Gelina Harlaftis has produced a magnificent study of two eminent Greek ship-owning businesses, placing them in the context of 150 years of business and maritime history. One owned by Aristotle Onassis, a celebrity business magnate whose public notoriety was exceeded by his skill and success in his chosen profession. Much of Onassis's fabulous wealth flowed from his aggressive and timely investments in oil tankers. The other owned by the Vagliano brothers, Mari, Andrea, and Panagi. The Vaglianos are mostly unknown today but are an excellent nineteenth-century counterpart to Onassis. Their commercial empire was founded on shipping grain from the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to Mediterranean and northern European ports.
Harlaftis is a prolific and eminent scholar of the history of the shipping industry, and of Greek shipping in particular. The book draws on her decades of experience in the field. The breadth of painstaking archival investigation that went into this study is awe inspiring. Harlaftis has literally traveled the world. In pursuit of the Vagliano brothers, she mined archives in Russia, Ukraine, Greece, and England. I confess to feeling more than a little envy imagining her scholarly visits to the Greek islands of Cephalonia and Spetses. For the portion of the book on Onassis, she was granted unprecedented access to extensive holdings at the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation. Moreover, she obtained fascinating information from the archives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The extensive bibliography and archival footnotes in this book are outstanding resources for scholars.
In the first chapter, Harlaftis gives an excellent overview of the evolution of European shipping firms from the early nineteenth century through the 1970s. This is incredibly useful because it permits the reader to draw a direct line from the Vagliano brothers to Onassis. The Vaglianos made the leap from an “island shipping firm” to “a powerful international trading firm involved in trading, shipping and finance, as well as transforming themselves into a steam-shipping company during the last third of the nineteenth century” (p. 31). Onassis pioneered the establishment of modern ship management firms, constructing a web of companies across the Americas and Europe. The chapter nicely sets a framework so that the reader really feels like they are peering through a window on the development of shipping industry over the long span of history.
The next section of the book is a series of chapters on the Vagliano brothers, following their business development, and a very useful chapter on their fleet and their management. Next are several chapters on Onassis that have the same basic structure. The book draws heavily on some of Harlaftis's previously published work but contains a lot of new material as well. By juxtaposing Onassis and the Vagliano brothers, and placing them in the context of the development of the global shipping industry, the book is a major contribution to business history, maritime history, and global history.
Beyond their success, there are fascinating parallels in the stories of Onassis and the Vaglianos. One that stands out is that they were immigrants who worked their way up from relative obscurity. Mari Vagliano did not stay at home on the family farm in Cephalonia like his older brothers; he ventured off to Taganrog, a Sea of Azov port in the Russian Empire, and learned the grain-shipping business from the ground up. He then played a key role in his younger brothers’ acquisition of human capital. Later, Andrea represented the family business in Marseilles and Panagi did so in London. The young Onassis was a refugee from what is now Turkey in the early 1920s, and he made his way to Buenos Aires. He began in the Greek tobacco trade, followed by a stint as Greek deputy consul in Buenos Aires. He purchased his first ship at the nadir of the Great Depression, in 1932.
Another parallel is that Mari Vagliano and Aristotle Onassis were major figures in causes célèbres of their day: Vagliano was accused of customs fraud; Onassis was accused of defrauding the United States in connection with the purchase and operation of surplus vessels after World War II. Harlaftis treats the reader to carefully researched, detailed descriptions of these cases. Both Vagliano and Onassis ultimately prevailed (at least in principle) in these epic legal battles. Vagliano subsequently retired, and Onassis subsequently decamped to Monte Carlo. In both instances, Harlaftis credits their legal success to excellent local legal assistance, political connections, and economic influence, and she attributes their prosecution at least in part to misplaced nationalism and xenophobia.
As Harlaftis shows, these skillful, innovative entrepreneurs built their fortunes in the context of “exogenous” developments in different eras of globalization. The Vaglianos recognized the opportunities in the burgeoning grain trade that was spurred by large-scale colonization of southern Russia. The three brothers settled in key exporting and importing nodes of that commerce. For Onassis, the principle commodity was oil. The growth of the international trade in petroleum in the post–World War II years was immense, and Onassis had the vision to ride that wave by acquiring a large tanker fleet. Explaining how he did so and how he organized his operations is one of Harlaftis's crowning achievements in this book. Creating Global Shipping is a book that will undoubtedly stimulate much future research in business and maritime history.
