Book Reviews 203

On the whole, it is a well-crafted and polished work; and is

clearly the best one-volume history of the Kaiser's High Seas Fleet
currently available. Although it offers precious little in terms of new
information or startling theories, it does provide a tremendous amount
of information on its subject. In addition, it clearly maps out both our
current state of knowledge about this military arm and the most
probable new research themes in German naval history. This alone
marks it as a valuable contribution to maritime history. It is highly-
recommended to both professional and general readers interested in
this period of German history.

Peter K.H. Mispelkamp Pointe Claire, Quebec.

Lewis R. Fischer and Helge W. Nordvik (eds.). Shipping and Trade,

1750-1950: Essays in International Maritime Economic History. Ponte-
fract: Lofthouse Publications, 1990. ix + 325 pp., contributors' notes,
tables, figures. £15. ISBN 1-85517-001-9.

For maritime historians the Tenth International Congress of Economic

History, held in Louvain, Belgium in 1990, was of special significance.
It was the first Congress to recognise maritime history as of sufficiently
established importance to merit a major session of its own. Those who
worked to persuade the economic history profession that matters
maritime are central to the subject (among them several individuals
directly associated with the International Journal of Maritime History)
should be congratulated for this alone. But, as most conference
organisers learn from hard experience, it is one thing to provide the
opportunity for academic interchange which a conference session or
seminar offers, but quite another to ensure that this opportunity is
seized by those who participate. "Good conference concept, poor
papers" would not be an unfair comment in some instances.
Such a judgement would be totally inappropriate in the case of
the Louvain maritime session. The sixteen essays collected in this
volume, all first presented as papers at a pre-conference in Bergen,
Norway and subsequently at Louvain itself, testify not only to the
attraction that maritime economic history exerts for scholars world-

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204 International Journal of Maritime History

wide but also to the high quality of much of the work being done. The
organisers selected participants whose studies indicate not only
something of the diversity of current research but also the variety of
methodological approaches possible. There is evidence here of the
outstanding contribution the computer continues to make to maritime
history in transforming raw data into meaningful shape, as well as of
the insights traditional qualitative assessments can offer when deployed
with skill. Not all the essays included are the product of completed
investigations-some are more in the nature of reports on research in
progress-but they are none the worse for this. Indeed, the overwhelm-
ing impression of maritime economic history provided by the collection
as a whole is that this is an exciting area in which to be involved,
where new discoveries are possible and old certainties are open to
challenge.
The volume, which is broadly-organised on chronological rather
than thematic lines (though there is a puzzling departure from this
towards the end), begins with a study by K.S. Mathew focusing on the
late eighteenth-century trade of the east Indian port of Masulipatnam,
a port with few natural geographical advantages as a harbour which
owed its development to a productive hinterland. Professor Mathew
shows how changes in demand structure influenced the port economy
and challenges the assumption that business declined substantially in
this period.
The essay which follows by Hans Chr. Johansen concerns the
role of Danish shipping in the trade between the Baltic and Mediterra-
nean, 1750-1850. Professor Johansen's initial focus is an innovative
analysis of the pattern of ships passing the Sound at Elsinore as
revealed through the Sound Toll Accounts, a hitherto underutilised
source also likely to be of value to historians of other national fleets.
Supplementing this data with "Algerian passports" to establish the
statistical record, he then considers the reason for Danish success as
a third-party carrier prior to 1815, substituting for traditional political
explanations the competitiveness of Danish shipping. A final section
deals with the post-Napoleonic period, though perhaps rather too
briefly to fully justify the scope promised by its title.
David J. Starkey'S contribution, "War and the Market for
Seafarers in Britain, 1736-1792," deals with an important issue, aspects

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 Book Reviews 205

of which have proved attractive to historians, but which has rarely been
examined within a wider analytical economic perspective. Dr. Starkey
succeeds in remedying this deficiency, concluding that war was an
important factor in increasing the supply of experienced seamen
available to the expanding British shipping industry in the later
eighteenth century. David M. Williams' study of bulk passenger trades,
1750-1870, is similarly effective in providing an original perspective. As
he points out, each of these trades has been the subject of original
research but only when considered collectively can their overall signifi-
cance for international maritime development be fully appreciated.
If these two essays demonstrate the value of reappraisal, what
follows tackles less familiar research territory. In a substantial essay,
Gelina Harlaftis traces the central role of Greek merchants and
shipowners in the Black Sea trades in the seventy years after 1830,
showing how kinship ties, commercial acumen and business
organisation combined to foster the success of Greek enterprise. In
comparison with this wide-ranging survey, J. Forbes Munro's essay on
the response of the MacKinnon Shipping Group to the opening of the
Suez Canal, dealing as it does with a single concern over a mere
fifteen-year period, may appear somewhat narrow. However, the wider
implications of this stimulating essay, which deals with a group already
operating steamships in the Indian Ocean before the canal opening, are
considerable, both challenging the traditional view of the impact of
Suez and alerting the reader to the importance of the Imperial-
Colonial context of shipping.
Yrjo Kaukiainen deals with the profitability of Finnish sailing
vessels in the half century before the First World War. The methodol-
ogy he adopts for converting data from the accounts of 119 vessels into
series for gross income and net results is exemplary; it should serve as
a model for similar investigations of other national fleets. Furthermore,
his conclusion from the data that it made economic sense for Finnish
shipowners to stay with sail later than appears technologically
necessary provides the evidence to support what has until now been
possible to argue only on the basis of supposition. C. Knick Harley
similarly moves our general understanding forward in a revisionist
essay on late nineteenth-century north Atlantic freight rates. Professor
Harley exposes the inadequacies as representative data of some

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206 International Journal of Maritime History

commonly-used north Atlantic series and, in exploring with commend-

able clarity the relationship between cargoes and freights in this
particular trade, provides insight into jointness of production which has
a far wider application and utility.
The interwar depression in shipping is the general context for
the informed essays which follow: Mariko Tatsuki's investigation of
competition on Pacific routes and the streamlining tactics employed in
response by the two major Japanese companies NYK and asK, and
Lars U. Scholl's detailed account of the attempt to restore the German
shipping industry to its prewar status-and its longer-term conse-
quences. Japanese shipping is also the subject of William D. Wray's
contribution, which deals with the competitive struggle by the Mitsui
Shipping Company to gain entry to the Far Eastern Freight Conference
between 1953 and 1956. This is a masterly essay-as much diplomatic
as maritime history--which shows how a single incident can be used to
illuminate wider issues of trade and cultural conflict.
K. Dharmasena's description of the growth of national shipping
in Sri Lanka 1750-1985 provides a much broader chronological sweep,
though its detailed focus is the experience of the nationalised Ceylon
Shipping Corporation in promoting a national fleet from the late 1960s.
This essay, like that of Tommaso Fanfani on the Italian shipping
industry from 1861 to 1914, explores explicitly what emerges as a
subsidiary theme of the volume as a whole; the degree to which it is
impossible to separate the fortunes of national fleets from the
ambitions of national governments.
William N. Still's contribution on North American shipbuilding
demonstrates how the first stage in analysis of information on the
origin of vessels accumulated in a computer data base has already led
to a re-evaluation of the nature of the North Carolinan economy, with
shipbuilding emerging as a significant sector. Fatima Dias' essay on the
nineteenth-century shipping and trade of the Azores is similarly an
interim report on the results from a computerised data base, heroically
compiled under exceptionally difficult conditions, which seem to
suggest that this period was not the golden age for these islands which
is often supposed. Similar challenges to conventional wisdom seem
likely to emerge from the on-going research discussed in the final essay
in the volume. Computer analysis of the Trade and Navigation

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 Book Reviews 207

Statements for British India, c.1870-1935, industriously undertaken by

Kenneth McPherson, Peter Reeves and Andrew Pope, reveals a
distinct shift in the orientation of India's trade over the last seventy
years of British rule and raises a number of problems of interpretation
and explanation.
In reviewing this volume, I have thought it important to indicate
the details of its contents to IJMH readers, who will naturally want to
know whether anything here relates to their particular maritime
concerns. Undoubtedly the range and scope of these essays should
itself guarantee a wide readership. However, one aspect of being a
reviewer of any collection is the requirement to read all essays, rather
than to concentrate attention on the few which appear of personal
interest. There is always a potential intellectual benefit from this, but
it is not invariably achieved. Commendably, Shipping and Trade, 1750-
1950 is a carefully-edited volume which succeeds in being more than
the sum of its parts. It deserves to be read as a whole, not only by
shipping specialists--"the converted"--but also by anyone with an
interest in modern international economic history. Until relatively
recently arguably the economic aspect has been missingfrom maritime
history, and equally economic history has lacked the maritime
dimension. The achievement of this volume is that it shows such a
judgement to be outmoded; maritime economic history deserved its
session at Louvain.

Sarah Palmer Queen Mary & Westfield College, London

Carl E. Swanson. Predators and Prizes: American Privateering and

Imperial Warfare, 1739-1748. Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1991. xvii + 299 pp., illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography,
index. $29.95 U.S. ISBN 0-87249-720-8.

Carl Swanson has written an important but problematic book concern-

ing American colonial privateering during the War of Jenkins' Ear and
King George's War. Though often confused with piracy and dismissed
by economic and imperial historians as having little consequence,
privateering, as the author shows, deserves its own history. Thousands

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