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.

This chapter indicates the problems the Vagliano brothers encountered in Russia as foreign trading companies. Their businesses could be described as a kind of proto-multinational that carried out international accounting. Their cosmopolitanism affected the hinterland of Imperial Russia’s South, and the story of the confrontation of Mari Vagliano with Russia indicates the populist and nationalist reaction to perceived foreign economic influence. Vagliano’s trial, which shook all of Russia for several months, has been described as the biggest trial in the legal history of Russia. This chapter examines the relationship of Mari Vagliano with Russian businessmen, government, and intelligentsia. As with Onassis’s legal battle with American authorities decades later, Mari Vagliano faced down highly public accusations of fraud and tax evasion, emerging from the confrontation unscathed. Vagliano and Onassis were prime paradigms for the survival of Greek firms involved in the international shipping business. Powerful governments have attacked entrepreneurial elites of foreign origin during periods of increasing nationalism and xenophobia.

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.

The financial crisis of 2007–2009 worsened dramatically on September 15, 2008, when Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest investment bank in the United States, collapsed into bankruptcy and triggered the most intense period of financial chaos. The next day, the Federal Reserve provided an $85 billion loan to the insurance giant and financial conglomerate, American International Group (AIG). The Bush Administration immediately went to Congress and asked for $700 billion to buy up bad debt held by banks and other financial institutions. By March of 2009, the stock market had fallen 38 percent, GDP was still shrinking, and people around the world watched in shock as the United States and Western Europe spiraled down into financial chaos.

On Thursday, August 12, 1982, Mexico’s Secretary of Finance, Jesús Silva Herzog, sent a letter to the country’s creditors telling them that Mexico did not have adequate foreign currency reserves to make interest payments on its national debt due the following Monday. In anticipation of the reaction in Mexico and abroad, Silva Herzog closed the foreign exchange markets in Mexico and phoned the heads of the (IMF), the Federal Reserve, and the US Treasury Department, before flying to Washington, DC, to negotiate assistance (Boughton, 2001: 289–90). So began the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.