Events

This talk recovers a little-known chapter of Greek maritime enterprise in East Asia by tracing Emmanuel Yannoulatos and Yannoulatos Bros in Shanghai and Hong Kong, 1930s–1950s. It reconstructs entrepreneurship under siege, namely Japanese occupation and Chinese civil war, through the firm’s successes and failures.

Equally central are the infrastructures that made these moves work: an on-the-ground Greek settler world of agents, captains, and families, and a nimble consular apparatus that issued papers, brokered access to ports and courts, and liaised with British, Japanese and Chinese authorities. By showing how community and small-state diplomacy converted high political risk into manageable commercial risk, the study widens the geography of Greek shipping beyond Atlantic and Mediterranean frames.