Europe And The Maritime World

This book offers a framework for understanding globalization over the past century. Through a detailed analysis of ports, shipping and trading companies whose networks spanned the world, Michael B. Miller shows how a European maritime infrastructure made modern production and consumer societies possible. He argues that the combination of overseas connections and close ties to home ports contributed to globalization. Miller also explains how the ability to manage merchant shipping's complex logistics was central to the outcome of both world wars. He chronicles transformations in hierarchies, culture, identities and port city space, all of which produced a new and different maritime world by the end of the century.

Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth-Century History offers a framework for understanding globalization over the past century. Through a detailed analysis of ports, shipping and trading companies whose networks spanned the world, Michael B. Miller shows how a European maritime infrastructure made modern production and consumer societies possible. He argues that the combination of overseas connections and close ties to home ports contributed to globalization. Miller also explains how the ability to manage merchant shipping's complex logistics was central to the outcome of both world wars. He chronicles transformations in hierarchies, culture, identities and port city space, all of which produced a new and different maritime world by the end of the century. Review: 'This book opens up a challenging and audacious new perspective on the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century globalization through its focus on European shipping, traders, and ports, and the networks that linked them. The ambitious scope of the book, resting as it does on deep research in many archives in many countries, is refreshing and a model of how transnational history should be written. The nuanced discussion of the evolving relationship between the global and the local is essential reading for all historians of globalization.' Geoffrey Jones, Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Harvard Business School 'Michael B. Miller has produced a critical contribution to the history of the twentieth century, emphasizing the human dimension in the evolution of the globalized economy, through the impact of two world wars, the shift in economic power from West to East, the emergence of the Container, and the commodization of sea transport. In the process he integrates shipping, ports, hinterlands, business networks, and the wider economic impact of conflict, decolonization, and deregulation.' Andrew Lambert, King's College London