This book may provoke some discussion of our understanding of globalization in the past century. Those who argue that globalization occurs when there are capacious, integrated flows of capital, trade, people, and information across the world distinguish “globalization” from mere world exchange itself. The attractiveness of such a definition is its ability to identify precise processes and effects that come from nearly full levels of world integration, and to separate, as well, current levels of exchange from all previous periods, save the half century that preceded the First World War. Focused and presumably dynamic – in the sense that the particularity of the present world is explained – this perspective has become the “master narrative” of how we speak and write of globalization today.

My instincts as a historian, however, tell me that globalization cannot be simply this. Trained to think in terms of continuity and change, and of history in all its multiformity, I find more rewarding a looser definition that ascribes to globalization a process of world connectedness that goes back at least 500 years and that has varied in intensity and consequence since those first voyages of discovery. In this perspective, an event with such world momentum as the Russian Revolution scarcely fits within a definition of “deglobalization,” no matter how catastrophic it may have been for global market integration. In this book I did not set out to prove the market integrators wrong – my initial interest in maritime history lay elsewhere. But my research uncovered a world of unrelenting linkages across the seas, and it pointed to a more genuine dynamic to explain globalization’s progress across the twentieth century than the tightly-argued paradigm of market integration. In this dynamic three things occurred. First, retrenchment in one sphere was balanced by global outreach in another. Second, ruptures with the world order before 1914 prepared a more decentered globalism after 1945. Third, globalization, while continuous, thus also evolved, until a new, different phase emerged in the final decades of the twentieth century. These ideas do not stand alone. Others have challenged the idea that globalization reduces to market integration, or that world business ties severed altogether in the Depression years, or that the world was not becoming a more integrated place in the middle years of the twentieth century. I must also acknowledge that my own thinking on globalization could scarcely have advanced without the work that has been done by the market integrators themselves. But we do differ, and this book should be read in that light.

The difference is the right place to begin these final words, but it is not what has driven my decision to write maritime history as the history of globalization, nor is it the leading idea I would like readers to take from this volume. More meaningful to me has been the exposition of how local and global actually did come together by sea. My argument has been that coexistence of cosmopolitanism with local identity and commitment in all sectors of the maritime world produced connectedness. Individuals and companies so well linked into local and global networks, and so at home in either, provided a mechanism by which global exchange could be rendered routine.

This book is then better understood as an investigation into how the modern world has worked. If the topic has been large, the pleasures have come from figuring out the mechanics – in this case maritime ones – turning and meshing behind the sophisticated encasements of European lives and society. The historian’s tinkering – either poring over the pieces and then fitting them together, as I have done with the networks of ports and shipping companies, or acquiring, vicariously, the expertise of the ship agent – has been the basis by which everything else in this book has been assembled into a picture of world flows, or what I have called globalism. I began this book by arguing that the seas have mattered, and have revealed how through a history of world coordination and circulation, in times of war as well as peace. But in reality I have shown it through the professional and social slog of business trips, or through port competitiveness, or through what the Hansen & Tidemann agency could do for its principals, or through Otto Brix loading the Brasilia in a snowstorm. Much of the pleasure of the research has been turning open the files and learning what shipping and trading companies actually did day to day. Catching globalization, or world coordination, in action, is largely what this book has been about.

My other satisfaction has been the opportunity to write about change across the entire twentieth century, and what this meant for both lives and city spaces. At an early interview at Hamburg’s Elysée Hotel, Diedrich Döhle commanded my attention, and probably a good part of the room, as he told me how cargo smelled, or at least did until containers altered that and nearly everything else that had defined the shipping world in his generation’s formative years. This theme echoed through nearly all the interviews I conducted: the tremendous change these men had witnessed in their professional lifetimes. It was certainly not possible, unless armed with the powers of historical recollection, to walk through Liverpool, or to ride the Docklands Light Railway in London, with any sense of passing through what had been the site of two of the world’s greatest ship gatherings not that many years ago. Even in Antwerp and Rotterdam there was little physically in the city to recall port life a mere thirty years gone by. By the time I began the research for this project, an era that had lasted a century in shipping and port life had gone forever.

Historical imagination thus required not only comprehending how things had worked, but articulating what had disappeared, and why this mattered. This is why culture has held a central place in this narrative. The chapter on business culture, preceded by the portrait of intermediaries, was intended to show how things held together, but even more to serve as a prelude for what fell apart as the century ended. To capture that change I have pursued several paths. One was to observe how decolonization ended one set of maritime histories and inaugurated new ones in ways that bore little semblance to how things had worked in the past, but a great deal of verisimilitude to how they would look in the future. Another was to write about new men. Aristotle Onassis is perhaps the household name among contemporary maritime figures, but my interest in him was drawn less by his flamboyance and accumulated power than by how he rose with big oil transport after the Second World War, and, even more, by the peculiarities of his transnational trajectory when set alongside those of the Vorwerks or the Braunds. Identities and commitments and consequently actions, and representations, were bound to differ among men of such divergent backgrounds and moments in time. The flooding in later of many new men, the Arisons, McLeans, Seatons, and Chang Yung-fas, none with any special tie to the past, none of whom would have figured even remotely as “the right man” several decades earlier, caught the ripeness of conditions for thoroughgoing change, and how completely the maritime world was consequently remade. It was with some amusement that I juxtaposed Lawrence Holt’s instructions to ship captains with the business-speak gurus of a generation later, but this too allowed me to set, in dramatic form, the casualness with which traditions were simply wiped away.

Mostly, however, it was only necessary to wander through the cities and to talk to people – former ship company directors, port authorities past and present, ship agents and brokers, and freight forwarders – to gather the profundity of the transformation. The rest was simply the work of historical reconstruction. It cannot be said that the sociability of this milieu has completely died away. Certainly this is one research project I would gladly begin again. In a work that has stretched across the planet, and from one end of a century to another, the center has remained the lives of individuals and their firms. This book has been about the world they created and changed and from which they have drawn their own sense of purpose. For many who write about globalization, identity has become a problematical matter. What is often forgotten is how profoundly identity lies at the heart of how globalization has happened.