History Repeats Itself

History Repeats Itself

Moses Taylor, the father-in-law to the original Percy R. Pyne, was keenly interested in transportation, as it had a direct impact on his business. He needed speedy and reliable transportation between New York and Havana and decided to own his own ships to accomplish the goal. Later in his career, he focused on rail, to assist with his growing coal business. Similarly, Percy R. Pyne, IV is interested in transforming American transportation by re-introducing short-sea shipping to the United States.

Let’s start by visiting the past. Transportation history seems to go through repetitive cycles of growth, institutionalization, and consolidation. For instance, in the United States between 1850 and 1900, was the era of the railroad barons. 

The backdrop was a growing nation that needed rail transportation to carry goods from manufacturing locations to cities in the center of the country as well as to export ports. Many of the manufacturing centers were small communities that often subsidized the rail entrepreneurs to run small feeder lines to their communities.

What is interesting is that Vanderbilt, Gould, Harriman, Moses Taylor, Percy Pyne, and a whole host of prominent financiers worked to consolidate the feeders into one trunk service to right-size the systems to take advantage of economies of scale.

We seem to see the same pattern in the automobile industry in the 20th century, where there were many small manufacturers which were then amalgamated into a few very large companies. The same happened in the airline industry more recently. The point is that when a new form of transportation arrives, there are many participants that either fail or are acquired or merged into bigger and bigger companies that eventually control the transportation trades. The big companies by definition become very powerful because they control the lifeblood of the economies: trade.

We see the same pattern being played out in real-time in the container shipping business. 40 years ago, there were many smaller shipping companies, and MSC, CMA-CGM, Evergreen, Maersk, and Cosco did not exist. As these companies grow, they control more and more of the international trade and in essence, our global economic future. 

Not one of the major liner shipping companies today is American and we have no American feeder companies to service our domestic or import and export trades. What does that tell us about our future?


Hodas, Daniel. The Business Career of Moses Taylor: Merchant, Finance Capitalist, and

Industrialist. New York University Press, 1976.




The Business Career of Moses Taylor: Merchant, Finance Capitalist and Industrialist

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