European family firms in international business: British and Greek tramp-shipping firms.

Then there is the tramp, the never-tiring tramp, which continually scours the Seven Seas in search of charters, loading from one port to another, and never knowing where she may have to sail for next, picking up a cargo here and running light there, figuring frequently in the overdue list, and sometimes turning up after she has been posted missing, but always returning to her home port, battered and weather-beaten, ready to sail again after an overhaul in dry dock and the renewal of her certificate of character.

The tramp steamer, the child of the sailing ship trader, was born in Britain, the product of the industrial revolution that brought an incredible increase in world production and transport of bulk cargoes by sea. Since the last third of the nineteenth century in particular, world shipping has been dominated by a small number of bulk commodities carried across all the world's oceans and seas. The need for foodstuffs and raw materials to feed the populations and industries of the Western World, in conjunction with the massive introduction of steam, brought permanent structural changes in world shipping after the 1870s.

This is the division of the shipping market as it exists to the present day, the division between liner and tramp shipping. The type of cargo, the type of ship and the area in which it trades determine the market in which a ship operates. Thus, liner steamships tended to call at a large number of ports in a specific oceanic region, to carry general cargoes (mainly manufactured or packed goods) and passengers, whereas, during the same period, tramp steamers and sailing ships tended to call at one particular port in various oceanic regions, to carry bulk cargoes.

At the same time, the transition from sail to steam not only increased the availability of cargo space at sea but also caused a revolutionary decline in freight rates. Trade and shipping were organised by transnational commercial and maritime networks that contributed to the globalisation of the international economy. Britain led the way, for it is there that the tramp steamship and the liner ship were born, and there that the organisation and the function of shipping companies were formulated and dictated. The most prominent European--and also world--tramp-shipping operators since the last third of the nineteenth century have been the British, the Norwegians and the Greeks. (2) Most of the history of Europe's maritime transport during this period involved and involves tramp shipping. In fact, deep-sea tramp shipping--what is called lately bulk shipping carried and still carries more than two-thirds of the world's sea trade?

Despite tramp shipping's great importance in world maritime transport there has been limited research on its operators. (4) Liner-shipping companies have traditionally formed the best known and the most glorious sector of British shipping; pioneering in all new technological developments and extending their operations to all oceans, they became the proud manifestation of the power of the British Empire that ruled the waves. British historians have narrated the stories of the main British liner businesses, the mighty Empire's lifeline with the colonies. But throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries liner shipping formed less than half of the sizeable British fleet; consequently, more than half of this fleet still remains largely under-researched. Part of the problem is that, in contrast to the luxurious four-stack liners that carried thousands of first-class passengers and millions of deck-class immigrants to all parts of the globe, and have caught the imagination of many a ship lover, there is nothing glamorous about tramp ships. These were usually worn-out dry-cargo vessels with 'dirty' bulk cargoes, such as coal, iron ore or phosphates, or slippery liquid-cargo vessels, tankers, with crude oil, which ploughed the oceans. The market functioned within a closed circuit of shippers and shipowners, who allowed little light to be shed on it. Tramp shipping, whether in Britain or Norway or Greece, has always been a very private business. (5)

Moreover, another obstacle the maritime historian has had to face is the omnipotence in the post-war period of maritime economists who established a methodology for analysing twentieth-century shipping, based on market forces and competition in the international arena. (6) Maritime economics does not focus on organisational and managerial factors that affect the efficiency of shipping companies, but rather on the overall competitiveness of national fleets. This approach gives priority to factors such as technology, institutional arrangements or resource availability and their contribution to cost formation; the industry is treated as a whole and does not take into consideration the differences and particularities of the companies. (7) Thus, maritime economists--with only very recent exceptions--have not taken the trouble to investigate maritime business at a micro-level within a historical perspective. (8) The tools of a historian and an economist will be used in this article to 'open up' the 'black box' of the activities of Europe's most prominent tramp operators.

The purpose of this article is to put the tramp-shipping firm at the centre of the analysis and to attempt to provide an insight into its organisation, structure and entrepreneurial methods through a comparative perspective; to identify continuity and change that will enhance our understanding of the successful path of British and Greek tramp operators over similar and different periods of time during the last 130 years. A common approach has been to analyse these fleets separately, by their involvement in the tramp-shipping market, taking for granted the differences and never searching for the similarities. Until the 1960s, the British were still the world's main tramp-steamer operators; but their story ever since has been one of steady decline, with the Greeks in the lead since the 1970s. This article neither analyses the tramp-shipping market--which belongs to the field of maritime economics--nor presents the main reasons for the rise or the decline of these two tramp operators. Its aim is threefold: firstly to describe the patterns of evolution and development of the tramp-shipping firm, focusing on the structural and managerial strategies that made it successful in an international environment; secondly to identify the different organisational and governance forms that have been developed during this period; and thirdly to provide an insight into the reasons for the survival of family capitalism in the European 'multinational' tramp-shipping firms to the present day.