Besides mercantile, shipping, legal, insurance and financial services, the capital’s maritime connections extended to large-scale manufacturing like shipbuilding, ship repairing, marine engineering, sail-making and sugar baking. Shipping investors, almost exclusively involved in some aspect of sea trade, varied from those holding a few shares to the relative few reliant on ship owning for their income. The wealthiest shipowners and merchants, as well as the Royal Navy, were among the customers of London’s shipyards, clustered along the waterfront. Subject to severed cyclical swings, shipbuilding was a highly skilled, unionised occupation. Many of those employed in port industries lived in London’s then quite socially mixed waterfront parishes of East London. Seamen ashore in colonial and foreign trades also gathered here in response to a sailor economy serving their need for credit, lodging and entertainment.

The 1866 banking crisis effectively ended London’s iron shipbuilding industry. Few companies survived, so destitution faced many shipyard workers. Processing industries also changed. Beet sugar replaced cane, soft sugar hard ‘baked’ sugar and production became concentrated in two firms. In contrast, boosted by foreign grain imports, London’s milling industry expanded. South bank maritime communities maintained established industrial patterns. Shipbuilding proved resilient and traditional employment systems persisted in the Rotherhithe docks, but settlements of waterfront wharf labourers, many of Irish origin, were desperately poor. Poverty was also a hallmark of the north bank. Less socially mixed than in the past, mythic undifferentiated images of ‘Outcast London’ obscured the East End’s continuing maritime connections, including the presence of skilled workers and their organisations. Sailors ashore, the subject of State intervention, were an exception.

The MCP’s discourse and activities show its hybrid nature as both a Chinese association and a communist party. In practice, the MCP’s double rootedness in Malaya and China as a Chinese association was achieved through the mechanisms of interwar globalization, that is, the discursive practices of the internationalization of both the Chinese snd Malayan revolutions as well as the attempt to indigenize the MCP. As the only Malayan Chinese association, the MCP both embraced the movement for Chinese rights in the British colony and campaigned for the overthrow of the Malayan and Chinese governments. The MCP’s Malayanization discourse mirrored British preferential policies toward Malays, whereas the Comintern’s rhetoric of colonial emancipation resonated with the MCP’s discourse of the emancipation of oppressed peoples by the Chinese, which echoed Sun Yatsen’s ideas. Different policies toward immigrant Chinese in Indonesia and Malaya resulted in different outcomes in the relationship between Chinese immigrants and indigenous nationalism. Yet, similarly, Chinese political parties in Indonesia (including leftist) embraced the national indigenous identity while also retaining a Chinese identity.

An unintended result of the MCP’s interaction with the Comintern was the strengthening of Chinese networks globally through the institution of the party and of the League Against Imperialism. The Comintern pushed the MCP to establish connections with other communists in Southeast Asia while fomenting a world revolution and requested that the MCP involve locally born Chinese along with non-Chinese in its movement. Comintern Chinese networks also ran through the CPUSA and its empire in the Philippines in addition to the Comintern network focused on Southeast Asia. Comintern interactions with the MCP represented a case of synthesis. The organizational culture of the Bolshevik Party offered a democratic participation model alternative to that of the British state. It was based on a culture of self-criticism and therefore allowed room for local communists to criticize the Comintern. The Comintern’s mutually reliant regional relationship with the MCP as a CCP chapter helped the MCP carve out its niche as liberators from British colonialism and provided for the livelihood of Southeast Asian Chinese communist enclaves through the network, connected by corridors of money, culture, and communication.

This chapter covers the Vaglianos’ business during the first period of their activities, beginning as island shipping companies and ending as a prime international trading house in Southern Russia. The aim is to investigate the Vagliano’s activities in southern Russia, the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranea, identifying the beginnings of their business. The maritime entrepreneurial environment in which they grew marked them, as all three Vaglianos started merchant captains, continuing Cephalonia’s maritime tradition. They were able to penetrate the established commercial and maritime networks of the Greeks from Chios and Epirus and form their own entrepreneurial networks in Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Greece. They extended their business from the Azov to the entire Black Sea region, then into the eastern Mediterranean, the western Mediterranean, and even into northern Europe, by forming strategic entrepreneurial and societal alliances. The Vaglianos evolved from free traders combining trade and sea-transport into independent sailing shipping companies specializing in sea transport, forming large sailing ship fleets, and finally becoming international trading companies.