On the Persistence of Old Techniques: The Case of North American Wooden Shipbuilding

During the second half of the nineteenth century important technological changes in shipping and shipbuilding resulted in the practical disappearance of an important shipbuilding industry in North America and the concentration of most of the world's shipbuilding in Britain. This shift of shipbuilding activity was quite clearly the result of the adoption of metal in place of wood as the structural material in shipbuilding. The adoption of metal was a slow process and the old and new techniques coexisted for decades. By the mid-1850's, British shipbuilders had developed the building of iron ships to a routine process and further improved their techniques in the following decades, but wooden shipbuilding in North America remained an important industry until the mid-1880's.