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The Business Trip: Maritime Networks in the Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Michael B. Miller
Michael B. Miller
Affiliation:
MICHAEL B. MILLER is professor of history at Syracuse University.
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Abstract

Global maritime business networks channeled the flows of people and goods for modern production and consumption societies. The principal instrument for constructing and sustaining these networks was the business trip. In the course of their travels, shipping-company and trading-company executives founded new commercial networks, established new routes and services, inspected agents, gathered business intelligence, and promoted new contacts and connections. These trips relied on a business culture that combined cosmopolitanism with national preferences and competitiveness with gentlemanly codes. Personal relationships remained fundamental to the networking process, despite a bureaucratization of business structures. An examination of the business trips of Belgian, British, Dutch, French, and German maritime firms reveals the centrality of global networks in modern economies, shows how such networks were constructed and maintained, and argues that face-to-face relationships continued to characterize business life deep into the twentieth century.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 77 , Issue 1 , Spring 2003 , pp. 1 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2003

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17 The following account is taken from HAPAG/1263,1264.

18 HAPAG/1263, 10–15.

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53 The Thomas and John Brocklebank, Ltd. company, a Liverpool shipping firm absorbed within Cunard or its subsidiaries between 1912 and 1919.

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59 Ibid., 24–41.

60 Ibid., 44–53.

61 Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 116–29; Saskia Sassen, “Introduction: Locating Cities on Global Circuits,” in Sassen, Global Networks, 1–36. For the continued importance of national platforms, see Porter, Michael, The Competitive Advantage of Nations (New York, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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