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This chapter offers a reassessment of the role of agents in the migration process, as it considers them the core link between migrant and shipping company. It deconstructs the layers of the agent network with a breakdown of the terminology used between brokers, expedients, agents, and runners; compares European and American migration legislation; analyses the American network in depth - services, pressures, and advertising strategies; and highlights the significance of an agent’s ethnicity when handling migration issues. It concludes that agents played a much larger role than merely organising the trip from destination to destination, they were akin to the economic and social gatekeepers of America and all the prospects it held.

This chapter discusses the trade relationship between the Norwegian merchant shipping fleet and Asian maritime freight markets between 1870 and 1914. In tracking the rise of the Norwegian fleet from regional to global in scope, and how Norwegian agents established and increased trade networks overseas, it provides a case study of the growth of economic globalisation. It draws on shipping statistics, consular reports, and observations from contemporary shipping press to quantify the rate of expansion and attitudes towards it, and concludes that Norway managed to secure strong trade links in Asian markets and held back competition from large western nations, though it calls for further academic research to establish how this was achieved with more precision.

This section explores the intangible infrastructures of maritime economies and the shipping industry through analysis of three separate components. The first sub-section explores the role of shipping agents in the twentieth century by analysing the varieties of agencies, their changing functions, the impact of both World Wars, and, in particular, the impact of containerisation. It determines that by the end of the century, technological, geopolitical, and managerial transformations rendered the role of the shipping agent all but obsolete. The second sub-section examines the consular services of Nordic countries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to determine whether or not they were successful, and discovers that the assumption that consular services lowered maritime transaction costs cannot be wholly verified. The final sub-section explores the Mediterranean narrow-sea nexus and the way in which the Mediterranean region served as a ‘strategic corridor’ for European colonial activity.