Fri Nov 3 09:42:16 EST 2006
Published by EH.NET (November 2006)
William H. Thiesen, _Industrializing American Shipbuilding: The
Transformation of Ship Design and Construction, 1820-1920_.
Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2006. x + 302 pp. $55
(cloth), ISBN: 0-8130-2940-6.
Review for EH.NET by Richard Sicotte, Department of Economics,
University of Vermont.
William H. Thiesen's _Industrializing American Shipbuilding_ is a
carefully researched, insightful book that focuses on the evolution
of U.S. shipbuilding from a craft to a modern heavy industry. Thiesen
is the curator of the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc,
Wisconsin. With impressive command of the details, he chronicles the
enormous changes in the design and construction of ships from 1820 to
1920. Thus, the book is primarily of history of technology, but
Thiesen's very effective presentation also contains substantial
information about particular business enterprises, shipyards,
entrepreneurs, scientists and naval officers.
The book is organized as follows. The first chapter discusses the
origins of U.S. craft shipbuilding methods. The ascendance of
scientific design and construction in Great Britain in the nineteenth
century is the topic of chapter two. Chapters three and four describe
the growth and heyday of American wooden shipbuilding. The fifth is
one of the most creative and interesting chapters, in which Thiesen
describes the transition from wood to iron. In the sixth and seventh
chapters, the author discusses ship design, and the belated adoption
of scientific methods in U.S. shipbuilding. Thiesen then describes
the revolution in U.S. ship construction, through the invention and
adoption of labor-saving machinery and greatly improved production
organization. The final chapter is a thoughtful summary and
conclusion.
Thiesen has provided an important, perhaps indispensable contribution
for answering some of the questions about U.S. shipbuilding that
would probably be of most interest to economic historians. For
example, when and why did the U.S. apparently lose its comparative
advantage in shipbuilding? American-built steamships played a minor
role in international shipping in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century, carrying only a fraction of U.S. oceanborne
commerce. Previous scholarship has focused, without much quantitative
evidence on costs of production, on the changes from wood to iron and
sail to steam, as explaining the decline of U.S. shipping. Although
Thiesen provides little in the way of quantitative analysis, his
detailed account of American shipbuilding methods will provide
researchers interested in the comparative advantage question with a
number of promising leads of where to look for evidence, and how to
develop alternative hypotheses. In chapter five, he convincingly
demonstrates the "cross-fertilization" of techniques between the wood
and iron branches of the U.S. shipbuilding industry, and argues that
the construction of iron ships in mid-nineteenth century United
States was largely a craft. Thiesen describes the step-by-step
process of the construction of the iron steamship _Saratoga_ in the
1870s. The extent of custom-fitting is striking. Still, I was left
wondering whether it was possible to provide a reasonable
quantitative estimate of how much additional cost these methods
implied relative to practices employed in other countries. Just how
important were demand-side factors, relative labor costs, and access
to resources in determining the comparatively poor performance of
U.S. iron shipbuilding?
Thiesen's description in chapter eight of the application of electric
power and cutting-edge technology at the New York Shipbuilding
Company is highly provocative. He cites European visitors to the yard
as being awestruck by the high-tech operation, and describes how the
U.S. began to be a source of shipbuilding technology transfer rather
than only a destination. He does not show, however, what the effects
of these innovations were on the competitive position of American
shipbuilding relative to its foreign rivals. Because foreign firms
adopted many U.S. innovations, it seems likely that the effects were
mitigated.
A second major research question about U.S. shipbuilding concerns the
effects of U.S. public policy toward the industry. Thiesen is
decidedly critical of the tariff on iron, arguing that it was a
serious impediment to the industry's development. He argues that
without the federal regulation reserving coastal traffic for American
ships, the industry would have been much smaller. (The Great Lakes
became the major center of U.S. shipbuilding in the late nineteenth
century.) The most innovative and well documented contribution he
makes insofar as public policy, however, is the vital role that the
U.S. Navy played in bringing scientific design and modern naval
architecture to the industry. The Navy sent officers and engineers to
Europe in the 1870s and 1880s to learn modern techniques. Later,
naval engineers were assigned to teach courses at American
universities, eventually leading to the establishment at several
universities of degree programs in naval architecture. Thiesen states
that the "development of a naval-industrial complex paved the way for
more systematic ship design and construction methods" (p. 159).
William Thiesen has produced an excellent book. It is a must-read for
maritime historians, and of major interest for historians of
technology. It also will stimulate research on some of the most
interesting questions surrounding the comparative advantage of U.S.
shipbuilding industry and of U.S. heavy industry more generally.
Richard Sicotte is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University
of Vermont. His research has focused on the shipping industry, its
market structure and effects on international trade and migration.
Copyright (c) 2006 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be
copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to
the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the
EH.Net Administrator (administrator at eh.net; Telephone: 513-529-2229).
Published by EH.Net (November 2006). All EH.Net reviews are archived
at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.