Introduction

Shipping has long been considered one of the most internationally competitive sectors of the modern world economy. The triumph of large-scale integrated transport systems symbolized by the super tanker is widely believed to have transformed the small shipping businesses of the nineteenth century into managerial bureaucracies based on massive investments and worldwide control networks. Formerly national systems became internationalized as the large oil companies turned their transport operations over to flag-of-convenience carriers. More recently, even the major maritime powers have established so-called international registers which provide reduced taxation and exemption from other national regulations for shipowners operating under this regime.

This standard account of the development of modern transport systems creates a paradox. Since the advent of modern shipping in the mid nineteenth century, certain small countries have managed to build up and control a disproportionate share of the world's merchant fleet. This essay concentrates on perhaps the most successful of these smaller nations, Norway. Since the late 1860s, the Norwegian fleet has on average ranked fourth-largest in the world. Given that over this period Norway had between two and four million inhabitants and was not regarded as a rich country until quite recently, this astonishing fact seems to contradict everything we know about the success of managerial hierarchies and large-scale manufacturing. The Norwegian achievement appears all the more paradoxical since it has not been based on the attraction of foreign carriers to a flag of convenience regime. Indeed, some Norwegian owners have instead fled the strict domestic shipping regime to register under the flag of other nations.