“Inheriting Strategies: Understanding Different Approaches to Shipping during the World War I Boom in Haugesund, Norway”

Summary

On 14 October 1915, John Knudsen Haaland married Aslaug Stolt-Nielsen in the Church of Our Saviour (Vàr Frelsers kirke) in Haugesund, a small town on the west coast of Norway. One week later, in the same church, his twin brother Christian Wegner Haaland wed Ida Karoline Knutsen. Not only did the brothers marry at roughly the same time, but each served as the other's best man. For residents of Haugesund, however, the most striking similarity between the two weddings undoubtedly concerned the brothers’ choice of brides, for they married the daughters of two of the town's leading shipowners, Botholf Stolt-Nielsen and Knut Knutsen O.A.S. The twenty-year-old brothers, sons of a bank manager from a respectable though rather modest background, were about to embark on careers as shipowners just as World War I was beginning to affect maritime commerce (although Norway remained neutral). Despite the similarities, their careers had very different outcomes; one went bankrupt, while the other enjoyed immense prosperity and was one of the most important and respected men, both economically and politically, in Haugesund.

How did these results occur? Why did the twins end up at such different ends of the success spectrum? As happened so often in the volatile world of shipowning, the fates of these two men and their companies hinged on strategic decisions taken before or after a boom or bust. It is often fairly straightforward to identify the decisions that led to riches or doom for various actors, but in this article I will concentrate on the strategies that underlay these decisions. From where did these differing strategies stem? How were they produced? How were they implemented?

Trying to understand why different actors made different strategic choices can be difficult. For example, it is possible to utilize the extensive literature on “economic man,” differing concepts of (economic) rationality or the psychological processes involved in economic decision-making. Instead, although somewhat overlapping with these approaches, I will view the shipowners' strategic choices as first and foremost social phenomena that were heavily influenced by the past. As Karl Marx famously declared, “[m]en make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”