This essay will examine the ways in which British coastal shipping businesses reacted to competition from railways. It is divided broadly into five sections. The first sketches the role of coastal shipping before the advent of the railways and explores the impact of steam on short-sea shipping. The second analyzes the part played by the short-distance early railways, which were perceived initially as at best minor threats to coastal shipping. Indeed, many were seen as beneficial because they enhanced the flow of goods to and from ports. The third section examines the threat from the long-distance national rail lines that began to appear in the 1840s. The fourth considers the range of responses, including attempts at intra- and inter-modal collusion; a search for technological improvement; a more positive market segmentation; and a re-appraisal of pricing methods. Finally, I will evaluate the success of these responses in securing market share for the coaster.

As a method of moving goods and people, coastal shipping has a long history. In the early modern period it was an important industry in Britain, even if estimates of its significance vary enormously. With an extensive coastline and many navigable rivers, Britain was particularly reliant on coasters to move coal, grain, ore and a wide range of agricultural and extractive goods. Despite having been virtually ignored by some recent historians, coastal shipping was crucial to British industrialization and its growing trade. Coasters linked the various regions into something approaching a national economy, carrying not only bulky, low-value products but also manufactures, such as linen, cheese, iron goods, and beer and spirits. They were ubiquitous, as a perusal of directories for port cities or early local newspapers reveals.

The value of the coaster was much enhanced with the advent of steam. Although there were earlier experiments, the first commercial steamboat service in the UK was inaugurated in 1812 by Henry Bell, who ran Comet on the Clyde and its estuaries between Glasgow and Gourock. This service, which spawned many others, began thirteen years before the pioneering Stockton and Darlington Railway (SDR) and eighteen before the Liverpool and Manchester (LMR). In other words, steam was exploited much earlier on water than on rails. The advantages of steam to water transport were enormous. Although largely confined to rivers, estuaries and coastal routes, steam provided a predictability that sailing ships lacked.

On the afternoon of 8 June, 1726, as it was making its way north through Pentland Firth between the Scottish mainland and the Orkney Islands, the merchant ship Christian of Leith was struck by a storm. The ship's master, Alexander Hutton, was obliged to bear away and make for the shelter of Kirston Harbour, anchoring there at 5 pm. Not until 14 June did the winds shift sufficiently to allow the Christian to get underway once again. Finally, two days later and nearly two weeks after departing Leith, the ship's supercargo, Edward Burd Jr., was able to record in his journal with some satisfaction that the Christian had come abreast of the lonely rock of St. Kilda. Ahead lay the open Atlantic and their destination, Newfoundland.

The unscheduled stop in the Orkneys had almost certainly come as a relief to Burd, for he had been troubled by sea-sickness during the Christian's first days at sea. Yet the men who had chartered the ship would have viewed the delay at Kirston as an inauspicious beginning to a commercial venture which, by its novel nature, was filled with uncertainties. Stowed in the Christian's hold were five tons of “Bisquett” in thirty-two casks, which the supercargo was to sell in Newfoundland; he was then to purchase a cargo of fish for delivery and sale in Spain, where the acquisition of yet another cargo, consisting of cork, wine, and fruit, was to be arranged for the final leg back to Scotland. It was a dramatic departure from the kind of venture in which the investors had previously engaged, for not one of them had ever traded to Newfoundland — indeed, no Scottish merchant had ever participated regularly in the Newfoundland fish trade before the Christian began her voyage. Yet the men who chartered the ship were not complete novices in maritime commerce. All were experienced both in domestic enterprise and in maritime trade with Europe. Moreover, they were linked by an informal but advantageous network of social, political and commercial contacts through which they could safely respond to new commercial opportunities like the Newfoundland trade. This paper will therefore consider the social, economic and political environment which drew them into the Newfoundland trade at this time, as well as the circumstances of the voyage which seemingly convinced them not to repeat the experiment.

John Greene Proud, supercargo for several ships owned by the large New York firm Minturn and Champlin, wrote from French-occupied Hamburg to his principals in June 1810: “The resources of this market in Capital and a Spirit of Speculation so far exceed that of any other in this quarter that is open to us.” A week later, however, writing to London bankers, Proud sounded a note of caution: “Our mutual N.Y. friends have had some pretty considerable and on the whole advantageous business in this quarter under my direction — but the Prospect is now exceedingly cloudy and if we are enabled to wind up present Affairs in safety and without Loss it is as much as can be expected.” By October he characterizes the Hamburg, and by implication North Sea/Baltic, market as “nearly as bad as it can be,” in November, his opinion drops lower still: “With respect to commerce I hope it is not entirely annhilated but you may consider it as dead for the present.”

Having been detained by Danish privateers, nearly shipwrecked off Rostock, and frustrated at every turn by French douanières and duplicitous German merchants, supercargo Leonard Matthews of the schooner Nonsuch was even more scathing about American trade prospects in northern Europe at that same time. From Hamburg, he informed his principal, merchant and later mayor of Baltimore George Stiles, in February 1811 that: “The shape given to commerce in this country, and which involves your interest so deeply, is to me a source of infinite regret, but no human foresight could guard against it.” He was long since disenchanted with north European markets: “I am heartily sick of Europe, and wish very much to go home, but when that happy period will arrive is very uncertain.” Writing to a fellow American supercargo, Matthews expressed his disgust, asserting that the German merchants would “fleece you like the devil, for it is, unfortunately for us, the prevailing opinion of the merchants in this country, that the United States will have no more trade to these parts of the world…”

Although perhaps more severe as a result of the Napoleonic conflict, the experiences of Proud and Matthews were by no means uncommon for maritime merchants from the fledgeling US.

The aim of this article is to estimate the amount of work performed by coastal shipping in the period just before World War I and to compare its contribution with that of the railways and canals. Until recenüy, with honourable exceptions, the coastal trade in the railway era was either ignored or merited but scant coverage. The impression was given that the railways, like juggernaut's chariot, swept everything else away, rendering obsolete the coach, wagon, canal barge and coaster. By 1910 the railway network was virtually complete compared with, say, 1875, when many branch lines had yet to be constructed, or 1850, when only the basic network had been built, and it might be assumed that litde scope was left for the carriage of freight in coastal ships. Thus, the year 1910 should provide the least favourable case for the coaster and the most favourable for the railway in terms of total tonnage of goods carried. Passenger traffic will not be considered here; this is not to imply that coastal shipping did not carry people, but it seems indisputable that where coaster and railway competed, passengers preferred rail to sea travel. The main strength of the coastal passenger ship in 1910 was in services the railway could not provide in ferrying passengers to places like the Isle of Wight, Isle of Man, Channel Isles and the Scottish islands. This article will confine itself to considering the use made of the various types of transport in providing cargo-carrying services.

One measure of freight traffic which might be used is tonnage carried. At first sight this seems the obvious criterion; it is commonly used for foreign trade or modern lorry traffic, and the capacity of railway wagons or canal barges seems crucial. However, a more informative and accurate measure of total cargo movement performed is ton-mileage, as this takes into account not merely the tonnage of goods moved but also the distance consignments were carried. The value of ton-mileage has long been recognized by railway managers and statisticians. Historians, too, have emphasized its importance, notably Hawke, who used it as the measure of total railway output, and Cain, who said that “[t]on miles…are the only reasonable measure of railway output.“ Different forms of transport may be better suited for different lengths of journey.

Much is known of the extent, methods and significance of conferences as a means of regulating competition in overseas shipping. They were introduced among liner companies running to a fixed schedule in a particular trade. Tramp conferences were unlikely to succeed because such ships did not ply one regular route but rather worked whatever cargo and route was available, making mutual pricing a nightmare. Tramps also were often operated by merchants to carry their own goods and were not interested in collaborative action. Conferences in overseas trade appeared with the advent of the long-distance steamer which ensured reasonably reliable arrivals and departures. Sailing ships depended too much on fickle winds and tides to run to a strict timetable. Conferences were most likely to succeed where valuable or perishable commodities needed regular and rapid transit. For instance, the tea trade from the Far East, carried so famously by clipper ships until the 1870s, was confined to steamers belonging to the Far Eastern Freight Conference after its inception in 1879. Other cargoes could await the unscheduled but cheaper freighter.

The earliest conference in foreign trade was established in August 1875 for shipping from the United Kingdom to Calcutta. One had been projected in 1869 for the North Atlantic but failed to materialize, and some sailing ship brokers attempted to form rings to fix freight rates on the more regular routes. From that beginning conferences spread rapidly into most trades so that by 1895 they were “in all the major trades from Great Britain, with the exception of the North Atlantic,” and by 1913 they “regulated most of the cargo exported from the UK” except coal.

Although there were variations, the common features of conferences have been identified. A schedule of freight rates was agreed to which all members adhered. Deferred rebates were pioneered in 1877 by the Calcutta conference to encourage shipper's loyalty, since the rebate was conditional upon the merchant sending all goods only via conference ships in the qualifying period. This worked sufficiently well for it to be adopted by many later conferences. In most cases conference ships ran to a regular schedule of sailings to ensure that goods were not kept waiting for transportation. Within the conferences there were also often confidential pooling agreements which usually took the form of “joint purses” where all receipts were divided between the participants on some pre-arranged basis.

In 1988, the American Neptune published an article by Dwight E. Robinson on the British coastal fleet in the eighteenth century.2 It was a pioneering study in that before then very few pieces had been published on any aspect of the British coastal trade in this or any other maritime history journal. It reminded readers of the great importance of the British coastal trade, both quantitatively and qualitatively, from the earliest days of Britain and especially of its role as a nursery for seamen and in boosting Britain's naval power through training seamen in ship handling and navigation. It was also innovative in its methodology, as Robinson had to deal with the problem of double recording of ships and find a method to eliminate such double counting. He chose to use a computer database for this task, a relatively novel solution at the time. Furthermore, the article provided a quantitative assessment of the size of the British coastal trade in 1776, and was able to break this down by the nature of the cargo carried, between domestic coasting and that to near-continental ports, and also provided a ranking of which ports were the largest owners of coasters and therefore probably the most heavily engaged in operating coastal ships. This was important work and came up with revealing findings.

Robinson took maritime historians to task for ignoring “a comprehensive source of data” that would allow us to estimate “the extent and nature of the British domestic coasting fleet” in the eighteenth century.3 Given that the article was published over a decade ago, and that no subsequent book or article has appeared tackling the question of the size of the British eighteenth-century coasting fleet or drawing on the documentation to which Robinson referred, maritime historians appear to be either incorrigibly slow and lazy or totally disinterested in the British coasting fleet. Our object is to redeem the community of maritime historians. There are good reasons why the records in question have not been extensively used, and why Robinson overstated their comprehensiveness and value.

The records that Robinson used were the British Admiralty's thirtyeight “Registers of Protection from Being Pressed,” held in the National Archives in Kew on the western outskirts of London.

The Dutch Republic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is often perceived as a bastion of free trade. No doubt, Hugo Grotius’ celebrated publication Mare liberum (The Open Seas) has contributed to that image, although Grotius soon afterwards defended Dutch monopolistic practices. As Immanuel Wallerstein has asserted, nations that enjoy a hegemony of world trade - as the Dutch “carriers of the world” did during the seventeenth century - have the advantage of supporting freedom from restrictions in international trade. However, it has been well established that the Dutch wanted to have it both ways and demand open seas when it suited them and impose restrictions on foreign merchants when they found it to their economic advantage, in both the East Indies (Indonesia) and the West Indies.

Historians generally label the commercial protection against foreign competitors by means of state intervention as mercantilism. Employing this interpretive framework is fraught with dangers, however, because of the different meanings of that theoretical model. Some have even questioned the validity of mercantilism as an interpretive model. Without restating the various interpretations of mercantilism, I am using the term here to signify governmental efforts to prevent subjects of foreign countries to trade in regions under its jurisdiction for the purpose of limiting such rights to its own subjects and thus protect its national economy.

In their Atlantic commerce, the Dutch employed a mixture of mercantilistic protectionism and free trade access, depending on what suited them best. Initially, they had been instrumental in developing the Caribbean region, through capital investment and an efficient merchant marine, into a new system based on “advanced capitalist economics,” in contrast to the exclusive markets of the Spanish and Portuguese American colonies. As England and France began to apply mercantilistic policies during the seventeenth century and the Dutch found their commercial opportunities declining, their commerce became increasingly confined to their own overseas colonies.

Unlike several other European nations, the Dutch Republic was never able to induce much of its own population to emigrate to overseas settlements. This contributed to the failure of both their Brazil and New Nederland settlements. In the Guiana region they were able to provide a supervisory staff to make tropical plantation economies thrive with slave labour brought in from Africa. For these areas the Dutch developed their own protective policies.

Maritime history has made some amazing strides in the past half century. From largely being the preserve of aniquarians and aficionados of ships, it has become an increasingly respected genre within the larger body of historical scholarship. Yet if there is one area that has been relatively ignored - with, as John Armstrong would likely put it, “a few honourable exceptions” - it would be the history of the trades in which merchant vessels engaged. In the early modern period we know a lot about the tobacco and timber trades, and the study of the slave trade in all its ramifications has been revolutionized by the work of a dedicated group of scholars. But virtually all the great trades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries still await proper scholarly treatment.

There is, however, an “honourable exception” to this last generalization, for as the essays that follow demonstrate with grace and insight, we know quite a bit about the British coastal trade. That I can make this claim is due almost entirely to the work of a single remarkable scholar - John Armstrong. Although as John is always careful to remind us, his work has been entirely on the British trade, it is no less important for this focus. Moreover, although even in the United Kingdom this sector was far from homogeneous, I believe that readers of the essays in this volume will come away with an appreciation of the main characteristics of its various branches. As John has pointed out repeatedly, there remain many significant things that we still do not know. Yet what is striking to me - and I suspect that it will be to many other readers as well - is that thanks to John Armstrong's industry, imagination and hard work we know quite a bit about the British coastal trade.

For this reason, and many others besides, we are extremely happy to have this selection (and as the bibliography at the end of the book demonstrates, it is only a selection) of John Armstrong's writings in a single volume in the Research in Maritime History señes. Having worked on this book for the past few months and reacquainted myself with his body of work, I am convinced that all maritime historians will learn a great deal from the essays included here.

The period 1900 to 1914 has been characterized as one of continuing depression in the international shipping industry. James considered 1901 to 1911 to have been an acute depression in shipping, while Sturmey considered the period 1904 to 1911 to have been “the first truly international shipping depression.“ More recently Aldcroft, examining ocean freight rates, the earnings of half a dozen British liner companies and the movement of earnings per ton of four British shipping firms, has concluded that “during the first decade of the twentieth century British shipping was more depressed than at any time during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.” Aldcroft admits the statistical basis of his conclusions “are very weak,” and indeed he presents no new index of freight rates to support his case, relying on data from Angier and Isserlis.

No cognizance has been taken of coastal freight rates in this period, and indeed not much is known generally about the movement of coastal freight rates. It has been established that coastal liner companies followed the practice of the railways in charging on an eight-fold classification based on the value of the good and the difficulty of handling it and that the coastal liner charged less than the railway for virtually all commodities and routes. However, there has been no attempt to look at a series of coastal freight rates to see how they fluctuated over time. Freight rates charged by liner companies were only one aspect of the coastal trade. There was also the tramping coaster, not tied to any specific route but going wherever there was a cargo to be carried and working to no published schedule of sailings but departing as and when the cargo had been loaded. Although the liner companies carried the higher-valued cargoes, leaving the bulkier, lower-valued commodities to be hauled by tramps, liners were almost certainly a minority of the total number of ships in the coastal trade and carried a smaller aggregate tonnage of goods than the tramp ships. Thus, to concentrate only on liner freight rates is to ignore charges made on the major portion of coastal trade. The single most important cargo carried by the coaster in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was coal.

Introduction

Spain has had a long and distinguished history of seafaring, but its political culture has been shaped largely by its hinterland. Throughout history, inland Castile held most of the country's arable land and the bulk of its people, and most Spaniards did not identify with the sea. In the Habsburg period (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), though shipping lanes bound Spain's empire together, government neglected the navy when financial exigencies diverted funds to more pressing needs.

The Royal Navy (Real Armada) was not founded until 1714, after Spain had lost its dominant position in Europe. The Bourbons streamlined the complex organization that had defined royal maritime affairs and succeeded in defending and even expanding the empire in the eighteenth century. After most of Spain's colonies broke away in the early nineteenth century, there was less need for a navy and less commerce to occupy the merchant marine. When the final remnants of empire were stripped away at the end of the nineteenth century, the days of Spain's maritime prominence were already long past.

Given these circumstances, modern Spain might have neglected its maritime history, yet it has not. The Revista General de Marina, founded in 1877, has published nearly 11,000 articles in its long career. Although most have concerned the military history of the sea (naval history), that does not define the filli range of topics covered. Articles also deal regularly with the merchant marine and the fishing industry. The Revista de Historia Naval, founded in 1983, created a venue for more focused naval history, but there seems to be little antagonism among scholars who study various maritime topics. Instead, they seem to agree with a nineteenth-century merchant marine captain who wrote that “the merchant marine and the navy have identical interests to promote, and instead of divorcing themselves they complement one another. They are like two bodies with a single soul.” Such sentiments were undoubtedly more common when multipurpose vessels dominated the world's sea lanes, and that tradition may have lasted longer in Spain than elsewhere. A wide range of books on maritime matters has also appeared in the past century, and the pace of publications in all aspects of maritime history has increased notably in recent years.

This paper discusses an instance when war compelled merchants to venture into trades that were new to them. Specifically, it examines the introduction during the Napoleonic Wars of British trade to Iceland, a dependency of Denmark, one of England's enemies. War between Denmark and Great Britain broke out officially in November 1807 and continued until a peace treaty was finally concluded in Kiel in January 1814. Why did British merchants become interested in trading with Iceland and how was the trade conducted? This paper will attempt to answer these questions.

Iceland in 1800

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Iceland had a population of only about 47,000. Its society was made up of a small landowning class and a large tenant peasantry. Most Icelanders lived on isolated farms and were engaged primarily in animal husbandry (mainly sheep farming) with fishing as a subsidiary occupation. There were no villages, only trading stations dotted along the coast. Reykjavik, the principal mercantile station and centre of administration, had only three hundred inhabitants. The island lacked both fortifications and a defence force.

In 1788 the “Free Trade Charter” brought two centuries of mercantilist monopoly trade to an end. Henceforth only independent merchants, subjects of the Dano-Norwegian kingdom — with the exception of the Faroes and Greenland but including native Icelanders — would be permitted to participate in the Iceland trade. The basic principle of the new trade system was to exclude foreign merchants from trading to Iceland and strictly to forbid Icelanders from having any direct commercial dealings with “foreigners.” Almost all of the merchants active in Iceland during this period were Danes resident in Denmark for the better part of the year. In the spring they and their ships would arrive in Iceland; they would trade during the summer season (the handet) and return to their homeland in late summer or autumn. Only a handful of native Icelanders were engaged in trade.

The Iceland trade was a barter trade; little money was in circulation. The principal exports were: fish, including both stockfish (dried cod) and klipfish (dried salted cod); fish liver oil (train-oil); wool and woollen products of various kinds, such as stockings and mittens; tallow; salted mutton; eiderdown; feathers; the skins of sheep, fox, and swans; and sulphur. British merchants also sought such items as reindeer antlers, minerals and horses suitable as pit ponies.

The popular view of internal British nineteenth-century transport history in undergraduate texts may be characterized as the triumph of railways over older modes of travel, such as stagecoaches, horse-drawn wagons and canal boats. This is sometimes used as evidence of the supremacy of modern over preindustrial technology and as such contains more than a smidgen of Whig history. The railway is portrayed in Darwinian terms as the more advanced species that killed off other forms of transport by offering superior service, speed and lower prices. Thus, long-distance coaches and wagons ceased operations when a rail line was completed and were then relegated either to areas that lacked railways or to service as intra-urban, short-haul carriers between railway stations and factories or workshops. Canals entered an era of long-term, genteel decline, helped by the fact that some railways absorbed canal companies and at times even laid their tracks in drained canal beds. This can also be seen as progress, since new technology superseded the outdated.

Even a cursory glance at the tables of contents of established transport history texts, such as Dyos and Aldcroft, Barker and Savage or Bagwell reveals that substantial portions are devoted to the advent of the railway, its impact on other forms of transport and its effects on the society and economy. Moreover, there are a plethora of enthusiast books on the history of particular rail lines, classes of engine, towns, engineers and types of carriage. The sheer size of Ottley's massive bibliography, plus its supplement, gives some idea of the amount of information available on various aspects of railway history. In this obsession with the new technology of the iron rail, coastal shipping has been relatively ignored. The tacit assumption seems to have been that, like the horse-drawn wagon, coach or barge, coasters were obsolete and hence “naturally“ superseded by the railway. An excursion through the pages of the standard texts shows that the space devoted to coastal shipping is minuscule. In comparison to the nearly 13,000 items in Ottley's compilation, a bibliography on coastal shipping and trade from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries would contain only about 250 entries, even including fleet lists barren of all but the most basic factual information. Nor can it be claimed that such neglect was a phenomenon only of the “first generation” of transport history texts.

Introduction

Although the study of the history of maritime labour in the Netherlands has made great strides in the past twenty years, a survey of the development of the labour market between 1570 and 1870 still is necessarily incomplete. First of all, research on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been more extensive than inquiries on the period before 1600 or the era after 1800; labour in the Dutch navy and mercantile marine after 1825 has up to now hardly been studied at all. Second, most pre-1800 studies have concentrated on the navy, the East India Company (VOC) and whaling rather than on the fisheries or the merchant marine. Third, inquiries on maritime labour until recently were more concerned with themes like geographical origins, mortality rates or wage levels than with analyses on a micro-level of the mechanisms that made the maritime labour market operate as it did. Career patterns, labour cycles, earnings, marriage rates, age distribution or reproductive behaviour of seamen - to mention but a few salient topics - are as yet still insufficiently known. Fourth, the movement of foreign maritime labour to the Netherlands has received more attention than the flow of Dutch maritime labour abroad. These biases are to some extent reflected in the following survey.

The survey starts with an overview of aggregate data on maritime labour in the Netherlands. This section summarizes the evidence available on such general aspects as levels of employment; the size, structure and productivity of shipping; the geographic origins of crews; and the movement of Dutch labour abroad. Having sketched the parameters of the maritime labour market at large, I will then take a closer look at the operation of the labour market itself. Starting from the model of the “segmented labour market,” which at present holds sway in the study of labour in the early modern Netherlands, I will attempt both to integrate the findings so far and to pinpoint the principal issues that require further research. This survey naturally leads to the con- elusion, I will argue in the final section of this essay, that the study of maritime labour in the Netherlands is now especially in need of more micro-level research.

In a well-known opening passage of his Essay upon Projects (1697) Daniel Defoe rhapsodised upon the ingenuity of merchants, forced by the pressures of recent maritime conflict to devise novel strategies of survival. Living by their wits, every venture they undertake is a project:

It is a romantic, almost Faustian, image this — the merchant as magus, contriving remote lévitations and transmutations from the cloistered privacy of his wharfside offices — and it may seem rather far removed from the prosaic realities conveyed to us by a score of contemporaneous manuals on mercantile practice and brought to life most recently by Jacob Price and David Hancock. In their vivid accounts of eighteenth-century Atlantic-merchant partnerships we are placed in a severely practical world, of disciplined procedures, meticulous record-keeping and cautious calculation. Surrounded by the ordered hierarchies of waste-books, billbooks, letter-books, journals and ledgers we are in an environment of constraints — constraints imposed by time, distance, law and the overriding necessity to reduce risk. It does not seem an environment attuned to strenuous adventure or novel enterprise.

Yet, Defoe was right. Implicit in his characterization is the timeless truism that knowledge is power. The well-ordered merchant-house, sustaining a large correspondence and capable of efficient informationretrieval, was the organization most advantageously placed to conduct its affairs with least risk of disappointment or surprise, and if it could convey a reputation for the reliability of these attributes to its clients and competitors then it stood to gain one of the highest prizes in the game of commerce — sound credit. From this all else could flow — business, profit, confidence, the momentum of self-sustained growth.

Unsurprisingly, the force of these simple truths re-emerges, again and again, from these collected papers. Despite the competing, autarchic statesystem — English, Spanish, Dutch or French — which sought to monopolize the transatlantic trades, the eighteenth-century North Atlantic was a trading environment distinctively exploited by individual initiatives.

Seamen on Norwegian Ships: Norway and Shipping

Because of Norway's lengthy coastline, ships were a common means of transport and communication. During the Norwegian North Sea empire (vesterhavsriket) in the Middle Ages, the country was important for shipping, but by the beginning of the sixteenth century Norwegian shipping was insignificant compared to its competitors. The majority of freight to and from Norway was carried by foreign ships. Due to the Hanse's dominant position in Bergen, Germans had a strong grip on the trade of western Norway and on the supplies of fish from the north. But Bergen still showed signs of being a westward-oriented town, maintaining contacts with Iceland, the Orkney and Shetland Islands, and Scotland, partly because western Norway at that time could supply these barren lands with timber. In the districts of Rogaland and Vest-Agder, timber was the most important export; here the Scots were dominant. From Aust-Agder eastwards, the timber trade was especially important, and it was at first dominated by the Dutch. Of course, no nation had total control over any district. For example, in Trondheim the economy depended on fishing as well as timber, and vessels from various nations called at the port.

It was crucial to Norwegian shipping to carry a growing share of exports, because the new industries, timber and mining (bergverk), grew rapidly. Timber was especially important, since the bulk of mining output was consumed domestically. As the Hanse's power declined, Norwegian vessels engrossed a large part of the fish trade as well. Thus, the growth of Norwegian shipping resulted mainly from heightened demand for the country's exports. This was buttressed by the Dano- Norwegian policy of encouraging shipping, especially through an armed merchant ship agreement (defensjonsskipsordninga) which gave domestic craft certain advantages as long as the state could use them in time of war. As the fleet developed, the role of outside shipping was reduced. Growth also resulted from a shift in the locus of world trade from Holland to England. Timber exports, as well as the volume of shipping, increased when the British Navigation Act of 1651 excluded third-party shipping from trading between Norway and England. Another reason a small country like Norway could obtain a foothold was that the great shipping states were constantly at war.

To understand the labour market for seamen in the Southern Netherlands (Belgium from 1830) from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, we should ask about government's attitude toward maritime affairs, as well as about the size of the merchant fleet and the navy, the area of recruitment, working conditions, wages and opportunities for promotion.

Size of the Mercantile Marine and Navy

By and large maritime affairs have not been one of government's priorities for the past 500 years for various reasons. Primarily, the extension of a maritime tradition depends on geopolitics. The reduced coastal strip along the North Sea from Dunkirk to Heist, and the fact that only artificial harbours were possible - vessels could only make port at high tide - are two obvious explanations. A second aspect involves the international balance of power. Spanish military strategy required that Dunkirk and Ostend, which were only significant as fishing harbours, be used for naval fleets as well. War and trade, however, do not always coexist well, and the merchant marine became the first victim. There was also Antwerp, which had only become a true port in the fifteenth century. In the last quarter of the sixteenth century direct access to the sea was severed by the Dutch, and the Eighty Years’ War further disturbed the growth of the harbour.

Antwerp then slumbered until the Napoleonic era. When Napoleon wanted Antwerp to become a military bulwark, a British blockade ended this brief commercial expansion. While during the Dutch period shipowners from the Netherlands dominated, it is notable that Antwerp still developed a merchant fleet.

In Belgium, industry and trade were given absolute priority by 1830. The success of the industrial revolution was vital to the young nation. Since many shipowners moved to the North with ships and crew, the merchant fleet had declined. To stimulate the investment in the fleet, government offered some modest subsidies, but indifference, lack of insight and limited expertise led to poor results. Shipowning remained of minor concern to firms in the Southern Netherlands. The famous Delia Faille concern in Antwerp was typical in the sixteenth century: it owned only two vessels, and only for a brief period. Otherwise, it was content with just one share in a ship. Profits on commercial and financial transactions appeared preferable and less risky.