ABSTRACT

Greece in the 1930s was still a country of merchants and sailors; its economic culture was overwhelmingly privateering and commercial. Considering the fact that less than one-fifth of its land area was cultivated, and industrialization was in its very early stages, this is not surprising. To be sure, over 50 per cent of Greeks were occupied with agriculture, producing enough tobacco, wine, raisins, currants and dried figs to account for 70 per cent of the country’s cash exports. But one must also remember that in the foreign trade markets, these were luxury agricultural products. Despite the country’s considerable mineral wealth, it had very scarce energy resources to fuel, and fewer raw materials to develop, a manufacturing industry. The costs of such development would have been so high that the scope for industrialization in Greece remained limited. Hence the more natural link between commerce and a seafaring nation: by 1939 Greece had the third largest merchant fleet in the Mediterranean (after the French and the Italian), ranking ninth in the world, with an annual revenue of £8 million for the Greek state from shipping.