Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth-Century History offers a new framework for understanding globalisation over the past century. Through a detailed analysis of ports, shipping and trading companies whose networks spanned the world, Michael B. Miller shows how a European maritime infrastructure made modern production and consumer societies possible. He argues that the combination of overseas connections and close ties to home ports contributed to globalisation. Miller also explains how the ability to manage merchant shipping's complex logistics was central to the outcome of both world wars. He chronicles transformations in hierarchies, culture, identities and port city space, all of which produced a new and different maritime world by the end of the century.
• A new history of globalisation in the twentieth century • The first comprehensive study of the maritime world in the twentieth century • A trans-national history of networks across all the seas, setting European history within a world perspective
Contents
Part I. Networks: 1. Ports; 2. Shipping; 3. Trading companies and their commodities; 4. Intermediaries; 5. Culture; Part II. Exchanges: 6. World War I; 7. The time of troubles; 8. War and remaking, 1939–1960s; 9. Transformation.
Reviews
'This book opens up a challenging and audacious new perspective on the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century globalization through its focus on European shipping, traders, and ports, and the networks that linked them. The ambitious scope of the book, resting as it does on deep research in many archives in many countries, is refreshing and a model of how transnational history should be written. The nuanced discussion of the evolving relationship between the global and the local is essential reading for all historians of globalization.' Geoffrey Jones, Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Harvard Business School
'Michael B. Miller has produced a critical contribution to the history of the twentieth century, emphasizing the human dimension in the evolution of the globalized economy, through the impact of two world wars, the shift in economic power from West to East, the emergence of the Container, and the commodization of sea transport. In the process he integrates shipping, ports, hinterlands, business networks, and the wider economic impact of conflict, decolonization, and deregulation.' Andrew Lambert, King's College London
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