Chapter 3 examines regional trade networks, drawing on archival records of import and export tax duties assessed in the ports of Veracruz, Havana, and Cartagena. Contrasting regional trade with transatlantic trade—which was larger than regional trade by volume and value and has thus occupied most scholarly attention—I show that ships moved between Veracruz and the Caribbean Islands and mainland littoral with greater frequency than they did between Veracruz and Europe. Shipping within the Mexican-Caribbean was also not entirely a byproduct of transatlantic trade, as we often imagine, but a distinct circuit following its own seasonal patterns. Focusing on seasonality and other “soft” factors, I argue that rather than seeing regional trade simply as a secondary consequence of transatlantic trade, we can see it as a primary means through which people in the Mexican-Caribbean world created material links to one another and participated in a common commercial system.

Aristotle Onassis was among the first in the shipping business to take advantage of global sourcing, and was instrumental in creating the global shipping business that reinvented the European maritime tradition. He was a prime mover after World War II exclusively in instituting offshore companies, with their flags of convenience, in the rapidly globalizing shipping industry. In the 1950s it was mainly the Greeks that used them; today two thirds of the world fleet flies a flag of convenience. In this way Onassis was a pioneer global entrepreneur. He conducted his business in the 1940s in ways that anticipated modern business practices, not least its globalization. Onassis innovated on four levels. First, he pioneered the modern model of ownership and management of global shipping companies, based on offshore companies, flags of convenience, and multiple holding companies. Second, he was the one to first open the United States financial markets to ship finance. Third, by building tankers in American, European and Asian shipyards, he contributed to the evolution of ship technology and gigantism. And fourth, he reinvented Greek island maritime culture into a corporate shipping culture.

This chapter follows the evolution of European shipping business by focusing on the Greek experience. There are four distinct stages in the evolution of the European shipping firm 1) up to the 1820s; 2) from 1830s to 1870s; 3) from 1880s-1930s; and 4) 1940s-1970s. Greek shipping firms in general followed the development of their European counterparts; this was the context in which the Vaglianos and Onassis shipping firms developed. Their success lay to a large extent in the fact that they were family businesses that retained an important connection to specific island maritime communities preserving a unique maritime cultural tradition. The Vagliano’s case indicates how from the first stage of the evolution of the sailing shipping firm they made the transition to the second stage of the international trading firm and then led the way in the third stage, to the formation of a ship management firm. The Onassis case indicates how from the third stage of the ship management firms a great leap forward was made towards the fourth stage: the creation of the new form of global maritime business in the second half of the twentieth century.