The British Empire and World Shipping

The British merchant marine was, by 1890, the largest in the world, and it remained so until 1945. The path to dominance is conventionally dated from the 1651 Navigation Act, but the structural cause was the eighteenth-century expansion of the British carrying trade, and the structural effect was the nineteenth-century industrial advantage the British shipping companies held over their continental competitors. The 1840s conversion of long-distance shipping from sail to steam was, for the British, the first technological transition in which the British were a generation ahead of their competitors; the result was the 1870–1914 era in which British shipping companies carried roughly half of the world’s seaborne trade.

The Origins in the Chartered Companies

The earliest substantial British shipping was, in the seventeenth century, the shipping of the chartered trading companies. The Levant Company (1592), the East India Company (1600), the Virginia Company (1606), the Royal African Company (1672), and the Hudson’s Bay Company (1670) all maintained their own fleets, and they all required naval protection in the form of convoy. The 1651 Navigation Act, passed by the Rump Parliament under the Commonwealth, and the 1660 Navigation Act, passed by the Convention Parliament at the Restoration, were the first substantial pieces of British mercantile legislation regulating who could carry colonial trade. The principle was the same in both Acts: colonial trade should be carried in British-built, British-owned, and British-manned ships, with a majority of the crew being British subjects.

The 1696 Act for the Prevention of Frauds and the Regulation of Abuses in the Plantation Trade extended the principle to enumerated commodities — sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo, ginger, and other tropical goods — that could not be shipped from a colonial port to a European port other than a British port. The 1696 Board of Trade, the administrative body that policed the system, was the first substantial British government institution for colonial commercial affairs. The system worked imperfectly. The Navigation Acts were routinely evaded by colonial merchants, and the customs administration was chronically under-resourced. But the Acts established the institutional framework inside which the British merchant marine grew.

The Steamship Transition

The 1838 steamship voyage of the Great Western from Bristol to New York, in 15 days, opened the transatlantic steam age. The 1840 founding of the Cunard Line, with the backing of the Admiralty and a contract to carry the mails, established the model of the subsidised, mail-carrying, long-distance steamship company. By 1850, Cunard, the P&O Line (founded 1837 as the Peninsular Steam Navigation Company), and the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company were the three principal British long-distance lines. The 1845 founding of the White Star Line, the 1869 founding of the Inman Line, and the 1872 founding of the HAPAG-typed German lines (HAPAG, Norddeutscher Lloyd) marked the start of the international competition for the long-distance trades.

The 1869 opening of the Suez Canal, which the 1882 British occupation of Egypt converted into a British strategic asset, restructured the steamship trades. The new route from London to Bombay was 4,000 nautical miles shorter than the Cape route. The P&O Line, which had been running steamers to India via the Cape since 1842, restructured its services through the Canal and became the principal British carrier on the eastern route. The 1870s and 1880s saw the construction of the P&O’s larger and faster India steamers, the Cunard’s Blue Riband challengers, and the White Star’s Oceanic-class liners. The 1880s saw the conversion of the British merchant marine from sail to steam on the long-distance routes; the conversion on the bulk trades was slower, and British sail maintained its lead in the Australian wool and the Indian jute trades until the 1900s.

The Late-Victorian and Edwardian Peak

The 1890–1914 period was the peak of British shipping. By 1900, the British merchant marine totalled some 9.2 million gross registered tons — more than the merchant marines of Germany, the United States, the Netherlands, France, and Japan combined. The Cunard Line held the Blue Riband from 1839 to 1845, lost it to the American Collins Line, recaptured it in the 1850s, lost it to the German Bremen and Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse in the 1890s, and re-took it in 1907 with the Lusitania and the Mauretania. The 1907 Cunarders were the fastest commercial vessels afloat; they were also Royal Navy auxiliary cruisers, manned by Naval Reserve officers, and were armed as such on the outbreak of war in 1914.

The White Star Line’s 1911 Titanic was the largest passenger liner in the world, and her 1912 sinking on her maiden voyage was the central maritime disaster of the era. The White Star Line’s Olympic-class tonnage continued to serve as Admiralty auxiliary cruisers through the First World War, the 1918 Olympic sinking the German submarine U-103. The Cunard’s Lusitania was torpedoed off the Old Head of Kinsale on 7 May 1915, with the loss of 1,198 lives; the sinking is the central political event of the period. The 1918 introduction of the Cunard’s Aquitania as the largest British liner, the 1921 refit of the Olympic, and the 1922 introduction of the Canadian Pacific’s Empress of Britain marked the start of the inter-war contraction.

The Twentieth-Century Decline

The British merchant marine’s relative position declined through the twentieth century. The 1921 Washington Naval Treaty limited the construction of capital ships, and the resulting displacement of skilled labour from the naval shipyards to the merchant yards lowered the cost of merchant construction. The 1929 Wall Street Crash destroyed the first-class passenger market, on which the Cunarders depended. The 1933 founding of Cunard White Star Ltd consolidated the British transatlantic lines. The 1935 launching of the Cunard’s Queen Mary — at 81,000 tons the largest British merchant ship ever built — recovered the Blue Riband from the Italian Rex. The 1940 launching of the Queen Elizabeth, the war-time use of the two Queens as troop ships, and the 1945 conversion of the merchant marine to civilian service marked the high-tide of the British Atlantic line trade.

The post-1945 decline was structural. The 1956 Suez Crisis exposed the dependence of British oil supply on the canal route. The 1957 launch of the first container ship, the Ideal X (a converted T-2 tanker, owned by Pan-Atlantic), opened the container revolution that would, in the 1960s and 1970s, restructure the global shipping industry. The 1967 closure of the Suez Canal after the Six-Day War shifted the trunk routes back to the Cape, and the 1975 reopening of the canal after the 1973 Yom Kippur War did not restore the previous pattern. The 1968 Containerisation Conference, the 1969 founding of the Far East and Europe shipping conferences, and the 1970s decline of the British tramp trades are the structural causes. The economic historian John H. Drabble’s work on the post-war decline of the British shipping industry is the standard account.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the British merchant marine has been shaped by three interventions. Charles Wilson’s Profit and Power (1957) argued that the British shipping companies were, in the eighteenth century, the agents of an English commercial empire in which the carrying trade was the central sector. Peter D. Richardson and the contributors to the Oxford History of the British Empire have extended the argument into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. John H. Drabble’s work on the post-war decline has produced the economic history of the contraction. The unresolved question is the weight to assign to the structural advantages of empire, the technological lead in steam navigation, and the labour-cost advantages of the British coal and steel industries in explaining the British dominance. The present generation of historians has, on the whole, declined to give the British Empire’s commercial legacy a clean bill of health.

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