The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Another remarkable example of vigorous participation in maritime trade is provided by the Greeks. In the nineteenth century the term ‘Greek’ is best used as an ethnic label, or rather as the ethnic descriptor of groups of families from quite restricted areas within what would now be called Greece, since some regions, such as the Ionian Islands, did not belong to the emerging Greek state, and Greeks were active in ports far beyond Greece itself, notably Odessa in the Black Sea. This is part of a longer and very remarkable story: in 1894, 1 per cent of world shipping was owned by Greeks, and by the end of the twentieth century that figure had reached 16 per cent (3,251 ships), making the Greek-owned merchant fleet the largest in the world, bearing in mind that the great majority of ships sail under flags of convenience – Liberia, Panama, and so on – rather than the Greek or Cypriot flag.38

  In the early nineteenth century, as Greek merchant shipping grew in scale, its focus was very much upon the Mediterranean, including Marseilles, Alexandria, Trieste and Livorno, and the leading families came from Chios, whose position in the eastern Aegean helps explain why the trade in Black Sea grain out of Odessa and other ports became a major interest. London was certainly on their radar, and the Chiot trading families had agents there, often bringing goods such as currants to Liverpool first of all, and taking Manchester cotton cloth out of the country for distribution across the world. But that is not to say that these goods travelled on Greek-owned ships; the most powerful Chiot business family, the Rallis, with agents in New York, Bombay and Calcutta, in Odessa, Trebizond and Constantinople, were dealers rather than shippers, and to move goods around they would often charter ships from outside their circle – indeed, they often took Austrian or French or British citizenship and played the role of consuls for various nations, just like the Jewish merchants of Mogador. Their business partners were as likely to be Odessan Jews or Lebanese Armenians as other Greeks.

  The Rallis, who claimed descent from Raoul, an eleventh-century Norman knight in Byzantine service, operated out of Syros, a small and nowadays rather dull Aegean island whose modern claim to fame is its sticky nougat, but which once (as its opulent nineteenth-century town hall suggests) lay at the very heart of the Greek trading world. In the years after 1870 power and influence shifted to shipowners based in the Ionian Islands, and they looked further beyond the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In the years up to the First World War the tonnage of Greek-owned ships overall grew quite gradually, but the number of steamships grew more rapidly – from just four back in 1864 to 191 in 1900 and 407 in 1914. Moreover, tonnage grew prodigiously in the first years of the twentieth century, from 327,000 tons in 1900 to 592,500 in 1914; in 1910 the Greek fleet was already the ninth largest in Europe, measured in tonnage, with Great Britain enjoying a massive lead – 45 per cent of world tonnage.39 After recovery from the chaos of the First World War, in which Greece was only lightly involved, there was sufficient infrastructure and knowhow in place to enable the Greek shipowners to spread their wings, and become a global phenomenon, while other merchant fleets, such as the British one, had a much harder time trying to recover. This left a vacuum that Greek shipowners, along with the Norwegians and to some extent the Japanese, were very content to fill.40 At the root of Greek success lay a willingness to act as a tramp fleet, picking up miscellaneous cargoes here and dropping them there, as they moved across the sea.

  V

  In some corners of Europe even more old-fashioned types of shipping than Cunard’s paddle boats still flourished in the late nineteenth century and beyond. The best example of this is the Åland Islands, lying between Sweden and Finland, and, since 1921, an autonomous territory under Finnish sovereignty. The capital of these islands, Mariehamn, was founded in 1861, while the territory lay under Russian rule – a quiet place for most of its history, but blessed with a deep port, and good supplies of wood for shipbuilding in the interior. Between 1850 and 1920 nearly 300 ships were built in the islands, and sixty more were bought from shipyards in Finland. The largest of these were tall sailing ships: in 1865 the Ålanders sent their first ship to America, and in 1882 an Åland ship circumnavigated the world, loading goods in Samoa. Meanwhile the islanders seized the opportunity to buy sailing ships cheaply on the international market, taking advantage of the shift away from wind power towards steam power, which meant that there were plenty of cheap sailing vessels (with modern iron or steel hulls) to be had at ship-breaker’s prices, all the more so once the opening of the Suez Canal created a new and fast route from Europe to the Indies; these ships had been built in as varied places as Glasgow, Bremerhaven, Liverpool and Nova Scotia.41 The result was the creation of a remarkable network of shipping routes managed by island-based companies, trading under the Finnish flag in timber, grain and other basic commodities as far afield as Chile, Canada, Australia and South Africa.

  These companies were not created by big-time capitalists. By far the most successful was Gustaf Erikson. He was born in 1872, had started his career at the age of ten as a cabin boy, then cook, eventually bo’sun, second mate and master, and he shared ownership of the first ship he operated, the barque Åland – this sank after striking a coral reef in the Pacific, because the captain did not realize that a lighthouse nearby was not functioning. Erikson bounced back from this disaster, and never actually believed in insuring his ships: ‘with so many ships it will be cheaper losing one a year than paying insurance premiums for all of them.’42 During his career he owned twenty-nine ships, and was operating twenty of them around 1930. He knew his ships intimately and kept control of every aspect of the voyage from his office in the Åland Islands, specializing in grain shipments. He had no interest in being liked, paid the lowest wages he could, and was dedicated to making his business succeed; but for a couple of decades he was the respected head of a remarkable, worldwide, operation linking the Baltic to the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific and the Southern or Antarctic Ocean.

  Shipping grain from the opposite side of the world on sailing vessels might not seem to be sound business, especially since many ships sailed out on ballast, for lack of goods to sell in Australia. But the prevailing winds enabled sailing ships to cover the distance to Australia at a comparable speed to steamboats, wafted straight through the oceans without the need to refuel that the steamships faced. These journeys are especially impressive because they were voyages right round the world with just one major stop, in Australia: the normal route took the windjammers round the top of Scotland and out across the Atlantic, past the Cape Verde Islands and towards the coast of Brazil, from where, in classic mode, they sought out the winds that would carry them past the Cape of Good Hope and across the wide expanse of the southern Indian Ocean to Spencer Gulf in South Australia. This stretch of water is separated from Adelaide Bay by a neck of land, and port facilities were very basic, a far cry from the bustle of Melbourne, Sydney or even Adelaide. On the other hand, Spencer Bay lay much closer to the sources of grain, and using sailing vessels, which comfortably negotiated the winds and currents of the bay, avoided the nuisance of having to hump the grain a hundred miles or so to Adelaide for collection by steamers. Loading their grain there, they then headed south of New Zealand towards Cape Horn, which was generally much more manageable when travelling eastwards out of the Pacific than in the other direction: Eric Newby reported rain and snow as he rounded the cape aboard Erikson’s fast windjammer the Moshulu in 1939, but he also says that ‘the sea was not rough but there was a tremendous see-saw motion of the water’, and it was ‘bitterly cold’. After that the windjammers wended their way along a twisting route north through the Atlantic to Falmouth in Cornwall or Cobh (Queenstown) in southern Ireland. These were the ‘ports of orders’, where the captain would receive instructions about who had bought the grain (for it was sold in advance, and sometimes resold and re-resold) and where he should take the ship for unloading. This could be Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow, Dublin or another British or Irish port. On final arrival they unloaded their cargo of grain, which
was a slow process as the grain was loaded in bags – as many as 50,000 on one windjammer.43

  The Ålanders took great pride in these voyages: during the 1930s the windjammers raced one another from Australia to the British Isles, the record being eighty-three days in 1933, with the wooden spoon going to another ship which took almost twice as long.44 There was also a practical side to these races: late arrival would mean that there was no time to return to the Åland Islands and see one’s family before the ship had to set out yet again for Australia. Ships in Erikson’s fleet were known for the relatively good quality of food aboard, and even attracted a small number of passengers.45 Although there were competitors, including German and Swedish windjammers, the success of Erikson’s trading fleet marks it out as something special.

  These operations came to an end with the outbreak of war in 1939, and only revived briefly after the war ended. Overall, what is impressive about the Ålander shipping network is the way the islanders were able to insert themselves in the grain trade of Britain and Ireland, coming in as complete outsiders with old-fashioned technology that proved its true worth. Little remains today: one impressive and lovingly preserved windjammer, the Pommern, forms part of the Åland Maritime Museum in Mariehamn, while the German-built Passat, acquired by Erikson in 1932 and kept in use until 1949, is now used as a training ship for young people, standing immobilized in the river mouth that leads from Travemünde to Lübeck.

  50

  War and Peace, and More War

  I

  Historians only began to write about ‘globalization’ from the 1990s onwards, and they by no means agree about its meaning and applicability. It is hard to dissent from those economic historians who see the concept as a red herring: if it can mean so many things, it is hardly likely that a debate about ‘when did globalization begin?’ will produce satisfactory results.1 Was the Greco-Roman trade route that linked Egypt to south India and beyond a sign that some form of globalization could be found as early as the first century AD? It makes most sense to apply the term when one can see how the economy of regions very far apart physically became interdependent, as, for instance, when potters in central China went out of their way to meet the requests made by purchasers of their goods in Holland or Denmark for specific designs. Even then, some trades were more ‘global’ than others: the vast scale and reach of the Roman pepper trade, the Chinese porcelain trade, the sugar trade or the tea trade are good examples of how trading connections were all-encompassing, affecting not just elites but people of modest station, including artisans and slaves. This might be described, then, as a process of economic integration across large spaces. And yet, whatever claims are made for the centuries before the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the global integration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is an altogether more complex phenomenon. Early in the twentieth century observers insisted that ‘the railway, the steamship and the telegraph are rapidly mobilizing the peoples of the earth’.2 The revolution in communications took place not just at sea, but in ways of reaching the seaports from which the steamships set out; and it was accompanied by other ways of communicating across the sea, beginning with the intercontinental cables that have already been mentioned.

  For the economic historian Kevin O’Rourke, ‘one indication that markets are integrated is when they have prices that are correlated with each other.’ Looking at the transatlantic wheat trade around 1900, and analysing the gap in prices between wheat put on sale in Britain and wheat put on sale in North America, he has concluded that a remarkable degree of globalization can be observed at the start of the twentieth century. Partly, this was the result of the use of steamships to transport goods, and a fall in overall shipping costs. British demand for American wheat ‘exploded’ (he says) at the time of the First World War. The war, however, marked the end of a period of worldwide economic convergence, and only after the next world war did the process of integration resume successfully, as controls on the movement of capital were relaxed under pressure from markets. From the human perspective the late nineteenth century was a period of free movement, another possible indication of globalization, but early in the twentieth century this was challenged by restrictions imposed – not necessarily for economic reasons – by a number of governments, notably that of the United States, which forgot the words written on the Statue of Liberty.3 These arguments, cogent as they are, do depend on a particular definition of globalization, and the new globalization of the years around 2000, based on the astonishing technological achievements of the computer age, undoubtedly has a different character to the globalization visible around 1900.

  Yet the twentieth century saw a complete transformation in the character of ocean shipping, with the development of cruise lines at the start of the century, the loss of passenger services once jet traffic across the oceans had become safe, and, most importantly, the container revolution, which made it possible to send goods through ports without any need to unload them there, one consequence of which was the rise of new or revived ports such as Rotterdam and Felixstowe and the eclipse of old ones such as Liverpool and London. As the scale of maritime trade grew exponentially, the lives of people all around the world, mostly far from sea coasts, were decisively transformed.

  These changes cannot be understood without taking into account railways as well as ports. The increasing ease with which goods could be transported from the interior, added to their position near the mouth of river systems that reached deep into Europe, gave Hamburg, Antwerp and Rotterdam distinct advantages at the end of the nineteenth century, all the more so when the Dutch built a new channel out to the sea. The Belgian solution was to create what is still the densest railway network in Europe.4 Not for nothing is one of the most magnificent buildings in Antwerp its railway station. The benefits for Belgium and Holland were almost immeasurable, as they became, along with Hamburg, the exit points for the products of German heavy industry – as Rotterdam still remains. Two small and, by this time, not particularly prosperous countries were thus given an enormous economic fillip.5 Rotterdam was better placed for access to the urban centres and factories of western Germany, whereas Hamburg was more dependent on eastern Germany, and lands beyond that were more lightly industrialized, or not industrialized at all. However, Hamburg was a busy industrial centre in its own right, with a busy smelting industry and a population that approached 2,000,000 around the time Hitler came to power.

  The trading links of Hamburg reached as far as Chile, where the trading company of Vorwerk was already doing business in 1847, while there were also very intense links with Brazil and Argentina. In 1924 a substantial office block known as the Chilehaus was built in Hamburg in the avant-garde style known as Brick Expressionism.6 Not to be outdone, the Dutch invested very heavily in Rotterdam, dredging new channels and constructing large basins where ships could moor and unload.7 Intensely competitive, the three ports improved their facilities in leaps and bounds, determined to attract the largest volume of traffic possible; and ever greater port capacity stimulated companies such as Vorwerk as they worked hard to increase the volume of trade with South America, South Africa and the Far East.

  Although New York was also a very successful port, handling a comparable quantity of goods, the northern European ports, taken together, dominated maritime traffic around the world. This becomes even clearer when the role of Great Britain is taken into account: over 8,500 steamships in 1914, 19,000,000 gross tonnage, two fifths of world tonnage. London retained its role as the largest port in Europe throughout the first half of the twentieth century, but the measuring stick is the physical extent of the port rather than the volume of goods it handled. Still, at the start of the century, especially when Liverpool is brought into the calculations, the dominance of Great Britain at sea was impossible to challenge. It had the largest and most effective navy; it had the largest and most successful merchant marine; it was home to extremely prestigious passenger lines, notwithstanding the growth
of the Holland–Amerika Line and German firm HAPAG, which was larger than any other shipping company anywhere in the world on the eve of the First World War, boasting a million-ton fleet.8 All this already disturbed the Germans in the decades before war broke out. Admiral von Tirpitz was determined to build a fleet that would outclass the British one, declaring in 1897 that ‘for Germany at the moment the greatest enemy at sea is England’ – für Deutschland ist zur Zeit der gefährlichste Gegner zur See England.9 However, it might be argued that England only became an enemy because Tirpitz wished it so.

  II

  One can look at the maritime history of the two world wars from many perspectives, most obviously that of naval warfare. The perspective that will be adopted here is that of the shipping companies, particularly those based in Britain such as the Blue Funnel Line, Cunard and P&O. This enables one to see how war brought the shipping industry both disaster and profit; and a comparison with what came before and what came after conflict helps explain the survival, crises and regeneration of these firms. Although the First World War massively disrupted Britain’s overseas trade, the attacks by U-boats on British shipping had less effect than the continuing command of the seas by British fleets, which left Germany struggling to obtain the goods it needed for its war effort; Germany was in effect subject to a maritime blockade; and Britain, a country whose ability to supply itself depended even more heavily on access to the sea, continued to rule the waves; Britain imported 79 per cent of its grain and 40 per cent of its meat in 1914, while some products such as sugar were still produced entirely overseas. The British government reserved the right to requisition merchant ships for military use, and gradually applied this rule more stringently, but it was obvious that the major role of merchant shipping would have to be the provisioning of Great Britain, including the carriage of large quantities of wheat from Canada and the United States. If anything, the shipping companies were accused of making excessive profits out of the war, partly through the increased freight charges they began to apply. Some companies, such as the Blue Funnel Line of Liverpool, saw their profits soar and suffered relatively minor losses; Cunard doubled the tonnage of its fleet between 1909 and 1919, and its assets soared towards £15,000,000. Even so, one third of Britain’s tonnage disappeared under the waves, particularly after the Germans developed effective U-boats, the carriers of deadly torpedoes. ‘Damned un-English’ was the verdict of a British admiral on the use of boats that hid under the surface of the sea. They were not the only threat: enemy mines stood in the way of merchant shipping.10