Maritime Chokepoints
The straits and canals through which a large share of world trade must pass, what makes a chokepoint, and the legal regimes that govern each.
A maritime chokepoint is a canal or strait through which a large share of a trade flow must pass, because the alternative route is long or hazardous enough that almost every ship accepts the fee, the queue or the risk. Two conditions must both hold for the label to mean anything: traffic concentrates, and no cheap substitute exists.
The set divides on governance rather than geography. A canal is owned by an authority that sets a toll and can refuse a transit, as at the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal . A strait is governed by its littoral states under Part III of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, carries no transit charge, and cannot lawfully be closed to a transiting ship. That difference decides how each passage fails: a canal authority can cut slots in a drought, while a strait fails through conflict, armed robbery or a single grounded ship with no owner positioned to manage the recovery.
The first-order set comprises the Strait of Hormuz , the Strait of Malacca and Singapore Strait , Bab-el-Mandeb and the Suez approaches, the Panama approaches, the Dover Strait, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Turkish Straits and the Danish Straits, with the Cape of Good Hope as the routing node rather than a chokepoint. The full article will cover the definition and the tests, the comparative traffic and cargo shares, the legal regime at each, closure and disruption history, and the size classes the physical limits produced.