You're really missing the point. The volume of cargo carried by sailing vessels in the old days was orders of magnitude lower. Not even remotely comparable to the current global trading system.
Customers care about total cost, not just fuel. There is also crew wages, maintenance, insurance, capital depreciation, etc. Sailing vessels that carry useful amounts of cargo are much slower than equivalent motor vessels so all other costs go up. Fuel is cheap.
> The volume of cargo carried by sailing vessels in the old days was orders of magnitude lower.
Surprisingly, no, it wasn't. I'll slightly fudge the numbers and talk in terms of proportion of world trade that was carried by ocean-going vessels (because if you double the population then it's reasonable to talk about doubling the number of ships).
The world economy was very globalised in 1913. That level of globalisation in trade wasn't matched again until the 1990s.
We're only a little more global now than we were in the age of sail.
The British navy and merchant fleet was a wonder of its era.
Show your work. Without numbers, those are all just assertions. And the assertion that the world's economies were more globalized before WW1 than after the Cold War is particularly dubious.
> You're really missing the point. The volume of cargo carried by sailing vessels in the old days was orders of magnitude lower.
At the end of commercial merchant sailing, the largest steel hulled merchant sailing vessels were about 1/10th the cargo capacity of a modern container ship, but actually pretty comparable in speed, which is limited more by the physics of displacement hulls in the water than the propulsion method.
Historically, sailing ships risked becalming, but that is no longer a risk, with improved weather routing and backup engines that allow them continue at full speed if the wind dies.
Considering that the cost of modern shipping is 50-60% fuel cost alone, and that in principle with modern tech sailing vessels won't require large crews, it is not clear to me that it can't be economically viable nowadays even at the scales already possible a century ago, nor that it would be impossible to develop tech to scale merchant sailing up to modern container ship sizes.
Customers care about total cost, not just fuel. There is also crew wages, maintenance, insurance, capital depreciation, etc. Sailing vessels that carry useful amounts of cargo are much slower than equivalent motor vessels so all other costs go up. Fuel is cheap.