From diaspora traders to shipping tycoons: The Vagliano Bros

Business History Review

Volumn 81, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 237-268

  Harlaftis, Gelina ^a  

^a Ionian University   (Greece)

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EID: 34548569391     PISSN: 00076805     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0007680500003354     Document Type: Review

References (95)

1. See Gelina Harlaftis, Greek Shipowners and Greece, 1945-1975: From Separate Development to Mutual Interdependence (London, 1993), 9.
2. See also Harlaftis, A History of Greek-owned Shipping: The Making of an International Tramp Fleet, 1830 to the Present Day (London, 1996); this analysis, based on archival research, identifies the formation of Greek diaspora entrepreneurial networks in the nineteenth century and their influence on the evolution on Greek shipping in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
3. Philip Curtin, Cross Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, 1984).
4. These networks have become a vibrant field of study for economic, business, political, and social historians, sociologists, and economists. See, for example, the collection of papers in Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Migration, Diasporas, and Transnationalism (Cheltenham, U.K., 1999).
5. See, for example, Frederic Mauro, "Merchant Communities, 1350-1750," in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-distance Trade in the Early Modern World (1350-1750), ed. J. D. Tracy (Cambridge, 1990), 285.
6. Geoffrey Jones, The Evolution of International Business: An Introduction (London, 1996), 149.
7. In Merchant Enterprise in Britain: From Industrial Revolution to World War I (Cambridge, 1992), ch. 5, Stanley Chapman discusses the importance of foreign merchants in British mercantile development. Jones gives us a global view of British traders' activities and identifies the origin of important traders but still treats them as part of the British trading companies' group.
8. See Geoffrey Jones, Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York, 2000);
9. and The Evolution of International Business.
10. Jones, Merchants to Multinationals;
11. see also Jones, Evolution of International Business.
12. Mira Wilkins, "The Free Standing Company Revisited," in The Free-Standing Company in the World Economy, 1830-1996, eds. Mira Wilkins and Harm Schröter (Oxford, 1998), 3.
13. Jones, Merchants to Multinationals, 10.
14. Jones, Evolution of International Business, 164.
15. Jones introduces a typology on British trading companies and suggests three network-based organizational forms. See Jones, Merchants to Multinationals, 160.
16. Gelina Harlaftis, "Greek Maritime Business in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Paradigm for Comparative Studies on Family Capitalism and Diaspora Networks," in Entrepreneurs and Institutions in Europe and Asia, 1500-2000, eds. Ferry de Goey and Jan Willem Veluwenhamp (Amsterdam, 2002).
17. Mark Casson, "Entrepreneurial Networks: A Theoretical Perspective," in Entrepreneurial Networks and Business Culture: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Economic History Congress, eds. Michael Moss and Anthony Slaven (Madrid, 1998), 15.
18. See also Gelina Harlaftis and Ioannis Theotokas, "European Family Firms in International Business: British and Greek Tramp-shipping Firms," Business History 46 (Apr. 2004): 219-55.
19. Ibid.
20. Mark Casson, "Entrepreneurship and Business Culture," in Entrepreneurship, Networks, and Modern Business, eds. Jonathan Brown and Mary B. Rose (Manchester, 1993), 44-45.
21. See also Ioannis Theotokas, "Shipping and Entrepreneurship in Greece," paper presented to the Economic History Seminar, University of Athens, 27 Nov. 2006;
22. Theodore Syriopoulos and Ioannis Theotokas, "Corporate Governance and Takeovers in the Shipping Industry," Annual Conference of the Multinational Finance Society, Athens, 2005;
23. Ioannis Theotokas, "Organizational and Managerial Patterns of Greek-owned Shipping Companies and the Internationalization Process from the Postwar Period to 1990," in Global Markets: The Internationalization of the Sea Transport Industries since 1850, eds. David J. Starkey and Gelina Harlaftis (St. John's, Newfoundland), 303-18.
24. Mark Casson, Enterprise and Competitiveness: A Systems View of International Business (Oxford, 1990), 80-81.
25. Ibid., 7.
26. Ibid., 43.
27. Avner Greif, "Reputation and Coalitions in Medieval Trade: Evidence on the Maghribi Traders," Journal of Economic History 49 (Dec. 1989): 857-82.
28. Ioanna Pepelasis Minoglou, "The Greek Merchant House of the Russian Black Sea: A Nineteenth-Century Example of a Traders' Coalition," International Journal of Maritime History 10 (June 1998): 61-104, has attempted to apply Greifs "traders' coalition" to the Greek merchant houses of the Black Sea. The author, using secondary literature, provides a limited view of the "whole" of these merchant houses, such as the Rallis, the Rodocanachis, the Scaramangas, or the Vaglianos, which were really multinationals centered in London, not in the Black Sea, and disregards the production system of the network as described above.
29. For the identification, organization, and structure of Greek diaspora merchant networks in the nineteenth century, see Harlaftis, A History of Greek-owned Shipping, chs. 2 and 3.
30. Forty islands and ports in the Ionian and the Aegean Sea comprised a "dispersed maritime city" that developed the most important fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Greek historian Spyros Asdrahas coined the phrase "dispersed maritime city" to stress the unity of these islands; see Anna Avramea, Spyros Asdrahas, and Vasilis Sphyroeras, Maps and Mapmakers of the Aegean (Athens, 1985), 235-48.
31. Gelina Harlaftis, "Mapping the Greek Maritime Diaspora from the Early Eighteenth to the Late Twentieth Century," in Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks: Five Centuries of History, eds. Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, Gelina Harlaftis, and Ioanna Pepelasis Minoglou (Oxford, 2005), 147-71.
32. These are some of the first results of the recent research project, "Greek Maritime History, Eighteenth Century," led by Gelina Harlaftis and conducted at the Department of History of the Ionian University, 2004-06. A team of twenty researchers carried out research in the archives of Istanbul, Venice, Trieste, Malta, Messina, Naples, Livorno, Genoa, Marseilles, London, and Amsterdam, as well as those of Athens, Thessaloniki, Herakleion, Corfu, Cephalonia, and Hydra. The final product is a database named Amphitrite, after one of the Nereids, sea nymphs in ancient Greek myth; the database includes about 15,000 Greek-owned ships in Mediterranean ports from 1700 to 1821.
33. Harlaftis, A History of Greek-owned Shipping, ch. 2.
34. Ibid.
35. Historical shipping statistics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greek-owned shipping are based on Gelina Harlaftis and Nikos Vlassopoulos, Pontoporeia: Historical Register of Sailing Ships and Steamships, 1830-1939 (Athens, 2002) (in Greek). The name of the Nereid Pontoporeia, protectress of seafarers on long voyages, was chosen for a database of 20,000 vessels, sailing ships, and steamships, of the Greek-owned fleet. The data were drawn from twelve sources in Greece and abroad, including ship registries, customs archives, and the mercantile shipping press, in a research project led by Harlaftis, lasting six years and financed by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
36. For grain exports from the Black Sea, see Harlaftis, A History of Greek-owned Shipping, Table 2.2;
37. data based on M. L. Harvey, "The Development of Russian Commerce on the Black Sea and its Significance," Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1938.
38. Harlaftis, A History of Greek-owned Shipping, ch. 3
39. See Harlaftis and Theotokas, "European Family Firms in International Business"; Gelina Harlaftis and Ioannis Theotokas, "Maritime Business during the Twentieth Century: Continuity and Change," in Handbook of Maritime Economics and Business, ed. Costas Th. Grammenos (London, 2002).
40. Jones, Merchants to Multinationals, 6.
41. Gordon Boyce, Information, Mediation, and Institutional Development: The Rise of Large-scale Enterprise in British Shipping, 1870-1919 (Manchester, 1995). Before the 1870s the shipping market was unified. By the last third of the nineteenth century, the division of the shipping market into two categories, liner and tramp shipping, was gradually adopted. Liner ships carried general cargoes (finished or semifinished manufactured goods), and tramp ships carried bulk cargoes (coal, ore, grain, fertilizers).
42. See also Robin Craig, British Tramp Shipping, 1750-1914 (St. John's, Newfoundland, 2003).
43. See also Lewis Siegelbaum, "The Odessa Grain Trade," Journal of European Economic History 9 (Spring 1980): 131-32;
44. Patricia Herlihy, Odessa: A History (Cambridge, Mass., 1986); Steven J. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881 (Stanford, 1985).
45. For evidence on Greco-Jewish collaboration, see Harlaftis, A History of Greek-owned Shipping, chs. 3 and 4.
46. For weights and measures: 1 imperial quarter = 8 bushels. A bushel was originally a measure of volume whose weight varied from one grain to the other according to its moisture content. A standard equivalent of a bushel of wheat is 60 pounds, and of an imperial quarter, 480 pounds, according to the 1863 Mediterranean scale given by Angiers (E.A.V. Angiers, Fifty Years' Freights, 1869-1919 [London, 1920], 6). In order to convert imperial quarters of 480 pounds to metric tons of 2,204.6 pounds, 1 metric ton = 4.593 imperial quarters = 36.743 bushels.
47. Shipping was very important for Greek economic development throughout the second half of the twentieth century, too. See Harlaftis, Greek Shipowners and Greece, 1945-1975.
48. Gelina Harlaftis and George Kostelenos, "Services and National Economic Growth: Calculating the Shipping Income in the Nineteenth Century Greek Economy," forthcoming.
49. Analysis of the scale and scope of the Vagliano house's operations responds to the challenge of seeking out and reconstructing from many sources and many countries a diaspora of a commercial house. The Vagliano Archive is deposited in the G.S.A. of the Prefecture of Cephalonia; the bulk of it is made up of books and documents from the office of Vagliano Bros., which was managed by Panagis Vagliano in London. Apart from this valuable archive, information on the shipping and mercantile activities of the Vaglianos has been obtained from the British consular archives in the ports of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, from the daily merchant shipping newspaper of Marseilles, Semaphore de Marseille, for the period 1830 to 1910, and from the British Customs bills of entry for the period 1840 to 1910. Moreover, in every shipping archive I have looked at, such as the Syrmas Archive and the Arvanitis Archive in the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive, or the Koutsis Archive in the Koutsis mansion on Spetses, there is also material on the Vaglianos, such as letters, bills of lading, and freight agreements.
50. Based on Figure 1 in Gordon Boyce and Simon Ville, The Development of Modern Business (New York, 2002).
51. Interview with the Vagliano great-granddaughters, Sophia Kostomeni and Irene Matiatos Facon, in Kerameies, Cephalonia, 15 Sept. 2006.
52. Harlaftis, A History of Greek-owned Shipping, Table 3.6.
53. For Taganrog, see Vassilis Kardasis, Hellenism in the Black Sea (Athens, 1997) (in Greek). The Greek commercial community in Taganrog, which the Russians refer to even today as "city of the Greeks," is a notable desideratum in the historiography of the Greek diaspora mercantile enclaves.
54. Vassilis Kardasis, Syros: Crossroads of the Eastern Mediterranean (1832-1857) (Athens, 1987) (in Greek).
55. "Will of Panagis Athanasios Vagliano," Management Committee of the Panagis A. Vagliano Bequest, Panagis A. Vagliano Bequest for Philanthropic Purposes in Cephalonia, Athens 1932.
56. Christos I. Coutzis Private Archive, Spetses.
57. Charter-parties, Arvanitis Archive, E.L.I.A. (Hellenic and Literary Archive).
58. Logbook Anastasia, private collection of Elias M. Kulukundis, Athens.
59. Christos I. Coutzis Private Archive, Spetses.
60. chetwert = 5.77 bushels, 8 bushels=1 imperial quarter.
61. Foreign Letter Book, no. 51, 1901, Vagliano Archive, General State Archives, Archive of the Prefecture of Cephalonia.
62. Andreas Lemos, The Shipping of the Greeks (Athens, 1968), vol. A, 153-54 (in Greek).
63. Andreas Lemos, Modern Greek Eternal Seamen (Athens, 1971), 380-82 (in Greek).
64. Insurance Book, 1898-1903, Vagliano Archive, General State Archives, Archive of the Prefecture of Cephalonia.
65. Spyridon Efst. Metaxas Lascaratos, ship's captain, Commercial-Consular Prosecutions (Athens, 1882), 10 (in Greek).
66. Panaghi Vagliano to Basil Papayanni, 12 Sept. 1875, Syrmas Archive, E.L.I.A.
67. Christos I. Coutzis Private Archive, Spetses.
68. Foreign Letter Book, 13 Nov. 1901-04 Apr. 1902, Ledger Book, 1901-1904, Vagliano Archive, General State Archives, Archive of the Prefecture of Cephalonia.
69. "Professional Correspondence of Captain A. Syrmas with Nicolopulos, 1880-1881," Sunderland, 17/8/1880, Syrmas Archive, E.L.I.A.
70. "An Assessment of the Greek Firms Operating in London in the Beginning of the 1860s," Baring Brothers Customers' Reference Book, in Timotheos Catsiyannis, The Greek Community of London (London, 1992), 422-24.
71. For the origin of the families, see Harlaftis, A History of Greek-owned Shipping, Appendix 2.1.
72. Maria-Christina Chatziioannou and Gelina Harlaftis, "From the Levant to the City of London: Mercantile Credit in the Greek International Commercial Networks of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," in Centres and Peripheries in Banking: The Historical Development of Financial Markets, eds. Philip L. Cottrell, Even Lange, and Ulf Olssen (Al-dershot, 2007), 13-40.
73. B. B. Turner, Chronicles of the Bank of England (London, 1897), 256-63.
74. Richard Roberts, "What's in a Name? Merchants, Merchant Bankers, Accepting Houses, Issuing Houses, Industrial Bankers and Investment Bankers," Business History 35 (July 1993): 22-38.
75. "Bank of England v. Vagliano Brothers," Banker's Magazine, 1890, 1156.
76. Letter to Messrs. Ch. Nicolaidis Sons, Syra, Greece, 9 Mar. 1902, Letter Book no. 51, Vagliano Archive, G.S.A., Cephalonia Archive.
77. Lemos, Modern Greek Eternal Seamen, 380-82.
78. Harlaftis and Theotokas, "European Family Firms in International Business," tables 3 and 5.
79. Jesùs M. Valdaliso, "The Rise of Specialist Firms in Spanish Shipping and Their Strategies of Growth, 1860 to 1930," Business History Review 74 (Summer 2000): 268-300, Appendix 2.
80. See also Valdaliso's La familia Aznar y sus negocios (1830-1983): Cuatro generaciones de empresarios en la España contemporánea (Madrid, 2006). A net registered ton is about 60 percent of a gross registered ton.
81. Processed data from Harlaftis and Vlassopoulos, Pontoporeia.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid.
84. Harlaftis, A History of Greek-owned Shipping, table 3.19.
85. Gunnar K. Sletmo, "Shipping's Fourth Wave: Ship Management and Vernon's Trade Cycles," Maritime Policy and Management 16, no. 4 (1989): 293-303.
86. The conversion or merger of the sixty-fourthers into a single fleet-owning firm was called "consolidation" by the shipowners at the end of the nineteenth century. See Robin Craig, The Ship: Steam Tramps and Cargo Liners, 1850-1950 (London, 1980);
87. also see Boyce Information, Mediation, and Institutional Development, ch. 4.
88. Harlaftis and Theotokas, "European Family Firms in International Business."
89. A highly interesting approach to maritime operations and the managing agency is given by Marc Casson in "An Economic Theory of the Free-Standing Company," in The Free Standing Company in the World Economy, 1830-1996, eds. Mira Wilkins and Harm Schröter (Oxford, 1998), 116-21.
90. Among the first to compare Greek shipping companies with multinational enterprises was Christos Carvounis, in "Efficiency and Contradictions of Multinational Activity: The Case of Greek Shipping," Ph.D. diss., New School for Social Research, 1979.
91. For the Vagliano family tree see M. D. Sturdza, Dictionnaire Historique et Généalogique des Grandes familles de Grèce, d'Albanie et de Constantinople (Paris, 1983).
92. See Foreign Letter Book, 13 Nov. 1901-04 Apr. 1902, Vagliano Archive, G.S.A., Cephalonia Archive.
93. Ledger Book, 1901-1904, Vagliano Archive, G.S.A., Archives of Prefecture of Cephalonia.
94. Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, Gelina Harlaftis, and Ioanna Minoglou, eds., Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks: Five Centuries of History (Oxford, 2005), Foreword; Gelina Harlaftis, "Mediterranean Entrepreneurial Diaspora Networks during the Long Nineteenth Century," paper given at the international conference "Competing Networks: Greek and Other Commercial Houses in the Mediterranean during the Long Nineteenth Century," University of Haifa, 6-7 June 2006.
95. Lemos, Modern Greek Eternal Seamen, 83.