The World's Key Industry

Maritime transport has been the main driver of trade growth, and the emergence and development of a global economy. This collection of essays from distinguished economists and historians takes an international and comparative perspective, covering topics ranging from technological advance and the role of the state to maritime business development.

GELINA HARLAFTIS is professor of Maritime History at the Department of History of the Ionian University, Greece. She graduated from the University of Athens and completed her graduate studies at the Universities of Cambridge (M.Phil.) and Oxford (D.Phil). She was President of the International Association of Maritime Economic History from 2004-2008 and was a visiting Professor and a Fellow in universities in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Her last books are co-authored with Ioannis Theotokas; Leadership in World Shipping: Greek Family Firms in International Business (2009) and with Nikos Karapidakis; Kostas Sbonias and Vaios Vaiopoulos,The New Ways of History (2010).

JESUS M. VALDALISO is professor of Economic History at the School of Economics and Business administration of the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, and of Maritime Business History in a MBA of Deusto University and the Basque Government. He is the author of several books and articles on the Spanish shipping and shipbuilding industries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is currently leading a research project on the historical origins of industrial clusters in the Basque Country and its legacy for the present. He is President of the International Association of Maritime Economic History and visiting scholar at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness of the Harvard Business School.

STIG TENOLD is professor of Economic History atThe Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration. His main research field is twentieth century Norwegian and international shipping history, and he is the author of Tankers in Trouble - Norwegian Shipping and the Crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, and Odfjell - The History of a Shipping Company (2006), co-authored with Atle Thowsen. He is currently involved in projects on maritime innovation, Nordic shipping in the twentieth century and Norwegian voyage patterns during the transition from sail to steam.