A brief history of the cruise ship industry—from its early idealism to its evolution into “funships” for “Huggets”:
“Arison found a Norwegian called Knut Kloster who had a suitable boat. Kloster also came from an old shipping family. They had made their fortune shipping ice to Europe from Norway, and they now ran a vast fleet of tankers. In 1966 Kloster and Arison set up a company called Norwegian Cruise Lines based in Miami.
“Kloster believed that the aim of capitalism was not just to make money but to use its power to improve society. He saw the world as divided between the rich, industrial west – and the ‘third world’ which was struggling to escape from the debilitating legacy of colonialism, and the still vastly unequal distribution of global power.
“So his cruise ships were going to remedy that.”