09/01/2026
🚨Upcoming event🚨
Join us on 23 September at the McGill Faculty Club Ballroom (3450 McTavish) for the Tom Nacos and Family Annual Lecture where Gelina Harlaftis (University of Crete) will present "Greek diaspora traders to shipping tycoons: Creating the global shipping firm."
Consult the following abstract for more information:
In 1893, Panagi Vagliano, a major diaspora merchant and shipowner from the island of Cephalonia and based in London, foresaw the future of Greek shipping. In an interview conducted in his office in London and published in the Greek newspaper Acropolis, a reporter described a casual and confident Vagliano, his “right leg folded on his left one, as he usually did, looking towards the window with a childish laughter.” Vagliano told the reporter “I imagine the Greek steam shipping colossal and the Greek shipowner so big that you cannot imagine...” When Vagliano gave this interview, Greek nationals owned only one percent of the world’s shipping fleet. Eighty years later he was proved right: by the 1970s, Greeks owned the largest fleet in the world and Greek shipping tycoons were among the wealthiest people on earth. In the mid-1970s, the Onassis group of shipping companies was one of the world’s ten largest independent tanker-owning companies, along with a number of other Greek shipowners. According to the Review of Maritime Transport, in 2025 “Greece continues to be the largest ship-owning country, accounting for more than seventeen percent of the world total.”
The Greek shipping industry originated in networked family enterprises dating back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century island shipping companies. These small, family-owned companies evolved into international trading companies like Panagi Vagliano’s, and then reinvented themselves during the twentieth century into ship management and global maritime business groups like Aristotle Onassis’s. This lecture following these two leading Greek firms, Vagliano’s in the nineteenth century and Onassis’s in the twentieth, will explain how Greek firms and their entrepreneurial networks evolved, how they not only survived, and thrived from the eighteenth century to the present day gaining international competitive advantage and reputation within the shipping sector.
