This book—as its subtitle, “The Nature, Development and Role of Flag Discriminations and Preferences, Cargo Reservations and Cabotage Restrictions, State Intervention and Maritime Subsidies” reveals—is an ambitious but timely work, given the policies of UNCTAD, the present over-capacity in world shipping and the accelerating trend towards removal of the shipping industry from the flags of traditional maritime nations (referred to in this book as TMNS) to the yards and registries of the Developing Maritime Nations (DMNS). The book is of particular interest since it is written by a lawyer born in Uganda, who received his legal education both in Tanzania and the U.K., who firmly supports the developing states’ demands for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) and sees the need for a New International Maritime Order (NIMO) as part of this, but concludes that the fact that developing countries increasingly resort to establishment of national fleets by use of such traditional devices as state intervention, flag discrimination and preferences, cargo reservations, cabotage and subsidies, though it may serve their political aims within the NIEO, can have many adverse economic effects on them in the form of extra costs and over capacity.

Dr Odeke bravely, but foolhardily as it transpires, attempts to explain and analyse the methods used to effect this transfer from a multi-disciplinary standpoint, since, as he rightly says, the aims of both TMNS and DMNS and the problems generated by their present policies are as much political and economic as legal. Nonetheless, a great deal of the book does concern the choice of legal mechanisms for organizing the shipping industry world-wide and the conflict of legal principle generated by rival regimes. The reviewer feared at first that she was not, as an international lawyer, the most appropriate person to review a book essentially concerned with industrial management and ownership questions: these fears were partially allayed by the fact that many legal issues are discussed and that Dr Odeke’s final conclusion and proposal is that there should in the long term (in the short term he sees Joint Ventures and Multinational Shipping Enterprises, MSEs, as the answer) be established an International Shipping Agency (ISA) to run world shipping on the lines of the International Seabed Authority (also, confusingly, known as the ISA) proposed and elaborated upon in the 1982 Law of the Sea