Some ports are called free ports but were not strictly speaking free ports according to most criteria, while other ports pretty much functioned like typical free ports, but were not normally called free ports. One aim of this project is to see if there are different ways of understanding what a free port is, rather than by looking at their official title. This is a classical problem of typology. However, we want to look beyond this and analyse from different perspectives (geographical, but also through different actors and kinds of texts) the way in which port functions and global political economy were interrelated and developed. For more ….