History in the Making – Steering Through Chaos: The Yannoulatos Brothers and Transnational Shipping in China

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.

Dr. Mavropoulos is a Ph.D. holder from Sapienza University of Rome specialising in diasporic networks and colonial history. In August 2022, De Gruyter-Brill published Dr. Mavropoulos’ first monograph “Italians in Africa and the Japanese in South East Asia’’. Dr. Mavropoulos has previously taught at the European University Institute in Florence and is now a faculty member in the History Department at Hong Kong Baptist University.

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