Introduction

In postwar Greece, shipping became the dream of many people, a passage from humble origins to the pinnacle of society and wealth. These were the years when Greek shipowners were flourishing and soaring to dizzying heights in international economic centres. They became a myth in Greece and abroad, dazzling the international jet set, filling the columns of glossy magazines with their trips to Cannes and Monte Carlo, New York and London. The great gap between the cosmopolitan lifestyle of Greek tycoons and that of the people of their impoverished homeland, ravaged by enemy occupation and then civil war, from which it emerged a decade later ragged and starving, was dramatic. The course of Greece’s reconstruction and economic development during the second half of the 20th century is not unrelated to its relationship with the ‘foreign’ capital that flowed in from shipping. However, the growth of Greek shipowning should be sought beyond the borders of Greece itself. It belongs within the framework of the development of Western Europe, the United States and Japan, as well as of the process of integration of the international economic system, better known as globalization.