Ten Percent of the World

Let us begin this section with the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is the point, and because once you have done it you cannot look at the island in the same way again.

Greece is the largest shipowning nation on earth. This is not a boast and not a matter of opinion; it is measured annually by UNCTAD, which tracks the world merchant fleet by country of beneficial ownership rather than by flag, and Greece has headed or shared the head of that table for decades. The Greek-owned share of world tonnage has been reported in recent years in the range of roughly fifteen to twenty per cent of the entire world merchant fleet by deadweight — with Greek owners holding very large shares of specific sectors, commonly reported at around a fifth or more of world tanker capacity and a comparable or greater share of the dry bulk fleet. Take twenty per cent as the working figure; it is defensible, and the reader should check the current UNCTAD review for the year in question.

Now consider where in Greece those owners come from.

They do not come from Greece in general. Greek shipowning is one of the most geographically concentrated industries in the developed world, drawn from a short list of maritime communities: Chios and the Oinousses, Andros, Kasos, Cephalonia, Ithaca, Syros, Hydra, Spetses, Kalymnos, Crete, and a handful of coastal towns of the Peloponnese and Epirus. The great majority of Greeks have no connection to shipping at all. A small number of villages have almost nothing else.

And of that short list, the largest single origin cluster — consistently, by any measure anyone has attempted, and by a clear margin — is Chios and the Oinousses.

The figure that circulates in the industry is that families of Chian and Oinoussian origin account for something approaching half of Greek-owned tonnage. Chapter 55 examines that claim properly, with all the caveats it deserves, and concludes that it is defensible as an order of magnitude under a reasonably generous definition of Chian origin, while not being a precisely measured number.

But do the multiplication anyway, and hold the result in your head for the rest of this section.

Twenty per cent of the world fleet is Greek-owned. Perhaps half of that is owned by families whose origins lie on Chios, on the Oinousses, or in the villages of the north coast.

Which is to say that something in the region of one merchant ship in ten, anywhere on the surface of the ocean, at this moment, belongs to a family from an island of fifty thousand people and a rock beside it with eight hundred.

There is no comparable statistic anywhere in the world economy. Not in finance, not in technology, not in luxury goods, not in any commodity. There is no equivalent village that owns a tenth of world aviation, or a tenth of world pharmaceuticals, or a tenth of anything else. The nearest analogies are all much smaller: the diamond families of Antwerp and Surat, the Hasidic and Jain networks in gemstones, the Hakka and Chaozhou trading diasporas of maritime Asia. All of these are real and remarkable, and none of them approaches a tenth of a global transport system.

And here is the part that ties this section to everything that has come before it. This is not a modern accident. It is not a postwar windfall, or a quirk of the Liberty ship disposals, or a story that begins in 1945. It is the current phase of a continuous three-thousand-year sequence.

The Chians were shipping wine to the Black Sea in the sixth century BC and taking grain and slaves in return. They were fielding a hundred triremes at Lade in 494 BC — the largest contingent of any Greek state present. They were the only ally of Athens permitted to keep its own fleet. They were the staging port for the Genoese Black Sea convoys in the fourteenth century AD, running exactly the same route with exactly the same return cargo. They were the merchant houses of Odessa and Taganrog in the nineteenth century, moving Russian grain to industrial Europe on their own ships. They are the owners of the bulk carriers loading grain at Novorossiysk today.

It is the same trade, on the same route, run by the same families, from the same island, since before Herodotus wrote it down. What follows is how the current chapter of that story was built.