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How Peter the Great Remade Russia
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The Flag a Ship Can Buy
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You Cannot Speed Up a String Quartet
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Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

In the late summer of 1697, the Dutch East India Company's shipyard in Amsterdam took on a new carpenter. He stood more than six and a half feet tall and gave his name as Sergeant Pyotr Mikhaylov. He was the Tsar of Russia, traveling under an alias so he could skip the court ceremonies. A year earlier, a fleet built on the Don had helped him capture the Turkish fortress of Azov, and he had come west to learn how the great naval powers built their ships. He spent some four months working on a frigate called the Peter and Paul, then crossed to England to study at the Royal Navy's dockyard at Deptford. There he stayed in the house of the diarist John Evelyn, who had reason to regret it. Peter was reportedly fond of being pushed in a wheelbarrow through Evelyn's prized holly hedge. By the time he left, the house and grounds were so badly damaged that the Treasury paid about 350 pounds in compensation. His travels ended in 1698, when news reached him that the streltsy, Moscow's musketeer guard, had risen in revolt.

The revolt had already been crushed by the time Peter returned, but he ordered hundreds more executions and disbanded the guard. He had little patience for the old court customs either. At a reception shortly after his return, he took a razor to the long beards of his nobles with his own hands. A few years later, men who wanted to keep their beards had to pay an annual tax and carry a copper token stamped with a picture of a beard as proof. Meanwhile, his new ships still needed a coastline. Peter wanted one on the Baltic, and that meant taking it from Sweden. War began in 1700 with a severe Russian defeat at Narva, after which Peter ordered a share of the country's church bells melted down to replace the cannons he had lost. Three years later he seized the mouth of the Neva and began building St. Petersburg on its marshes. The site had almost no stone of its own, so every cart and boat arriving in the city had to bring a quota of rocks. When there were too few masons to do the work, Peter banned stone construction everywhere else in Russia, leaving them with one place to find employment.

Peter kept building the new city while the war with Sweden went on. In 1709 his rebuilt army defeated the Swedes at Poltava, and when peace finally came in 1721 the Senate proclaimed him emperor. St. Petersburg became his capital, built at enormous human cost, while ordinary Russians faced heavier taxes and lifelong army service. A Table of Ranks divided military, civil, and court service into fourteen grades. A commoner who rose high enough became a hereditary noble. His eldest son, Alexis, had little interest in these reforms, and those who preferred the old ways gathered around him. Alexis fled abroad, and Peter coaxed him home with a promise of forgiveness, then had him tried for treason. After torture he was condemned to death, and in 1718 he died in the Peter and Paul Fortress, before the sentence could be carried out. In 1722 Peter changed the law to allow a ruler to choose his own heir, though he never named one himself. He died in 1725, aged 52, and was buried in the cathedral inside that same fortress, where his son was already buried.

Mongolia has no coastline, yet ships cross the oceans flying the Mongolian flag. Every merchant ship has to have a nationality, and the flag on its stern decides which country's taxes, labor rules, safety inspections, and courts follow the hull around the world. That country does not have to be the one where the ship's owner lives, and very often it is not. According to the United Nations trade agency UNCTAD, at the start of 2025 Liberia, Panama, and the Marshall Islands together flew their flags over 45.1 percent of the world's shipping capacity. The owners were somewhere else. In the same figures, the largest fleets by actual ownership belonged to Greece, China, and Japan, which between them controlled more than 40 percent of global capacity.

Panama was already offering its flag to foreign owners in the early twentieth century, and in 1922 the attraction was drink. Two American cruise liners, the Resolute and the Reliance, were transferred to the Panamanian flag that year so that their bars could stay open at sea. Other owners soon noticed that the same flag also came with lower taxes and cheaper crews. Liberia's registry was an American design. Edward Stettinius Jr., a former U.S. Secretary of State, helped draft the country's maritime code in 1948 as part of a business venture. On March 11, 1949, a tanker called World Peace, owned by the Greek magnate Stavros Niarchos, became the first ship to fly the new flag. The registry has always been administered from the United States, and today it is run from an office in northern Virginia. It kept signing up ships throughout Liberia's civil wars, when the fees were one of the few ways the government could still raise money. Maritime unions watched jobs and pay move to cheaper flags and began calling these arrangements flags of convenience.

In March 1967 the supertanker Torrey Canyon ran onto a reef off Cornwall and spilled more than 100,000 tons of crude oil, which washed up on British and French beaches. The ship flew the Liberian flag, belonged to a Bermuda subsidiary of a California oil company, was chartered to BP, and carried an Italian crew. British lawyers trying to recover the cleanup costs could not easily bring a case at home. They waited for the tanker's sister ship, the Lake Palourde, to call at Singapore and had it arrested there. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea later required a "genuine link" between a ship and its flag state, but never said clearly what that meant. The open registries continued to grow anyway. Some of them now compete on their safety records, and the quality of their fleets varies widely from flag to flag. The Deepwater Horizon, the drilling rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, was legally a vessel of the Marshall Islands, a chain of Pacific atolls whose ship registry is run from Reston, Virginia.