The plate
Presentation renders; photographs follow with the first printing.
Chokepoint Leverage
The Strait of Hormuz — a fifth of the world’s oil through one narrow door
Printed to order; dispatches in 2–3 working days. $9.95 flat US shipping. A plate damaged in transit is reprinted free.
The pattern
The Persian Gulf holds the densest concentration of exportable oil on Earth, and every barrel that leaves by sea passes one door: the Strait of Hormuz, about 39 kilometres wide between Iran and Oman. The plate frames both gulfs so the pinch does the arguing — leverage lives in the narrows, and the narrows are small. And yet the door has never actually closed. The threat is worth more than the act, because the states that hold the strait also live off what flows through it.
This pattern also governs
- The Strait of Malacca — a quarter of seaborne trade through a channel 2.8 km wide at its narrowest
- Bab el-Mandeb — the Red Sea’s southern door — Suez’s traffic held hostage 2,000 km south of Suez
- The Bosporus — Russia’s grain and fleet, metered by Turkey under a 1936 treaty
- The Øresund — Denmark taxed every Baltic ship for four centuries — the pattern’s oldest fortune
- Panama — five percent of world trade through a fifty-mile ditch
The living map
Every printed plate carries a small engraved code in the colophon corner. Scan it and the plate opens as a living map — the story, the interactive atlas, the daily challenge — at cartogram.earth/p/chokepoint-leverage. Prefer a clean margin? Reserve with the no-mark option and the code ships on the colophon card instead. See the place in the atlas →
Shipping & returns
$9.95 flat US shipping. Prints are made to order at the press’s US fine-art plant and ship flat or in a rigid, double-walled tube, dispatching in 2–3 working days. Framed plates are made in the press’s English framing works — solid wood, glass glazing — and ship boxed with corner protection; allow up to two weeks door to door. A plate damaged in transit is reprinted free, from a photo — no return postage, no argument.
The edition
The Pattern Index is an open edition, printed to order. A cased Portfolio Edition of 250 — all fourteen plates, numbered, with a fifteenth key plate — follows the singles.
