IntroductionIn 1893, Panagi Vagliano foresaw the future of Greek shipping. In an interview conducted in his office in London and published in a Greek newspaper, a reporter described a casual and confident Vagliano, his "right leg folded on his left one, as he usually did, looking towards the window with a childish laugh." Vagliano told the reporter, "I imagine the Greek steam shipping colossal and the Greek shipowner so big that you cannot imagine." 1 When Vagliano gave this interview, Greek nationals owned only 1 percent of the world's shipping fleet. Eighty years later he was proved right: by the 1970s, Greeks owned the largest fleet in the world and Greek shipping tycoons were among the wealthiest people on earth. In the mid-1970s, the Onassis group of shipping companies was one of the world's ten largest independent tanker-owning companies, along with a number of other Greek shipowners. 2 According to the Review of Maritime Transport 2018, "Greece with 17.3% of world tonnage expanded its lead." 3 The Greek shipping industry originated in networked family enterprises dating back to eighteenth-and nineteenth-century island shipping companies. These small, family-owned companies evolved into international trading companies like Panagi Vagliano's, and then reinvented themselves during the twentieth century into ship management and global maritime business groups like Aristotle Onassis's. Creating Global Shipping follows these two leading Greek firms, Vagliano's in the nineteenth century and Onassis's in the twentieth, to explain how Greek firms evolved, survived, and thrived between the 1820s and 1970s, eventually gaining international competitive advantage within the shipping sector.1 Andreas Lemos, H εμπορική ναυτιλία της Xίου [The Commercial Shipping of Chios Island] (Chios: privately published, 1963), 407.