Greek shipping paid a heavy price in the two world wars, both in souls and materially.

However, the industry's rise in the decades that followed would probably not have happened without them, as they forced owners to seek business outside of their Mediterranean comfort zone.

World War I destroyed their biggest markets — Czarist Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Habsburg Austria.

For a decade, much of the Greek fleet was barred from crossing the Dardanelles and the Bosporus to reach the Black Sea, whose grain it had been shipping for millennia.

At the same time, Greek neutrality at the beginning of the war created new trading opportunities in the Atlantic Ocean.

Britain’s gradual decline as a shipowning nation in the coming decades only accelerated the Greeks’ global ambitions.

A tipping point was reached in 1936 — as oceangoing volumes carried on Greek-controlled ships exceeded short-haul Mediterranean ones — and Greek shipping as a global force was born.

After World War II, Hellenic owners quickly consolidated and expanded their position, thanks to their alliance with the world’s new superpower.

The US provided them with the vessels, bank finance and chartering contracts they needed to replenish and grow their fleets.

There was something in it for Washington too. The US' energy needs grew at a rampant pace and Greeks had the seafaring experience to help cover them.

Greek crews were cheaper than their unionised US peers, especially when the ships they manned were flying US-backed flags of convenience, such as Panama's and Liberia’s.

And players such as Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos jumped on the trade, particularly in oil tankers.

Tirelessly stitching together networks with banks, oil majors and shipyards, they provided a blueprint for business that many Greek owners follow to this day.

Rapid post-war economic growth provided the rest of the impetus Greek owners needed. As early as in the 1950s, the Greek-controlled fleet became the world’s biggest and it has never looked back.

Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos on the cover of Time magazine in 1956. Photo: Stavros Niarchos Foundation

It’s coming home

Greek owners were a helpful tool for US policy but they never were Washington’s puppets.

Their individualistic streak and relentless pursuit of business opportunities often led them to deals that the US government considered beyond the pale.

This included Onassis attempting to corner Saudi Arabian oil cargoes and other owners carrying freight to socialist regimes hostile to the US, such as China, Cuba and North Korea.

As relations cooled, the US passed legislation in the 1960s to tax shipping companies. Greek shipowners, a big share of whom had by then gathered in London and New York, were the main targets.

Then, the Greek government saw an opportunity. As the US and Britain were hiking taxes, war-ravaged Greece began offering preferential tonnage tax schemes and other incentives to shipping.

Incentives were included in a landmark law passed by the country's military junta in 1967 in its first year in power. In the decades that followed, almost all big shipping families returned to home.

They were joined by a new generation of home-grown shipowners that would hit their stride in the decades to come.

A distinction between traditional owners who existed before the 1960s and the next generation is still cited occasionally but increasingly makes no sense. Several of the new players have now been in the business for so long that they can be considered traditional in their own right.

The homecoming trend has been bolstered in recent decades by Greece's relative political and financial stability as member of the European Union — a club it joined in 1981. Today, even the Greek companies listed in New York have their management in Athens and Piraeus.

It is characteristic that the only time when some Greek companies were recently prepared to leave the country was in 2015, when its membership of the eurozone was hanging in the balance amid a debt crisis.

Shipowners would have made a killing if Greece had left the euro area, earning dollars in a country with an undervalued currency. But they would also have had to live barricaded behind fences in a nation likely to be rife with crime and poverty.

The overwhelming majority stayed and are likely to continue to do so.

This article is part of a series of stories looking back at the history of Greek shipping, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the country's independence