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Opening to the East: Shipping Between Europe and Asia, 1770–1830

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2013

Peter M. Solar
Peter M. Solar*
Affiliation:
Professor of Economics at Vesalius College, Vrije Universiteit Brussel and at Université Saint-Louis—Bruxelles. Mailing address: Vesalius College, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

Shipping costs between Europe and Asia were reduced by two-thirds between the 1770s and the 1820s. Copper sheathing and other technical improvements which allowed ships to make more frequent voyages over longer lifetimes accounted for part of the cost reduction. British hegemony in the Indian Ocean, which ended an eighteenth-century arms race, accounted for the rest by allowing the substitution of smaller ships which cost less to build and required fewer men per ton. These changes were at least as important as the elimination of monopoly profits in narrowing intercontinental price differentials during the early nineteenth century.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 73 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 625 - 661
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2013 

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Footnotes

Steve Behrendt, Erik Aerts, Erik Gøbel, Ingrid Henriksen, Silvia Marzagalli, Johan Söderberg, John Turner, Simon Ville, and Eugene White kindly helped me access information from various corners of shipping history. Jan de Vries, Michael Fisher, Oscar Gelderblom, Luc Hens, Adrian Leonard, Peter Maw, Cormac Ó Gráda, Kim Oosterlinck, Richard Unger, Jeffrey Williamson, and Jan Luiten Van Zanden read earlier versions of the article and provided me with many useful comments. Without such generous colleagues, this venture into global history would have been much more arduous and much less fun. I am also grateful to participants in seminars at King's College, London and at Cambridge for their contributions. Finally, special thanks go to Elzbieta D'Hayère who has cheerfully and efficiently obtained for me books from libraries all over Western Europe.

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