I obvs don't care about the war and the silly mainstream media coverage of it... (DOWNZAP ME, BITCHES!!) but I do care about a cool econ history conundrum about tolls and waterways

There's a looong-af history tolls and middlemen...and the avoidance thereof!

Even the Erie Canal is a way to unleash the interior of America's grain and cattle production to the world... though there, the tax and toll isn't imposed by a foreign power but by nature itself (thus, God??)

In the late 18th century a vessel carrying about 50 tonnes of wheat passed through the Dardanelles to modern-day Ukraine. To transit the strait with that modest cargo, the merchant Apaştaş Parasara knew he would have to pay the Ottomans a fee for safe passage. [...] The duty, called İzn-i sefînei, was about 300 akçe, according to historical records, a measure of silver equivalent to about $15,000 today. It formed part of an elaborate series of tolls and permissions that the Ottomans levied on ships traversing to what they considered their private inland lake, the Black Sea.

Modern maritime law explicitly forbids states from charging ships to pass through territorial waters. But that has not stopped Iran, 230 years later, from saying that it will levy fees of up to $2mn for ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a previously open waterway through which more than a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and gas transit.

oh no, don't break the holy iiinttteeernational laaaaw. It's like the whole point of tons of cities growing up around natural fortifications and toll-passage like that -> including the very Istabul/Konstantinople that opened the tale.

Since Iran has sought to exert control over the strait, parallels have been drawn with other narrow waterways that charge fees of various sorts such as the Bosphorus in Istanbul or the Suez and Panama canals.
Outside specific treaties, the only country to have exerted financial control over a strait for an extended period is Denmark, which from about 1429 applied tolls on the Øresund. Ships were required to stop at Elsinore, the backdrop for William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and pay 1-5 per cent of their cargo value to the Danish crown.

Stupid map they include, there, of my homelands, given that in 1429 that portion of "Sweden" was Danish... (and it remains, we might say, naturally Danish!)

this is kind of a diplomatic ridiculousness... yea, that's a toll/tax/customs duty-whatever-the-fuck-you-wanna-call it:

Experts suggest the Bosphorus, a Turkish territorial waterway, is the nearest comparison to Hormuz. It is governed by the Montreux Convention, which allows Ankara to charge ships not for transit but for lighthouse, health inspection and rescue services, calculated based on net tonnage. The revenues amount to about $250mn from ships that do not dock.

What makes the Strait of Hormuz unique compared to all of the other examples is that the Iranians “have only got one side”, whereas the other countries control both sides of the waterways, said Helen Doe, maritime historian at the University of Exeter.

“There have always been historical clashes because of these chokepoints,” she added.“There have always been historical clashes because of these chokepoints,” she added.

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