ABSTRACT
On November 2016, the tanker Olympic Leopard was anchored in China loaded with two billion barrels of crude oil from Brazil waiting to discharge. It was built in South Korea and owned by a Liberian company which in turn was owned by a Panamanian company, which in turn was owned by a Lichtenstein company. The vessel sailed under the Liberian flag, it carried Greek and Philippino crew, and was owned by Greek shipowners. The shipping business was one of the first to use global institutions extensively after World War II: offshore companies and “flags of convenience,” or open registries as they are called today (Metaxas 1985; Harlaftis 1989). Deep-sea going shipping is an international industry par excellence; its business has been to work beyond political borders. The shipping industry was one of the first global makers in the last centuries and one of those that has led the way to globalization. After all, shipping was a leading sector in the early modern European economic growth that connected the local with the global (Lucassen and Unger 2011).
