During World War I ocean freight rates rose to extraordinary levels. Using a new monthly dataset it is shown that freight rates can be well explained by economic activity, commodity prices, war risk and world tonnage in the period 1912 to 1916. In the first two years of the war part of the...

This paper takes a critical look at the hypothesis that the Crimean War was the main cause of the surge in ocean freight rates in the first part of the 1850s. The analysis is based on newly constructed monthly data on world freight rates in the 1850s. A new type of freight rate index, referred...