SHIPPING AND TRADE
FROM THE NAPOLEONIC ERA
TO THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
28th March 2009
ABSTRACTS:
“Business networks as global institutions: Greek maritime business 1700-2000”
Professor Gelina Harlaftis, Associate Professor, Department of History, Ionian University
/ Visiting Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford
From the Napoleonic era to the early twentieth century, the eastern Mediterranean
lands and the Black Sea came to play a protagonistic role in the international bulk trade,
and particularly grain and cotton, next to the Atlantic and the Indian oceans. Apart from
the formal networks of markets and businesses of the Empires and the States of the West
and the East that developed to serve international trade, informal business networks of
ethnic religious groups, also described as trade diasporas, acted as main agents of change
and transformation in the maritime regions of the Eastern Mediterranean. Greeks, who in
the eighteenth century were an ethnic religious group living mainley in the Ottoman and
Venetian Empires, formed a long-lived system of maritime business networks which, by
the twentieth century had become global institutions linking seas and oceans. The Greek
paradigm of business networks forms an archetype of successful co-operative structures
and mechanisms of family firms in global business. A paradigm of continuity and
longevity, as today's Greece's most successful shipowners carry this tradition where one
can distinguish the path dependence and path-independence of re-adjustment and
renovation. This paper will use the tools of maritime history, the view from the sea to
analyse the developments on land in combination with the theories and quantitative
methods from economics and sociology to draw the framework of the formation and
dynamics of informal business networks as global institutions in international sea trade.
“Grain, fish and passengers on British ships; early signs of cargo specialization in
the Mediterranean in the Age of War (1770-1815)?”
Katerina Galani, Wolfson College
The second half of the 18th century, until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815,
is a transitory period for shipping and trading in the Mediterranean. Evidence, from
British ships, suggests that the unique wartime conditions increased demand for shipping,
by interrupting the existing trading channels. During a period when freight rates along
with sea wages soared, the overall tonnage of British ships doubled. By the end of this
period, from the second half of the 19th century onwards, shipping had slowly evolved
into a stable, well organized and sophisticated business with changes happening in the
level of institutions as well as in shipping firms. This paper is an attempt to trace the
origins of these developments in the preceding period, when intermittent warfare
precipitated innovations in shipping. Using cargo data drawn for the Quarantine station of
Livorno, a British hub since the 16th century I will test the hypothesis of early signs of
specialization for British shipping from 1770 to 1815.
“The Battle of the Atlantic: British and Norwegian Shipping and the Competition
for the US Bulk Export Trades, 1850-1913.”
Lewis R. Fischer
Memorial University of Newfoundland
The liberalization of international trading regimes in the second half of the 19th
century helped to fuel an unprecedented expansion of commerce. The most rapidly
growing segment of this was intercontinental and was carried by merchant vessels. As the
first industrial nation, Britain was at the centre of world trade, but western Europe in
general was not far behind. Following their comparative advantages, these nations
increasingly exported manufactured goods in return for raw materials which could be
produced at lower cost in what are often called the "new overseas territories of
settlement." Among this latter group of nations, no country produced the volume of
exports that emanated fromthe United States, especially after the conclusion of its Civil
War in 1865. At the same time that the volume of American exports soared, however, the
US deep-sea merchant marine suffered a sharp decline followed by a period of relative
stagnation up to the First World War. This meant that a declining proportion of US bulk
exports bound for Britain and Europe were carried in American-owned and registered
vessels. The resulting contest for control over this trade triggered what may be thought of
as the "first battle of the Atlantic" as European fleets and a variety of cross-traders sought
to control these trades. I am currently in the process of compiling a large-scale database
on this subject. While it is not yet complete, I have enough data to see some interesting
patterns, especially as they involve British and Norwegian shipping. These patterns,
preliminary though they may be, overturn a few generalizations in the current literature.
More importantly, they enable us to see some reasonably clear "national" strategies at
play in this competitive maritime marketplace. A discussion of these patterns forms the
core of this paper.
“Shipping from the periphery: The Norwegian experience 1850-1913”
Eivind Merok and Espen Ekberg
University of Oslo
The nineteenth century expansion of Norwegian merchant shipping has received a
fair amount of scholarly attention. We still, however, lack convincing explanations of the
development pattern that unfolded during this period. In particular, existing research as
been too focused on macro factors and failed to account for the role of the actual businesses
involved in the expansion. In this paper we therefore suggest an alternative, or at least
supplementary, approach, focusing on the market positioning and business networks of
Norwegian shipping. We show how the ability to develop new niche trades, employing
both sail and steam vessels, were crucial for the continued expansion of the Norwegian
fleet in the last decades of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th century. The ability to
develop niche trades, and in some instances monopolize these trades, we further
hypothesize, must have relied on extensive business networks in key international ports.
We present evidence on some aspects of these business networks for a selected port.
“Trends and cycles in ocean freight rates 1837 – 1872”
Jan Tore Klovland
Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration
Newly constructed monthly indices of ocean freight rates are presented for 28 inward and
outward commodity-routes for the mid-nineteenth century, ending with the year 1872.
Many indices can be extended back to 1837, but in some cases sufficient data are lacking
until the late 1840s. There are several highly distinct freight rate cycles in this period,
most of which are common to nearly all trades and waters. The new estimates show
moderately falling trend rates of growth in nominal and real freight rates over this period.
There is little evidence that the new steam ship technology had any major impact on
freight rates in the decades prior to the 1870s.
“Variation in freight rate trends in the late nineteenth century.”
Knick Harley, University of Oxford
It is clearly desirable to have single index of freight rates for the nineteenth
century. At some leave, however, this is impossible since there were important
differences among the trends in various freight rates. Two important sources of these
differences arose because of the differences in the rate of technological change in steam
and sailing ship technology and because freight rate trends reflected various aspects of
the jointness of production of various shipping services. The appropriate index for freight
rates therefore will depend on the use that it is intended to perform.
“East of Eden Norwegian shipping in Southeast Asia 1880-1920”
Camilla Brautaset, University of Bergen, and
Stig Tenold, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration
The paper focuses on an understudied part of Norwegian maritime history by looking at
Norwegian ship owners’ engagement in shipping in South-East Asia during the first period of
thick globalisation in the late 19th and early 20th century. We approach the topic by utilising
qualitative and quantitative primary sources of three different origins; consulate reports from the
region, Kiær and Lloyd’s.
The modernisation of domestic capital markets, increased ownership concentration and
the contingency of international events, such as the first Sino-Japanese war, made it possible for
Norwegian ship owners to tailor the supply of shipping services through hiring out purpose built
steam vessels for time chartering. One of the emerging shipping markets in this region that
rapidly became highly important to Norwegian shipping was that between China and Japan – a
route previously dominated by German vessels. Hence, this trade will also be the focal point of
the empirical analysis in the paper.