Creating Global Shipping

Gelina Harlaftis is the director of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies of the Foundation of Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH) in Crete, and is professor of maritime history at the Ionian University, Corfu. She was President of the International Maritime Economic History Αssociation, visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and an Alfred D. Chandler, Jr, International Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Business School. She has published many books, including Corsairs and Pirates in the Eastern Mediterranean, Fifteenth–Nineteenth Centuries (2016) a collection coedited with Dimitris Dimitropoulos and David J. Starkey.

'Gelina Harlaftis has written an indispensable work on the history of our globalized world. Based on remarkable archival research, including unprecedented access to the Onassis archives, it moves seamlessly from the local to the transnational, from the world of the nineteenth-century Black Sea grain trade to the world we inhabit today. It is a remarkable achievement.' Mark Mazower, Columbia University

• 1. The European and Greek shipping firm; 2. The Vagliano shipmasters: creating a business empire, 1820s–1850s; 3. An international trading house from Russia to the United Kingdom, 1850s–1880s; 4. The Russian government vs. Mari Vagliano, 1881–1887; 5. The Vagliano fleet and innovation in ship management; 6. Merchant to shipowner: Onassis from Buenos Aires to London and New York, 1923–1946; 7. The Onassis fleet, 1946–1975; 8. The United States government vs. Aristotle Onassis, 1951–1958; 9. Innovation in global shipping: the Onassis business; 10. Diachronic presence: an epilogue.