Why Chios?

It is worth ending by asking the question directly, because a book that has spent three thousand years describing a phenomenon ought to attempt an explanation of it.

Why did this island, of all the islands, never stop mattering?

Geography got it started and has never stopped helping. Chios sits at a chokepoint on a route that has carried the same cargo — northern grain going south, southern manufactures going north — for three thousand years, and it possesses a natural monopoly on a luxury commodity that grows nowhere else. Neither of those advantages can be exhausted, competed away, or taken by anyone who does not physically hold the island. Almost every other historic advantage in the world economy is contingent on technology or fashion or the location of a deposit. These two are not.

Catastrophe repeatedly selected for the trait that mattered. This is the darker part of the answer and it needs saying carefully, because it should not be mistaken for a suggestion that anything good came of what happened in 1822.

But consider the mechanism. Chios has been emptied four times: by the Persians in 493 BC, by Mithridates in 86 BC, by the Ottomans in 1822, and by the earthquake in 1881. Each time, the people who survived best were the ones who already had somewhere else to be — a brother in Odessa, a house in Trieste, a correspondent in Marseille. Each time, the recovery was financed from outside. And each time, the lesson drawn by the survivors was the same one: do not keep everything on the island. Three thousand years of that produces a culture in which dispersal is normal, the family firm with branches abroad is the default form of enterprise, and a young man's leaving is not a tragedy but a plan.

The social technology proved unusually portable. Whatever else it is, the Chian family firm — kin-based, endogamous, geographically dispersed, credit-generating, conservative with debt, patient across cycles — is an exceptionally robust institutional form. It worked for the wine trade to the Black Sea, for the Genoese mastic monopoly, for the Odessa grain trade, for Indian jute, and it works today for Capesize bulk carriers and LNG tankers. Ships, jute, wheat, and resin have nothing in common as commodities. The structure that handles them turns out to be nearly identical.

And the island held them. This is the part that resists economic explanation and is probably the most important. Chians have left continuously for three thousand years and have not, in any generation, stopped being Chian. They have gone on marrying each other, burying their dead there, building its schools and hospitals and churches, and coming home in August. The island functions as a kind of institutional anchor for a network that is otherwise entirely dispersed — the place where reputations are made and lost, where marriages are arranged, where the community can see itself. Take that away and you have a diaspora that dissolves into its host societies within three generations, as most diasporas do. Keep it, and you have a network that survives massacre, earthquake, revolution, and world war, and that turns up, five hundred years after the Genoese left, owning a tenth of the world's ships.

There is a monument on the harbour front at Kardamyla to the Chian sailor. It is not a large monument, and it stands in a village most people have never heard of. But from the villages within a few kilometres of it came the men who own the vessels currently loading iron ore at Port Hedland, crude at Ras Tanura, gas at Ras Laffan, and grain at Novorossiysk — which is where the Chians were loading grain in the sixth century BC, in ships of a different construction, for the same reason.

Some things about this island have changed a great deal in three thousand years.

Remarkably few of the important ones have.