We know a great deal about how Europeans sailed in ships to the far reaches of the world, set in motion a process of world integration, and, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, established extended maritime empires. Strangely, we know much less about how Europeans circulated goods and people across the seas in the twentieth century, even though industrial societies, consumer societies, overseas empires, and mass travel could not have developed as they did without the European steamship lines, European ports, European merchant companies, European markets, and European intermediaries that made these things possible. Europeans did not monopolize the sea lanes, but they did control them for almost the entire century. Americans constructed formidable numbers of merchant ships during the two world wars, but the sum of the American merchant marine in sheer numbers belied its significance on the seas. Not until containerization in the last third of the twentieth century did American shipping pose a serious challenge to European lines. Japan built a very large merchant marine, but Japanese shipping integrated into a European-led shipping system, so that powerful growth made the Japanese fleet simply one of the largest of the world’s fleets, but a modest one when set alongside the combined numbers of European ships. Only in the last decades of the century did Asian shipping reverse this relationship, although even then, at century’s end, the largest containerized shipping fleet was still European (Denmark’s Maersk), and the largest shipowning nationality was equally European (Greek). Europe’s ships sailed to ports around the world, but most called at a European terminus, and in many cases at a series of harbors along the northwest or Mediterranean-European littoral. No continent possessed such a number of great ports as did Europe in London, Liverpool, Hamburg, Bremen, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Le Havre, and Marseille. Many of the world’s other ports were built or expanded by Europeans, who then directed traffic through them. This was most true of imperial ports in the British, French, and Dutch empires, including world hubs such as Singapore or Hong Kong.

Moreover, whereas these ports functioned as entrepots of regional trade, many of the goods that shipped out were mined or logged or grown on properties controlled and managed by Europeans, traded with or through Europeans, brokered by Europeans, and, at some point, marketed by Europeans. The river and coastal companies that carried people and goods into and out of these ports, and that joined local to world traffics, were mostly European. There were vital local and regional traffics run by non-Europeans, and at no point did Europeans possess exclusive ownership over the transport and commerce of foreign lands. Increasingly we are coming to realize the extent to which the medium of Asian economic development was Asian-conducted intra-Asian trade.¹ Chinese merchant networks, in particular, controlled short-sea or inland trading in eastern waters, and were persistent shipping competitors, trading partners, or organizers of migrant flows. One of the arguments of this book is that world transport and trade functioned largely through the overlay of one network on another. Generally, however, it was Europeans who assembled or interlocked those networks on a transoceanic scale.² If ports outside the imperial ring – in Latin America, for example – differed in sovereign details, shipping, import-export trading houses, foreign capital, and overseas markets and networks remained heavily European. Asian traders, including intra-Asian commerce, relied on a Western infrastructure of steamships and ports.³ Even the North Atlantic was dominated by European shipping. Maritime history, or the overseas history of travel and trade, was, deep into the twentieth century, a European history. Even when things changed, the history continued to be in large part European, either because the reversals were caught up with the withdrawal from empire, because of legacy investments and networks, or because the reverberations in Europe altered older shipping and port hierarchies.

This book seeks to restore the sea to the center of how we think and write about modern history. It is a book about how “maritime” Europe ordered the flow of peoples and things around the world, but it is also, implicitly, about how Europeans lived, because little of what Europeans made, sold, or consumed in contemporary times was independent of overseas markets or sources of supply. At its basic level, then, it asks readers to take one step backward and ask not what mass industrial and consumer societies represented for European life and culture, but what infrastructures of trade and transport were essential for Europeans to create and run such societies in the first place. It thus denies an old but enduring tendency to particularize between maritime and interior – or continental – Europe.⁴ It recalls that some of Europe’s greatest cities were, and remain, port cities, and that far from peripheral, these functioned as national and transnational connectors. All were outward looking, but no less inward oriented, because all survived off hinterlands that reached deeply inland not only along the spines of waterways and railways, but also along the fashioned networks of human exchange. Ports were accumulated infrastructures, but also conduits and wealth generators. They were, too, bases for merchant fleets and merchant trading houses by which Europeans spread their influence, power, and grasp outward. They and the passenger ships that called at their harbors were no less the means – until late in the century nearly the only means – that enabled Europeans to travel across bodies of water. The history of migration, business, empire, and leisure in the twentieth century can no more be written without the history of maritime infrastructures than can the history of work, production, and possession. Not even the great-event history of the twentieth century, although much of it was acted out on the European landmass, operated independently of the sea. This book also argues that the ability to manage the complex logistics of merchant shipping was central to the outcome of the two world wars.

“Maritime” implies all things related to the sea, and although it is deployed broadly in this study, its use is not intended to be all encompassing. Left out are navies and sea power, as well as certain nonmilitary sectors such as fishing or oceanography. Dockworkers appear only infrequently, not because they were unimportant to the central subject of this work, but because the material on them is potentially so vast that to include them would have made a long book much longer still. The central subject is those sectors engaged in transport and trade across the oceans, and for these purposes the net has been widely cast. The sectors begin, of course, with ports and shipping, but cannot be understood without including trading companies; the harvesting enterprises they created and operated abroad; the riverboat and coastal shipping lines that connected hinterlands with forelands at both ends of the great trunk routes; an appreciation of commodity chains and markets; and the extensive range of intermediaries – ship agents, forwarders, warehousers, migrant labor and commodity brokers, dealers, insurers, compradors, tasters, the waterfront services that included master porters and stevedore companies, but also local specialities like Antwerp’s naties or Rotterdam’s vemen – who provided essential services but also, in the case of agents and forwarders, acted as the essential coordinators in a well-constructed yet fragmented global system. Each of these, in its own right, requires exploration of how it worked, but the interest is in the combined effect, or the systematic calibration of all sectors into an infrastructure for moving people and goods around the world. Reconstructing how this occurred, how a maritime world operated and coordinated world flows, is one of the two principal goals of this study.

The other is to examine the exchanges between maritime history and the larger currents of the twentieth century. That is a somewhat lofty presumption, as this is a century still awaiting its “long,” “short,” or 100-year history. Indeed the project has scarcely been taken up,⁵ because nearly all work has divided with the Second World War. This study, by contrast, begins with a maritime system in place at the start of the century and runs to the year 2000. There is no claim that maritime history explains twentieth-century history. Frankly, it cannot. Nevertheless, war, depression, empire and its disintegration, the circulation of people and their ideas, the rise of a new leisure society, the evolution of modern business, and globalization are also maritime themes, so the overlap is considerable. One result, therefore, is to cross between the hard and soft halves of the past century in order to understand impacts and influences. Mostly the flow is in the direction of the maritime: how the fates of port cities, or of trading companies, or of passenger travel, or of the way the system worked altogether were determined by the broader historical turnings of the century. Yet it is also an intention to interrogate how maritime business communities could shape the way in which twentieth-century people lived their lives. Such influences are implied in the basic premise of this work, that a commercial maritime world provided the infrastructure for modern production and consumption societies. But the effects came also from other directions, such as the circulations or transfers made possible by systematic sea communication, or the revolutionary ramifications of containerization.

It is also the objective of this study to present a European history. That objective can be met only partially, because not all of Europe was “maritime,” nor can all of its maritime peoples fit easily or equally into a single monograph. Mainly, research for this book was conducted in the collections of five nations – Great Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium – because within these countries could be found the main ports of the continent as well as a very steep percentage of Europe’s merchant fleets and overseas trading houses. For other significant shipping communities, such as the Norwegians or Greeks, I have relied on secondary literature in accessible languages. Some histories, therefore, will predominate over others, but in sum the approach has been to write about maritime Europe as the overall actor in this text. At multiple points this has meant gravitating toward comparative history, or the effort to explain influences, staying power, or declines by setting one experience against another. The comparative fates of ports, for instance, has been one challenge to explain, and one means of measuring the temporal outcomes of historical change. Antwerp and Rotterdam retained main port status throughout the century, Hamburg demonstrated remarkable resiliency in the face of crippling losses after both world wars, London and Liverpool dropped out of contention following containerization, and Le Havre and Marseille, while experiencing ups and downs, never fulfilled the promise of positions established toward the middle years of the nineteenth century. To understand why, this study sets one port’s history against another’s to investigate how national contexts – but also the tensile strength of individual port networks – account for differences in port city destinies.

Throughout, however, I favor a transnational approach to a strictly comparative one.⁶ The transnational history of the seas is almost redundant in its expression, but an additional purpose of this book is to underscore the degree to which even in this most nationalistic of centuries European history was cosmopolitan. Europeans ran the maritime world and that world ran on transnational connections. Its basic component, networks, nearly always ignored land or sea borders. Shipping companies and ports were incessant assemblers of transnational linkages. Freight forwarders could not organize shipments without correspondents in distant lands. Trading houses, by tradition, sent their sons to train with other firms, often in foreign countries, so that professional cosmopolitanism was built into formational experiences. Expatriate merchants and agents had one foot planted in their new host territories, the other in their home communities. After several generations abroad some possessed dual national identities and could be as Brazilian, say, as they were German. Shipping conferences institutionalized private, transnational governance. At interfirm levels they and shipping networks exhibited the cosmopolitan, trans-state behavior today customary for NGOs.⁷ Maritime culture, while national in one regard, was no less cosmopolitan in another. British houses competed with German ones, but old ties also prevailed in the resurrection of German shipping and trading firms after their obliteration in two world wars.

This book, therefore, is about European businessmen interacting with each other or with multiple other parties, including non-Western business communities, rather than about competing national outcomes. Built into its narrative will be the dynamics of cross-national exchanges such as the dissemination of Western tourism and consumerism, or the transport of populations to harvesting centers in tropical lands, or the entry of European profit-seeking companies into the Hajji carriage trades. At a broader level, its transnationalism will capture the common European experience that cannot be contained within a purely comparative approach. The aim is to understand how Europeans, not necessarily British, French, Germans, or Dutch, organized and managed world flows.

The transnationalism of global transport, however, cannot be separated from local and national identities or realms of action. Port networks, if multinational, also coalesced around home interests and civic engagement. Shipping and trading companies were well connected abroad, but no less embedded in home communities. Maritime culture, while strongly cosmopolitan, was simultaneously impregnated with national affinities. The transnationalism that appears in this book will therefore be a transnationalism of interplay, indeed complementarity, between local and global that could be found within companies, port communities, and personal experiences, and that accounted for the ability of each to organize and manage world flows. A critical argument is that hybridity of identities and realms of action translated not into rootlessness, but connectedness and the ability to mobilize networks and resources at both ends of the local-global spectrum.

Such a perspective passes perforce into the history of globalization, and in this book I hope to clarify how a globalizing process did in fact proceed over the course of the last hundred years. Chronologically, I begin with the commonly held presumption that at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century it is possible to speak of a highly coordinated world. The most recent statement to this effect is Jürgen Osterhammel’s monumental work on the nineteenth century. Although our books are very different in time and focus, there are a number of parallels between Osterhammel’s approach and mine. Both concentrate on globalizing patterns and the networks through which they occurred. Both see European centrality as a basic fact of globalization, even if they might dispute when that centrality faded away. Both insist, nonetheless, on the indispensability of non-Western networks in the globalizing process, and both stress the significance of port cities, shipping, and merchants in carrying it out.⁸

In this regard the current, almost endless literature on globalization is a source for considerable reflection,⁹ but within it there are strains with which I must disagree. It is not a foregone conclusion that expanding transnational bodies or networks have obviated the significance of either state power or national experiences. In nearly every instance where globalizing processes can be identified, it is possible to locate a state presence or the advancement of the state. Again, what strikes one repeatedly in the history of maritime communities was the synergy they manufactured from world and home connections.¹⁰ It is difficult, moreover, to comprehend how one can write transnational history in modern times without first being conversant with national historiographies. Furthermore, there is no advantage in distinguishing between “international” and “global” as a means of explaining what globalization was or is. Such distinctions simply return us to the national-transnational dichotomy at the expense of focusing on interconnectedness.

In particular, I break with the definition of globalization as market integration on a worldwide scale. Nor am I sympathetic to the consequent static view that measures globalization in the twentieth century strictly against a Belle Epoque equivalent, or its dynamic doppelgänger that defines globalization as the world of difference by the 1990s.¹¹ The market integration approach, largely posited and held by social scientists, has the advantage of a systematic and time-ordered understanding of what can be labeled as true “globalization.” Where capital, labor, trade, and information moved fluidly across the world, as occurred in the decades before the First World War – “the closest thing the world had ever seen to a free world market for goods, capital, and labor”¹² – we can glimpse the arrival of globalization. When substantial barriers made such flows difficult, at times even impossible, we can identify an era of deglobalization. When a reconstruction process restored integration of global markets, or so rapidly surpassed all earlier levels of global interchange to create something distinctively new, we can grasp what is implied when one speaks today of “globalization.” That cohesiveness of perspective has made market integration and its chronological procession – the first global economy to 1914; deglobalization between the two world wars; and the second global economy from the 1970s/1980s to the present – the paradigm, or “master narrative,”¹³ by which we chart globalization across our times.

This view of globalization is not altogether as tidy as it might at first seem. Cultural historians and postmodernist critics, keenly attuned to globalizing influences, may align their arguments with economic transformations. Yet their concentration on identity, “de-territorialization,” time-space hierarchies, compression, modernity, or homogenization versus heterogeneity frame globalism within a perspective that ranges far beyond market integration.¹⁴ Moreover, market compression in the interwar years runs counter to the unrelenting reach, at world levels, of cinema or advertising, or the intensified circulation of ideologies such as communism, or the exchange of knowledge and culture that accompanied refugee movements, or continued population flows, or the growth of transnational and nongovernmental organizations that persisted through the 1920s and 1930s. Even a strictly economic approach produces a more complex picture of the supposed march of deglobalization. Business historians have already remarked the resiliency of international business in the face of closing markets. Mira Wilkins’s work on multinationals not only has pointed to the continued expansion of multinational investment throughout the interwar years, but has shown how the very act of restriction generated responses – jumping tariff walls, opening triangular trades for supplying markets – that increased as well as contracted world presence.¹⁵

I join with those who have sought to complicate the paradigm by offering a different interpretation of what we mean by globalization and its progression over the past century. My treatment of globalization begins, therefore, as a more expansive one, where globalization entails primarily global interchange and connectedness, for which integrated markets can be fundamentally constructive but not indispensable. Globalization, in this view, is about the exchange of ideas, people, and goods across oceans and civilizations; mounting world presence; and the hybridity that comes when local and overseas are coupled on a global scale.¹⁶ The degree or intensity of that connectedness, to use the formula of one major contribution to the literature,¹⁷ may change over time, but globalization from a historical point of view is about linkages that have a long pedigree, and that cannot be conflated with the workings or effects of what we call globalization today. Most of all I seek to return historical thinking about globalization to historians, rather than leaving it to the social scientists who have dominated the production of thought on this topic.

In this book, the history of globalization occurs in two ways. First, globalization is presented not as a meta-narrative with “globalizing” (in the French sense of the word) explanatory powers, but as a reality of relationships – in this case by sea – that formed the building blocks of modern societies. Those that I identify were not the only ones, but they were, as I argue, essential to the making of modern material culture. Regardless of how far one projects back into time the sighting of globalization, shipping and commerce lie at the center of that vision. If globalization preceded the Europeans, then a Muslim ecumene spread and cohered through mercantile networks on sea and land.¹⁸ If the origins of globalism are dated to the sixteenth century, then it was the voyages of discovery and conquest, creation of seaborne trading monopolies, and overseas migrations – voluntary and forced – that initiated the process. To place the first true global moment in the nineteenth century is to write about the effects of the steamship and its business organization into world-ranging liner networks. As one leading study of this period has argued, “The globalization that took place in the late nineteenth century cannot be ascribed to more liberal trade policy. Instead, it was the falling transport costs that provoked globalization.”¹⁹ Even globalization as we speak of it today, in an era of jet travel and real-time global communication, emerged no less from containerization. Globalization as a historical phenomenon must therefore be rooted in its day-to-day realities of shipping and trading. There were other dimensions to globalization that elude this reduction, but showing how a maritime world functioned to create global interconnectedness substitutes historical action for abstraction.

Second, I reconsider how we historicize globalization in the twentieth century. I agree with other historians that some form of global interconnectedness reaches back at least four centuries, and that we can identify different stages in its history.²⁰ I do not, however, agree with the argument that the First World War detonated deglobalization. My argument is that globalization, viewed from a maritime perspective, remained deeply entrenched throughout the century and took on new forms as the century progressed. Even as markets contracted, there were widening exchanges on other fronts. Thus in this analysis the First World War is seen as a stimulus to greater globalism in multiple ways. It confirmed the interconnectedness of trade. Its outcome was not only the rise of new world centers in the East and West, but also the expansion of European-driven routes and trades. War needs forced investments in ports that formerly had been backwaters on world circuits.

Between the wars, restrictive laws and economic crisis depressed older immigration traffic in the West, but to a certain extent this was replaced by refugee flows or the aggressive marketing of tourist traffic, while strong eastern passenger trades persisted. People and goods still circulated over the seas in high volumes. Trading companies transferred consumer goods to non-Western societies. Tellingly, Japanese penetration of Asian markets followed the same network patterns deployed earlier by Western firms. In Singapore and South Asia, indigenous entrepreneurs, like Marwaris, increasingly encroached on expatriate markets. Some shipping lines went over to imperial preferences in their home and colonial markets, but simultaneously introduced round-the-world services. Despite controls, global flows remained the norm and began to outline the shape to come.²¹ The Second World War set still more globalizing forces in motion. It put paid to empires but in so doing realigned globalism as less Eurocentric. Circuits diffused. Asians established an increasing presence in transoceanic markets. Shipping lines, once anchored to imperial trunk routes, shifted to cross trades that broke with homeland identities. Before the technological revolutions and deregulation of the late twentieth century, volumes and vectors of world trade reconfigured and expanded enormously. Supertankers and bulk carriers came close to eradicating distance as an economic factor. Containerization slashed transportation costs much like the steamship revolution of the nineteenth century, but it also systematized world flows and global logistics to the point that it was possible to create a new order of globalization.

For if globalization did not come to a crashing halt in the middle decades of the century, it also did not remain the same. At the end of the twentieth century it was considerably different from what it had been at the century’s beginning. That difference was partly to be found in levels of intensity, but equally in how global connectedness was structured and functioned. For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, the globalism of sea exchanges was Eurocentric, strongly imperial, and fragmented. Major termini began or ended with European ports. Routes, trade (manufactured goods for commodities), and expatriate firms were closely allied to imperial patterns. Few shipping lines or trading companies operated in more than one hemisphere or over two oceans. There was a world maritime system, but it was the composite of partial networks coordinated through ports and intermediaries, especially ship agents. Transnationalism was still anchored to local affiliations. By the 1980s and 1990s, the look, but also the internal workings, of sea exchanges had changed. Once Eurocentric, they were now multipolar, with three major centers in North America, Europe, and East and Southeast Asia. Former subjects reinvented themselves as trading partners, rivals, global initiators, and predators. Fragmentation gave way to global operators. Container logistics and global sourcing reorganized global flows. Liner ships that once had sailed between two fixed points with ports of call along the way now circulated containers through the cheapest points of production and assemblage before final transport to points of sale. Intermodality of land and sea transport, global presence, and flags of convenience reordered transnational identities.

Global interconnectedness, so interwoven with a maritime history in a century that advanced and often defined it, is therefore better told as a story of progressions and mutations than one of interruptions and new beginnings. The historical trajectory of this study will reflect this pattern: a global system of flows, in place at the start of the century, that remained constant and widespread while also metamorphosing until it ceded to an altered system of connections and exchanges at the end of the century. This is not the history that presently dominates our understanding of globalization. But it is the history that best represents the twentieth-century maritime world.

This book, in part, is also an imperial history. For millennia long-distance travel and trade benefited from the stability, protection, uniformity, and cosmopolitanism of empire, and global flows in modern times, until recently, did not much differ.²² This perspective should not obscure the fact that a considerable proportion of twentieth-century commerce occurred within European waters or across the Atlantic to North America. Yet global maritime circuits were, down to decolonization, just as highly structured within a system of formal or informal empire. At a basic level this arrangement was unavoidable, as European empires were dispersed across seas and oceans and accounted for a very large portion of the world’s land surface.²³ In the two leading cases, seaborne power projected across all the hemispheres, North and South, East and West; maritime empire by the start of the twentieth century was inherently global. In addition, despite multiple motivations, modern empire was, from the start, conjoined with trade. The Dutch empire in the East Indies was, in significant ways, a commercial project. The French empire had religious, military, administrative, but also merchant origins, and the French increasingly came to concentrate their maritime commercial connections on their empire. The British empire, as has been cogently argued, operated largely as an expression and extension of a gentlemanly capitalism whose “main dynamic was the drive to create an international trading system centered on London and mediated by sterling.”²⁴ Coalesced around a common public school formation, the directors of British overseas influence and power harbored in Whitehall, but no less in the City’s service industries: banking, shipping, merchant houses, and insurance. If there is a flaw to that argument, it is that in its urgency to emphasize the City over “Manchester,” it understates the role of other British service sectors, especially among the Scots or in Liverpool.²⁵

Structured linkages between maritime business and empire were therefore manifold. In the nineteenth century steamships had encouraged migration to settler economies, provided long-distance bulk commodity carriage, and set in motion the globalizing dynamic by which settlers opened new lands for production, shipped primary commodities back to Western urban centers, and imported manufactured goods from the homelands. Steamships had also made practical the development of mines, plantations, and timbering enterprises in tropical colonies; the transport of large, cheap labor forces from Asian lands to work these; and thus another dynamic of tropical commodity shipments homeward to imperial centers in exchange for the requisite shipments of machinery and tools. Underpinning these dynamics had been the sizable export of capital to formal or informal empire; in 1914 more than half of world foreign direct investment had gone to Latin America and Asia.²⁶ In still more symbiotic ways the expansion of maritime business had gone hand in hand with the expansion of empire. Transoceanic, coastal, and riverboat companies had built their route structures out of public service contracts, but these had also served to advance imperial power, influence, extension, and linkage. Trading companies had justified imperial claims and had developed the exportable resources of colonial dependencies. In return they had received protection, stability, infrastructure investment, and property rights.

The maritime world of the twentieth century (until empires fell apart) was thus, in good part, an elaboration on these earlier developments. Hub ports abroad concentrated among imperial harbors such as Hong Kong, Singapore, or Batavia, seconded by the construction of plantation ports like Belawan or the imperial rehabilitation of faded ports like Makassar. Passenger liners east of Suez carried colonial administrators; colonial officers; engineers, planters, and settlers; family members who accompanied them or who traveled out and returned each year for home visits; educators traveling outward, but also children sent to schools in colonial homelands; commercial travelers to imperial markets; missionaries; or labor emigrants, returning migrants, and pilgrims. Transoceanic travel to and from Latin America retained a quasi-imperial flavor: travel to European consumer centers or carriage of immigrants, seasonal laborers, and expatriate businessmen. Cargo flows were heavily colonial in their patterns: primary commodities homeward to Europe, manufactured or processed goods outward to the rest of the world. Cross trades ran counter to these harmonics, but they too serviced colonial economies by shipping food to monoculture or mining communities or carrying jute bags for sugar. Imperial regional, feeder, and trunk lines thus reinforced the Eurocentric and fragmented element to globalization. When empires broke apart after the Second World War, one of the first indicators of the transition to a new kind of transnationalism and globalism was the shift by former imperial shipping companies to cross trades independent of home port connections.

These shipments to and fro were managed by an expatriate maritime business community that was deeply embedded in formal or informal imperial territories. The principle purpose of European banks overseas was to finance “the movement of commodities and minerals around the globe.” Their names, such as the Bank of British West Africa or the Banque de l’Indochine (whose activities spread to China and throughout Southeast Asia), disclosed the regions they served. So intertwined were they with the cultivation or harvesting of regional export products that some banks were colloquially referred to as the nitrate bank or the sugar bank. Expatriate banks financed export trades, but they also poured in capital to develop port facilities or rail networks to transport goods to the harbors.²⁷ Closely allied were a host of shipping and trading companies, again imperially ensconced; their presence fills the pages that follow. All three – imperial banks, shipping companies, and trading companies – were in bed with each other, participating as founders, customers, and agents. Their interconnections with empire were legion. The fortunes of the shipping and trading company Mackinnon Mackenzie, to take one example, evolved out of a close personal relationship co-founder William Mackinnon developed with Sir Henry Bartle Frere, a senior figure in the Indian government and desirous of using Mackinnon’s steamship line to advance British imperial interests. Frere granted Mackinnon access to mail contracts and to other power brokers in London and India. From these beginnings, Mackinnon built the British India Steam Navigation Company, which sailed along the Indian coast and throughout the Indian ocean, and which became one of the world’s largest shipping companies at the time of its absorption into the P & O Group in 1913. Mackinnon’s trading interests grew to include a network of managing agencies engaged in trading, ship agency, plantation, cotton mill, riverboat, and wharfage operations based in India and distributed across British imperial outposts from the Persian Gulf to East Africa and Singapore. Mackinnon’s successor, James Lyle Mackay, subsequently Lord Inchcape, became one of the most important figures in British shipping and trading circles and was at one time considered for the viceroyalty.²⁸ The composite of relationships such as these dominated the world’s north-south or east-west sea lanes, excepting principally the United States. Even maritime business culture was heavily laden with the imperial connection, exuding the clubbiness of expatriate communities, their oscillations between national identities and cosmopolitan associations, their territoriality, their paternalistic attitude toward the organization of the world’s sea transport, and their virtues of trust that lubricated the networks and personal transactions of all nations’ gentlemanly capitalism.

Yet in this globally interlocked world, the networks mattered more than their colonial connections, even if the latter often determined the vectors they took. The problem with focusing too restrictively on empires is the danger of compressing the picture within a frame it only partially fits. Smoothing out the wrinkles that result is not so easily accomplished. Germany after 1914 possessed no colonies, but its maritime commitments were worldwide and extensive. Many of these can be ascribed to informal empire, but that concept too wore increasingly thin over the course of the century. The global flows that dominate this account cannot be separated from the colonial context that for the first half of this narrative encased so many of them, but their real history lies in the business networks at home and abroad that circulated peoples and goods across the seas. More than empire, transnational relationships and their principal medium – networks – are the motor of this study.

That too is an old story. Fernand Braudel, in his classic work on the Mediterranean, argued that the sea constituted a human unit “created by the movements of men, the relationships they imply … ‘the sum of its routes,’… an immense network of regular and casual connections,” and the “the infrastructure of all coherent history.”²⁹ By the twentieth century the unit was global, but its infrastructure was still the sum of its routes, or the port, shipping, and trading networks that added up to world integration.

The networks were protean. Port networks were geographical, physical (railroads, waterways), and human, and the latter split into business networks, port community networks, or port operatives stationed in hinterlands and markets abroad. Shipping networks were route networks but also agency networks, or networked ties with shipyards, railroads, exporters and importers, port directors, harbor captains, custom houses, travel agencies, government officials, and other shipping companies. Trading company networks divided among multihouse networks, station or branch networks, distribution networks, route networks, financial networks, management networks, supplier and buyer networks, broker and dealer networks, networks of sources of information, and network links with indigenous businessmen who ran their own sets of networks. The overlap between shipping, trading, and port networks was so great that it was possible to speak of networks within networks.

The common element to all these networks was that individually, and in their ensemble, they processed the world’s flows. What was transnational, global, and imperial to this history was therefore ultimately a story of maritime networks and how they worked. This story has in fact been intimated throughout this Introduction, and it is the builders and operators of networks who appear as the central actors in this book, their creations as its central mechanism. The task has been not simply to invoke or identify networks, but to catch the architects in the act of networking, to show how maritime firms and communities constructed, sustained, and expanded networks, and then to seek the concatenation of networks, their gathering within specific centers, that explain the lines of force or nodal points – to remain within Braudel’s way of thinking –³⁰ that concentrated flows and directed them to focal cities or maritime hubs such as Hamburg, London, or Singapore. Power, wealth, and influence in the twentieth century were, to a very large measure, an outcome of commanding networks on a globalized scale. Because concatenation required synchronization, it is also necessary to follow the intermediarieswho coordinated networks and created a world system out of its fragments. Since maritime culture was constructed largely out of the cultural presumptions of network culture – trust, cosmopolitanism, shared identities, and codes – it has again been necessary to concentrate on networks. Networks too were the great conduits of knowledge, almost certainly the critical resource in the twentieth century. Historians and economists alike have recognized the fundamental role that learning capacity, knowledge transfer, or informational flows have played in innovation and market power. Maritime enterprise, strung out across the world, was always knowledge based. All the great historical switchboards – from Amsterdam to London to New York – assembled vast arrays of services and infrastructures, but at their core they functioned primarily as hubs of intelligence. Without access to information, modern shipping and trading companies would have withered on the vine, and global exchange with them. Therefore it will be necessary to return repeatedly to networks as sources of knowledge, and the means for passing it on.³¹ Finally, it has been necessary to follow the networks because when these changed, so too did nearly everything else about the maritime world. A history of the maritime world, this book is foremost about maritime networks and how they functioned.

Research for this book was primarily conducted in Hamburg, Rotterdam, The Hague, Antwerp, London, Liverpool, Le Havre, and Paris. Long ago I learned the value of business collections for excavating the processes of modern life. Maritime history is no different. For the worldwide circulation of people and things, the records of shipping and trading companies are unsurpassable, and in some cases close to insurmountable; the best preserved shipping company archives fill hundreds of linear meters of shelf space. The peculiarities of running an enterprise extended over thousands of sea miles have resulted in extraordinary quantities of correspondence and reports, especially the reports of business trips, and these I have mined as best I could. Ports, more spatially confined and verbally accessible, were, comparatively, less “document productive,” but their records too have been essential for grasping the history of global flows contained in these pages. House histories, often scorned by historians, have offered incomparable information on firms whose records, in many cases, have long disappeared and perhaps never existed. I have also conducted more than forty interviews with port directors, shipping company executives, and especially with ship agents and forwarders. Through the retelling of their experiences, I have been able to re-create the lived history of maritime business, its culture, the histories of professions rarely preserved in archival collections, and the immense changes of the past thirty to forty years. Needless to say, the wider secondary literature for a project of this scope has been indispensable. To be frank, my best materials are Dutch, German, and British, and, even though I am a historian of France, the subjects of these sources dominate.

The book is divided into two parts. Part One reconstructs how the maritime world worked until the 1960s; that is, until containerization revolutionized not only shipping, but ports, professions, identities, and hierarchies. This part is divided into chapters on the four key sectors – ports, shipping, trading, and intermediaries – and a fifth chapter on the maritime culture that pervaded and held that world together. Throughout, Part One has deliberately treated the first two-thirds of the century as a whole, because systems or patterns established at the beginning of this period did not change substantially until containerization and jet air travel swept them away. By concentrating on the static side to these years, and leaving underlying dynamics to Part Two, it is possible to bore into how each sector contributed to local-global connectedness, and how, combined, they did so in interlocking but also parallel ways. Part Two presents the chronological progression of maritime affairs and their historical exchanges since 1914. In this part, narrative fuses with war, depression, and decolonization, and most of all the history of globalism over the past century. Here is where I lay out my arguments about globalism’s steady advance on the seas and its gestation toward a new stage that emerged as the century closed. The final chapter, then, takes up the great transformations, the end of passenger crossings by sea – save a new concept of cruises – and the breakthroughs but also eviscerations resulting from the shipping of goods inside a container.