Ports of Profit asks a simple question with uncomfortable reach. What if the most decisive theaters of the Second World War were not only beaches and skies, but furnaces, refineries, registries, and docks. It follows the hidden supply lines of wealth, where steel met forced labor, oil met marine insurance, banks met bullion, and paperwork turned persecution into process. It shows how wartime systems were repackaged as peacetime prosperity. Drawing on archives, depositions, and procurement records, Kaelen Frost wrote this book to clarify the money mechanics of war so readers can recognize how instruments of emergency become the routines of peace.

From occupied foundries and neutral vaults to textile floors, auction rooms, and allied procurement boards, the book maps an economic choreography that converted scarcity into margin and emergency into habit. It traces how industrial scale, legal finesse, and logistical certainty produced fortunes. How claims of neutrality became a service priced in ore, gold, and silence. How culture could be laundered as asset and asset as respectability. How trials and settlements translated atrocity into ledgers. How the peace that followed normalized the standards, contracts, and corridors first built under duress.

Blending economic history, law, and moral clarity, Ports of Profit reveals recurring mechanisms by which harm becomes throughput and throughput becomes position. State backed guarantees and government owned, contractor operated plants. Standard setting that advantages incumbents. Reflagged ships and restamped bars. Documentary finesse that makes extraction look like policy. The book closes by asking what guardrails of audit, provenance, competition, and memory we must build if prosperity is to be real without forgetting where its foundations were poured.

Provocative and meticulously structured, Ports of Profit is a field guide to the infrastructures of enrichment in wartime and to the inheritance they left to the modern economy. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how wealth moves when the world is on fire, and what remains when the smoke clears. As Kaelen Frost insists, understanding these circuits is the first step to building guardrails worthy of prosperity.

Who this book is for

• Historians, economists, and students of political economy who want a clear map of wartime finance and industry

• Business leaders, board members, and risk officers who steward supply chains, procurement, and compliance

• Policy makers and regulators working in sanctions, export control, and competition

• Journalists and researchers who follow money across borders, registries, and flags of convenience

• Museum professionals, provenance scholars, and legal practitioners engaged with restitution and repair

How this book helps

• Provides a coherent framework for tracing flows among industry, finance, insurance, and law during war and after

• Explains the mechanics of guarantees, procurement, standard setting, and logistics in precise, readable terms

• Illuminates how neutrality, paperwork, and legal form can convert harm into orderly commerce

• Offers case based chapters and discussion prompts useful for classrooms, boardrooms, and policy workshops

• Outlines practical guardrails of audit, provenance, competition, and public memory without pretending to replace legal or financial advice