and France before the treaty that ended the
Russo–Turkish War of 1828–1829 opened the Black Sea to all
vessels.

Of the countries in a position to engage in maritime gatekeeping, none
clung to its old privilege longer than Denmark. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the Sound Dues funded as much as two thirds of
the Danish budget, allowing the small kingdom to become a heavily
armed absolutist state that could hold its own against much larger
neighbors, such as Sweden. The Sound Dues came to an end in 1857
thanks to the United States, the Atlantic nautical power most
committed to free navigation and neutral rights. American diplomats
and jurists argued that the Sound Dues could not apply to their
country because it had not yet existed when they were instituted; the
United States would not pay tolls to which it had not consented.
“The [Danish] tribute,” wrote one of them in 1837, “is
oppressive in its operation, disgraceful in its character, and
pleading no justice for its imposition but the power to enforce it at
the early era in which it took its origin.” In exchange for a lump
sum payment, the Danes abolished the Sound Dues; the US contribution
was $393,011.

The second half of the nineteenth century was a golden age of
international law. A new technique developed to stabilize great power
rivalry was the regulation of international waterways through
treaties. After its opening in 1869 the Suez Canal became a major new
trade route between Asia and Europe, and by 1888 it was officially
declared a neutral waterway in war and peace alike for all major
powers.

The campaign to govern waterways by treaty ran up against imperialist
designs, especially in the Western Hemisphere: when the Panama Canal
was opened in 1914, it was accessible to international shipping but
remained under the direct management of the United States government,
which had acquired the land on either side as its sovereign territory,
the Panama Canal Zone. Nonetheless, international treaties for
maritime bottlenecks persisted in the interwar years. When the Ottoman
Empire collapsed in 1922, the League of Nations took over management
of the Turkish Straits, but this arrangement was temporary, as Turkey
rapidly reasserted its sovereignty under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In
1936 an international convention restored Turkish sovereignty over the
straits in exchange for their free and uninterrupted use by civilian
and military vessels from all nations, subject to certain numerical
and weight restrictions. This agreement has held up for ninety years
and counting, a respectable duration compared to the shorter shelf
life of some other elements of the rules-based international order.

A plate from a volume of _India Orientalis_, circa 1598–1613
Wikimedia Commons

Even in this era of relatively open seas, however, liberal maritime
powers did not shy away from the use of coercion. In the nineteenth
century Victorian Britain pioneered the protection of global sea lanes
as a justification for its preeminence, even though the Royal Navy
often restricted trade in the course of wars and diplomatic disputes.
It also engaged in gunboat diplomacy against weaker states such as
Greece and Argentina by imposing blockades without declaring
war—so-called “pacific blockades.” As the saying went, when
Britannia ruled the waves, it waived the rules.

*

The emergence of the United States as a global hegemon after World War
II disrupted this state of affairs. The US has espoused the doctrine
of freedom of navigation for most of its history, and since the 1940s
the US Navy has backed up this commitment everywhere with unique
credibility by conducting occasional “freedom of navigation”
operations to check what it considers the excessive maritime claims of
other countries. During the cold war, Washington undertook such
cruises in the Taiwan Strait to contain Maoist China and, in the
1980s, in the Mediterranean to curb the power of Muammar Gaddafi’s
Libya. Washington’s Asian and European allies have huddled under the
umbrella opened by these displays of American naval power; their
assumption has been that US administrations are prepared and able to
protect the shipping routes vital to sustaining their economies and
societies.

That belief has not always been borne out. The United States has been
an inconsistent defender of free seas, and in the Western Hemisphere
especially it has long claimed a wide latitude to intervene. A notable
case occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when Kennedy
erected a US naval cordon around Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from
reinforcing Moscow’s military presence on the island, but avoided
calling this a blockade for fear that the Soviets would see it as an
act of war. He instead used the euphemistic term “quarantine” to
describe what was in effect the same policy. In 1982 the United States
helped to draft the most important international legal treaty
regulating maritime conduct, the United Nations Convention on the Law
of the Sea (UNCLOS). But the Reagan administration wanted to retain
its rights to claim parts of the ocean floor for deep-sea mining
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and never ratified the treaty, which would have required it to pay
royalties for exploiting a part of the global commons.

The Trump administration has abandoned an already waning US interest
in international law. Since December 2025 the US Navy has maintained a
naval blockade against Venezuela to subjugate the government in
Caracas. Following the abduction of Nicolás Maduro in January, this
campaign has involved the seizure of Russian and Panamanian ships and
has given Washington virtually complete flow control over the
Venezuelan economy. It has also raised the economic pressure on Cuba,
which has been put under an effective US naval and coast guard
blockade [[link removed]] since late
January. Although a Russian tanker was recently allowed to discharge
its fuel in Havana, Mexican and Colombian energy trade with Cuba has
all but ground to a halt.

There is a striking regional discrepancy here: whereas the US is
attacking freedom of the seas in the Caribbean, it claims to support
it in the Arabian Sea. The issue for the US is not merely that this
rhetoric exposes its hypocrisy but also that its actions jeopardize
its role as a provider of maritime security. By blithely launching the
Hormuz War and belittling its consequences for the majority of the
world’s population that depends on maritime supply chains, the US
has shown that it offers many fewer benefits to its allies than
advertised.

The comparison with British power in the nineteenth century is
instructive. Victorian Britain derived its authority from a unilateral
commitment to free trade that lasted from the 1840s to the 1930s,
maintained in the face of widespread protectionism by other states,
including the United States, France, and Germany. Yet while cabinets
in London kept their economy open, they did not have to uphold a
worldwide system of alliances and security arrangements premised on
untrammeled maritime access. As long as he keeps exercising command
over the US global power structure, Trump—despite his disinterest in
globalism—very much does.

At the same time, it is clear that Trump’s America has begun to
shirk the provision of the global public goods that in the 1940s made
the United States such a relatively attractive hegemon for a troubled,
hostile, unsafe world. Instead of reciprocal free trade, a one-sided
US tariff barrier now regulates access to the American market
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for all countries, including close allies. And in the place of
reliable political backing, these allies have faced American
interference in their domestic politics and even threats of military
annexation, as Denmark has over Greenland. Together these reinforcing
trends have led to the serious decay of the commercial, logistical,
and diplomatic foundations of US hegemony.

The Persian Gulf Strait Authority, created by Iran in early May to run
a tollbooth at Hormuz, does not, in other words, exist in isolation.
It has to be understood in the wider setting of the ongoing onslaught
against unfettered globalization—a backlash emanating in large part
from advanced economies in the capitalist West, and preceding
Trump’s latest depredations. Since 2016 both the Trump and Biden
administrations have wielded tariffs and sanctions, ramping up export
controls against China, while the retaliatory Chinese rare earths
restrictions have added further uncertainty. Even the European Union,
usually a stalwart free-trader, recently imposed tariffs on Chinese
cars as its market is flooded with imports.

Some of these restraints on free exchange may well be warranted for
domestic political reasons. Certain sectors cannot be abandoned to
private-sector offshoring, and industrial policy has been an important
catalyst of development across economic history. What is deleterious
to global stability is the pell-mell, haphazard way in which these
instruments are being used. Rich economies are justifying economic
coercion with alarmist rhetoric and blanket invocations of national
security, offering no sense of what guardrails, if any, they might
respect. Under these conditions, international trust and constructive
global governance are nearly impossible.

Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority would institute a unilateral
tax on a global public good. But in material terms its cost would be
quite marginal compared to that of the growing bundle of sanctions,
export controls, import duties, and other burdens that Western states
have heaped on commercial transactions. It is hard to argue that a 1
or 2 percent Iranian tariff on energy exports is intolerable when the
United States levies, on average, an 11 percent tariff on all its
trading partners, with rates rising to 25 or even 50 percent on
specific goods such as steel, aluminum, and cars. Over the course of
2025 this tollbooth for entry to the US market brought in $287 billion
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in federal revenues—a substantial economic rent paid to the
world’s consumer of last resort.

*

Despite the West’s deep history of mercantilism, this reversal from
the more recent, liberal form of globalization is disorienting.
Political and economic openness are no longer as neatly aligned as
they once seemed in the Western imagination. There are still many free
societies that are also open in their economic posture: Japan, South
Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, and South Africa, among others.
Yet on both sides of the Atlantic, democracies such as the United
States, Canada, Mexico, and the member states of the European Union
are bolting down their economies against foreign threats. At the same
time, a broad and multifarious group of authoritarian states and
postliberal democracies across Eurasia—including Turkey, the Gulf
monarchies, Iran, India, Pakistan, the Central Asian republics,
Russia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and China—are forging new networks of
exchange outside the reach of Western economic pressure. As Western
democracies deepen their protectionist turn and postliberal Eurasian
states create their own variety of globalism, they will exert
countervailing pressures on the large group of Latin American,
African, and Asian states caught in the middle.

The principle of free seas was always loftier than the imperial
realities it justified, but we should be wary of equating the past
origins of a practice to its present value. Mare liberum is a
principle to which any international order worth its name should
aspire. It offers real benefits to smaller and weaker states, to
migrants and the countries that are sustained by them, and to those
who need to move to survive—in other words, to most of the world’s
population.

The problem is that open seas have always been maintained by some
great preponderance of military power. Such singular might is
inherently unstable, liable to be abused, and generates challengers.
On top of this, the dominant power needs to be durably committed to
policing the oceans and critical waterways. In both these domains,
ability and will, the Hormuz War has been especially corrosive to US
hegemony. For one thing, there is no obvious and easy military way to
reopen the strait short of a massive amphibious assault against Iran
and a permanent occupation of the country. Drone and missile
technology have given a whole new tier of states and non-state actors
the ability to impose lasting damage on global trade. The US blockade,
which has now entered its second month, seems unlikely to succeed in
its goal of forcing the capitulation of a regime that has withstood
many years of sanctions and prior collapses in oil exports. Well-worn
methods of evasion and substitution will likely cushion the damage for
a considerable time.

Yet even if a straightforward military method to regain Hormuz were at
hand, a deeper trend finds its expression in Trump’s insouciance
about global trade: the United States has ceased to be a great trading
state, as it still was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In
the centuries of European mercantilism, states expanded their navies
because of the perceived need to protect their own merchant marine.
The spread of liberalism reduced this nationalist anxiety about
defense, as one dominant country henceforth provided security for all
seaborne traders. But over time the domestic foundations of the
commitment withered away, with the decay of American industry leaving
its naval power without much of its material raison d’être. There
are only 188 US-flagged merchant vessels of more than 1,000 gross
registered tons in size; by contrast, China operates roughly 5,500
cargo vessels in that category and has a fleet of some 57,000
industrial fishing vessels roaming the world’s seas. As the French
historian Arnaud Orain has pointed out, the United States is the first
empire in history that is a dominant naval power but has ceased to be
a maritime power of any significance.

In the long autumn of US hegemony, global interdependence will
certainly survive. But there will no longer be a unified Western
political community in charge of its direction. This should not come
as a surprise, nor need it be a cause for dread. Eurasian commerce
along the Silk Roads was a cosmopolitan and unifying force across
culturally and politically diverse states for many centuries before
the arrival of modern liberalism. The unusual preeminence of Western
power that marked the nineteenth and twentieth century helped obscure
the fact that, throughout recorded history, Eurasia has been the most
consistently dominant region in globalization.

When we speak of economic globalization today, what we are talking
about is pan-Eurasian exchange. In 2025 roughly 87 percent of global
container trade entered or left Asian ports and waters. Taken
together, Europe and Asia are home to 81 percent of all trade-driven
employment
[[link removed]] in
the world and account for three quarters of global maritime trade. The
real question is not whether this world will be connected or siloed
but what admixture of laissez-faire and interventionism its
participants will adopt, and how they will balance the benefits of
open access against the temptation to control its flows.

_NICHOLAS MULDER is an Assistant Professor of History at Cornell and
the author of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of
Modern War. His next book, The Age of Confiscation: Making and Taking
Property in the Creation of the Modern World, will be published later
this year._

_THE NEW YORK REVIEW was launched during the New York City newspaper
strike of 1963, when the magazine’s founding editors, Robert Silvers
and Barbara Epstein, alongside Jason Epstein, Robert Lowell, and
Elizabeth Hardwick, decided to start a new kind of publication—one
in which the most interesting, lively, and qualified minds of the time
could write about current books and issues in depth. _

_Readers responded by buying almost every copy and writing thousands
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_Subscribe to the New York Review of Books_
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* Freedom of the Seas
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* Strait of Hormuz
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* maritime trade
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* Donald Trump
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* Tariffs
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* China
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* export controls
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* economic weapons
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* History
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* Panama Canal
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* international law
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