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From Diaspora Traders to Shipping Tycoons: The Vagliano Bros.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Gelina Harlaftis
Gelina Harlaftis
Affiliation:
GELINA HARLAFTIS is associate professor in the Department of History, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece.
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Abstract

This study traces the origins of the twentieth-century Greek shipping tycoons and their global business to the nineteenth-century Greek diaspora traders. It examines the distinct characteristics of a diaspora firm, which can be treated partially as a multinational or “free standing firm” with distinctive features. Based in the main European financial centers, diaspora traders were international operators who developed ethnic-religious networks with their own unofficial international market, enabling them to operate independently of the countries or states in which they were established. The Vagliano house is a prime example of a diaspora trading house that transformed itself into a major shipping and ship-management firm, paving the way for the global success of twentieth-century Greek-owned shipping. The Vagliano network integrated the Greek shipping sector into the international shipping production system by creating an institutional framework based on trust that minimized transaction costs and entrepreneurial risk and provided information flow.

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Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 81 , Issue 2 , Summer 2007 , pp. 237 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2007

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References

1 See Harlaftis, Gelina, Greek Shipowners and Greece, 1945-1975: From Separate Development to Mutual Interdependence (London, 1993), 9Google Scholar. See also Harlaftis, , A History of Greek-owned Shipping: The Making of an International Tramp Fleet, 1830 to the Present Day (London, 1996)Google Scholar; 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.

2 Curtin, Philip, Cross Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 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 Vertovec, Steven and Cohen, Robin, eds., Migration, Diasporas, and Transnationalism (Cheltenham, U.K., 1999)Google Scholar.

4 See, for example, Mauro, Frederic, “Merchant Communities, 1350-1750,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-distance Trade in the Early Modern World (1350-1750), ed. Tracy, J. D. (Cambridge, 1990), 285Google Scholar.

5 Jones, Geoffrey, The Evolution of International Business: An Introduction (London, 1996), 149Google Scholar.

6 In Merchant Enterprise in Britain: From Industrial Revolution to World War I (Cambridge, 1992), ch. 5Google Scholar, 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. See Jones, Geoffrey, Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; and The Evolution of International Business.

7 Jones, Merchants to Multinationals; see also Jones, Evolution of International Business.

8 Wilkins, Mira, “The Free Standing Company Revisited,” in The Free-Standing Company in the World Economy, 1830-1996, eds. Wilkins, Mira and Schröter, Harm (Oxford, 1998), 3Google Scholar.

9 Jones, Merchants to Multinationals, 10.

10 Jones, Evolution of International Business, 164.

11 Jones introduces a typology on British trading companies and suggests three network-based organizational forms. See Jones, Merchants to Multinationals, 160.

12 Hariaftis, Gelina, “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. Goey, Ferry de and Veluwenhamp, Jan Willem (Amsterdam, 2002)Google Scholar.

13 Casson, Mark, “Entrepreneurial Networks: A Theoretical Perspective,” in Entrepreneurial Networks and Business Culture: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Economic History Congress, eds. Moss, Michael and Slaven, Anthony (Madrid, 1998), 15Google Scholar.

14 See also Hariaftis, Gelina and Theotokas, Ioannis, “European Family Firms in International Business: British and Greek Tramp-shipping Firms,” Business History 46 (Apr. 2004): 219–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Ibid.

16 Casson, Mark, “Entrepreneurship and Business Culture,” in Entrepreneurship, Networks, and Modern Business, eds. Brown, Jonathan and Rose, Mary B. (Manchester, 1993), 44–45Google Scholar. See also Ioannis Theotokas, “Shipping and Entrepreneurship in Greece,” paper presented to the Economic History Seminar, University of Athens, 27 Nov. 2006; Syriopoulos, Theodore and Theotokas, Ioannis, “Corporate Governance and Takeovers in the Shipping Industry,” Annual Conference of the Multinational Finance Society, Athens, 2005Google Scholar; Theotokas, Ioannis, “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. Starkey, David J. and Hariaftis, Gelina (St. John's, Newfoundland), 303–18Google Scholar.

17 Casson, Mark, Enterprise and Competitiveness: A Systems View of International Business (Oxford, 1990), 80–81Google Scholar.

18 Ibid., 7.

19 Ibid., 43.

20 Greif, Avner, “Reputation and Coalitions in Medieval Trade: Evidence on the Maghribi Traders,” Journal of Economic History 49 (Dec. 1989): 857–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Minoglou, Ioanna Pepelasis, “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): 61–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 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 mer-chant 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.

21 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.

22 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 Avramea, Anna, Asdrahas, Spyros, and Sphyroeras, Vasilis, Maps and Map makers of the Aegean (Athens, 1985), 235–48Google Scholar.

23 Harlaftis, Gelina, “Mapping the Greek Maritime Diaspora from the Early Eighteenth to the Late Twentieth Century,” in Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks: Five Centuries of History, eds. McCabe, Ina Baghdiantz, Harlaftis, Gelina, and Minoglou, Ioanna Pepelasis (Oxford, 2005), 147–71Google Scholar.

24 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.

25 Harlaftis, A History of Greek-owned Shipping, ch. 2.

26 Ibid.

27 Historical shipping statistics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greek-owned shipping are based on Harlaftis, Gelina and Vlassopoulos, Nikos, Pontoporeia: Historical Register of Sailing Ships and Steamships, 1830-1939 (Athens, 2002)Google Scholar (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.

28 For grain exports from the Black Sea, see Harlaftis, A History of Greek-owned Shipping, Table 2.2; data based on Harvey, M. L., “The Development of Russian Commerce on the Black Sea and its Significance,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1938Google Scholar.

29 Harlaftis, A History of Greek-owned Shipping, ch. 3

30 See Harlaftis and Theotokas, “European Family Firms in International Business”; Harlaftis, Gelina and Theotokas, Ioannis, “Maritime Business during the Twentieth Century: Continuity and Change,” in Handbook of Maritime Economics and Business, ed. Grammenos, Costas Th. (London, 2002)Google Scholar.

31 Jones, Merchants to Multinationals, 6.

32 Boyce, Gordon, Information, Mediation, and Institutional Development: The Rise of Large-scale Enterprise in British Shipping, 1870-1919 (Manchester, 1995)Google Scholar. 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).

33 See also Craig, Robin, British Tramp Shipping, 1750-1914 (St. John's, Newfoundland, 2003)Google Scholar.

34 See also Siegelbaum, Lewis, “The Odessa Grain Trade,” Journal of European Economic History 9 (Spring 1980): 131–32Google Scholar; Herlihy, Patricia, Odessa: A History (Cambridge, Mass., 1986)Google Scholar; Zipperstein, Steven J., The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881 (Stanford, 1985)Google Scholar.

35 For evidence on Greco-Jewish collaboration, see Harlaftis, A History of Greek-owned Shipping, chs. 3 and 4.

36 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 48 0 pounds to metric tons of 2,204.6 pounds, 1 metric ton = 4.593 imperial quarters = 36.743 bushels.

37 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.

38 Gelina Harlaftis and George Kostelenos, “Services and National Economic Growth: Calculating the Shipping Income in the Nineteenth Century Greek Economy,” forthcoming.

39 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.

40 Based on Figure 1 in Boyce, Gordon and Ville, Simon, The Development of Modern Business (New York, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Interview with the Vagliano great-granddaughters, Sophia Kostomeni and Irene Matiatos Facon, in Kerameies, Cephalonia, 15 Sept. 2006.

42 Harlaftis, A History of Greek-owned Shipping, Table 3.6.

43 For Taganrog, see Kardasis, Vassilis, Hellenism in the Black Sea (Athens, 1997)Google Scholar (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.

44 Kardasis, Vassilis, Syros: Crossroads of the Eastern Mediterranean (1832-1857) (Athens, 1987) (in Greek).Google Scholar

45 “Will of Panagis Athanasios Vagliano,” Management Committee of the Panagis A. Vagliano Bequest, Panagis A. Vagliano Bequest for Philanthropic Purposes in Cephalonia, Athens 1932.

46 Christos I. Coutzis Private Archive, Spetses.

47 Charter-parties, Arvanitis Archive, E.L.I.A. (Hellenic and Literary Archive).

48 Logbook Anastasia, private collection of Elias M. Kulukundis, Athens.

49 Christos I. Coutzis Private Archive, Spetses.

50 1 chetwert = 5.77 bushels, 8 bushels = 1 imperial quarter.

51 Foreign Letter Book, no. 51,1901, Vagliano Archive, General State Archives, Archive of the Prefecture of Cephalonia.

52 Lemos, Andreas, The Shipping of the Greeks (Athens, 1968), vol. A, 153–54 (in Greek)Google Scholar.

53 Lemos, Andreas, Modern Greek Eternal Seamen (Athens, 1971), 380–82 (in Greek).Google Scholar

54 Insurance Book, 1898-1903, Vagliano Archive, General State Archives, Archive of the Prefecture of Cephalonia.

55 Spyridon Efst. Metaxas Lascaratos, ship's captain, Commercial-Consular Prosecutions (Athens, 1882), 10 (in Greek)Google Scholar.

56 Panaghi Vagliano to Basil Papayanni, 12 Sept. 1875, Syrmas Archive, E.L.I.A.

57 Christos I. Coutzis Private Archive, Spetses.

58 Foreign Letter Book, 13 Nov. 1901-04 Apr. 1902, Ledger Book, 1901-1904, Vagliano Archive, General State Archives, Archive of the Prefecture of Cephalonia.

59 “Professional Correspondence of Captain A. Syrmas with Nicolopulos, 1880-1881,” Sunderland, 17/8/1880, Syrmas Archive, E.L.I.A.

60 “An Assessment of the Greek Firms Operating in London in the Beginning of the 1860s,” Baring Brothers Customers’ Reference Book, in Catsiyannis, Timotheos, The Greek Community of London (London, 1992), 422–24Google Scholar. For the origin of the families, see Harlaftis, A History of Greek-owned Shipping, Appendix 2.1.

61 Chatziioannou, Maria-Christina and Harlaftis, Gelina, “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. Cottrell, Philip L., Lange, Even, and Olssen, Ulf (Aldershot, 2007), 13–40.Google Scholar

62 Turner, B. B., Chronicles of the Bank of England (London, 1897), 256–63Google Scholar. Roberts, Richard, “What's in a Name? Merchants, Merchant Bankers, Accepting Houses, Issuing Houses, Industrial Bankers and Investment Bankers,” Business History 35 (July 1993): 22–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63 “Bank of England v. Vagliano Brothers,” Banker's Magazine, 1890, 1156.

64 Letter to Messrs. Ch. Nicolaidis Sons, Syra, Greece, 9 Mar. 1902, Letter Book no. 51, Vagliano Archive, G.S.A., Cephalonia Archive.

65 Lemos, Modern Greek Eternal Seamen, 380-82.

66 Harlaftis and Theotokas, “European Family Firms in International Business,” tables 3 and 5.

67 Valdaliso, Jesùs M., “The Rise of Specialist Firms in Spanish Shipping and Their Strategies of Growth, 1860 to 1930,” Business History Review 74 (Summer 2000): 268–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Appendix 2. See also Valdaliso's, La familia Aznar y sus negocios (1830-1983): Cuatro generaciones de empresarios en la España contemporánea (Madrid, 2006)Google Scholar. A net registered ton is about 60 percent of a gross registered ton.

68 Processed data from Harlaftis and Vlassopoulos, Pontoporeia.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid.

71 Harlaftis, A History of Greek-owned Shipping, table 3.19.

72 Sletmo, Gunnar K., “Shipping's Fourth Wave: Ship Management and Vernon's Trade Cycles,” Maritime Policy and Management 16, no. 4 (1989): 293–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 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 Craig, Robin, The Ship: Steam Tramps and Cargo Liners, 1850-1950 (London, 1980)Google Scholar; also see Boyce Information, Mediation, and Institutional Development, ch. 4.

74 Harlaftis and Theotokas, “European Family Firms in International Business.”

75 A highly interesting approach to maritime operations and the managing agency is given by Casson, Marc in “An Economic Theory of the Free-Standing Company,” in The Free Standing Company in the World Economy, 1830-1996, eds. Wilkins, Mira and Schröter, Harm (Oxford, 1998), 116–21Google Scholar.

76 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.

77 For the Vagliano family tree see Sturdza, M. D., Dictionnaire Historique et Genéalogique des Grandes families de Grèce, d'Albanie et de Constantinople (Paris, 1983)Google Scholar.

78 See Foreign Letter Book, 13 Nov. 1901-04 Apr. 1902, Vagliano Archive, G.S.A., Cephalonia Archive.

79 Ledger Book, 1901-1904, Vagliano Archive, G.S.A., Archives of Prefecture of Cephalonia.

80 McCabe, Ina Baghdiantz, Harlaftis, Gelina, and Minoglou, Ioanna, eds., Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks: Five Centuries of History (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar, 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.

81 Lemos, Modern Greek Eternal Seamen, 83.