This open access book belongs to the Maritime Business and Economic History strand of the Palgrave Studies in Maritime Economics book series. This volume highlights the contribution of the shipping industry to the transformations in business and society of the postwar era. Shipping was both an example and an engine of globalization and structural change. In turn, the industry experienced and pioneered, mirrored and enabled key developments that led to the present-day globalized economy. Contributions address issues such as the macro-level shift of shipping’s centre of gravity from Europe to Asia, the political and legal frameworks within which it developed, the strategies and performance of both successful and unsuccessful firms, and the links between the shipping industry and the wider economy and society. Without shipping and its ability to forge connections and networks of a global reach, the modern world would look very different. By bringing together scholars from various disciplinary and national backgrounds, this book advances our understanding of the linkages that bind economies and societies together.

This book is concerned with the role played by the sea transport industries in the development of global markets. It claims that the sea transport industry in fundamentally intrinsic to the political and economic interactions between nations. It seeks to demonstrate that the elements of shipping, internationalisation, and globalisation are intertwined. The purpose of this journal is to trace the development and examine the consequences of globalisation as it relates to maritime history. The four main issues under consideration are:- information networks and cooperation in transoceanic shipping; the expansion of markets; technological change; and the adaptability of entrepreneurs, institutions, and nation states to changing business environments. Geographically, the focus of the contributing essays splits between Europe and Japan.

Corporate networks, the links between companies and their leaders, reflect a country’s economic organization and its corporate governance system. Most research on corporate networks focuses on individual countries or particular time periods, however, making fruitful comparisons over longer periods of time difficult. This book provides a unique long-term analysis of the rise, consolidation, decline, and occasional re-emergence of these networks in fourteen countries across North and South America, Europe, and Asia in the 20th and early 21st centuries. In this volume, the editors bring together the most internationally well-known specialists to investigate the long-term development of corporate networks. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative research approaches, the authors describe the main developments and changes in the corporate network over time by focusing on important network indicators in benchmark years, and identify historical explanations for these developments. This unique, long-term perspective allows readers insight into how and why national corporate networks have evolved over time.

Since Henry Hudson landed on Manhattan in 1609, the peoples of the Netherlands and North America have been inextricably linked. Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, written by a team of nearly one hundred Dutch and American scholars, is the first book to offer a comprehensive history of this bilateral relationship. This volume covers the main paths of contacts, conflicts, and common plans, from the first exploratory contacts in the early seventeenth century to the intense and multifaceted exchanges in the early twenty-first. Based on the most up-to-date research, Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations will be for years to come a valuable and much-used reference work for anyone interested in the history and culture of the United States and the Netherlands and the larger transatlantic interdependent framework in which they are embedded.

This book is concerned with the role played by the sea transport industries in the development of global markets. It claims that the sea transport industry in fundamentally intrinsic to the political and economic interactions between nations. It seeks to demonstrate that the elements of shipping, internationalisation, and globalisation are intertwined. The purpose of this journal is to trace the development and examine the consequences of globalisation as it relates to maritime history. The four main issues under consideration are:- information networks and cooperation in transoceanic shipping; the expansion of markets; technological change; and the adaptability of entrepreneurs, institutions, and nation states to changing business environments. Geographically, the focus of the contributing essays splits between Europe and Japan.

In Globalization and the Colonial Origins of the Great Divergence Pim de Zwart examines the Dutch East India Company’s intercontinental trade and its effects on living standards in various regions on the edges of the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Contrary to conventional views, De Zwart finds significant evidence of the integration of global commodity markets, an important dimension of globalization, before the 1800s. The effects of this globalization, and the associated colonialism, were diverse and could vary between and within regions. As globalization and colonialism affected patterns of economic development across the globe they played a part in the rise of global economic inequality, known as the ‘Great Divergence’, in the early modern period.