Risk, Uncertainty and the British Atlantic Merchant Ship as a Technology for Profit, 1600–1800

Abstract

Douglass North's work on the productivity of early modern British merchant shipping, along with that of his students Gary Walton and James Shepherd, taught us much about how the economy of British America worked. While crediting the security of the seas and more efficient business organization for allowing modest growth in shipping productivity, they relegated technological adaptation to insignificance. While accepting the main thrust of their argument, and indeed furthering it, John McCusker, Russell Menard, Nathan Rosenberg and Frederic Lane declined to dismiss the role that such adaptation might have played, leaving open the possibility that ship technology was worth exploring in a time and place for which it was generally considered static. Phillip Reid’s exploration of that subject has been guided by two premises: first, that continuity as well as change can serve as technological adaptation to operating conditions; and, second, that economic maritime history has paid too little attention to the technology of the ordinary merchant ship in this period to evaluate its contribution to the success of the shipping industry – or lack thereof. Both continuity and change served as technological adaptations, allowing the merchant ship to serve a shipping industry that, in turn, served a world growing and changing demographically and economically, with that change accelerating in the second half of the eighteenth century. In past work, he has argued that specific continuities and changes in the merchant ship are best explained as strategies of ‘risk mitigation’. Here, he also considers the distinction between risk and uncertainty to determine what, if any, application it might have to understanding continuity and change in the hazards to profit presented by the ever-present and dangerous collection of hazards posed to the merchant ship and crew by the Atlantic and the human predators who cruised it.