HMHS Britannic under construction at Harland and Wolff, circa 1914. Via Wikipedia .
From roughly the end of the US Civil War until the late 1950s, the United Kingdom was one of the biggest shipbuilders in the world. By the 1890s, UK shipbuilders were delivering 80% of worldwide shipping tonnage, and though the country only briefly maintained this market-dominating level of output— on the eve of World War I, its share of the market had fallen to 60% — it nonetheless remained one of the world’s largest shipbuilders for the next several decades.
Following the end of WWII, UK shipbuilding appeared ascendant. The shipbuilding industries of most other countries had been devastated by the war (or were, like Japan, prevented from building new ships), and in the immediate years after the war the UK built more ship tonnage than the rest of the world combined.
But this success was short-lived. The UK ultimately proved unable to respond to competitors who entered the market with new, large shipyards which employed novel methods of shipbuilding developed by the US during WWII. The UK fell from producing 57% of world tonnage in 1947 to just 17% a decade later. By the 1970s their output was below 5% of world total, and by the 1990s it was less than 1%. In 2023, the UK produced no commercial ships at all.
Ultimately, UK shipbuilding was undone by the very thing that had made it successful: it developed a production system that heavily leveraged skilled labor, and minimized the need for expensive infrastructure or management overheads. For a time, this system had allowed UK shipbuilders to produce ships more cheaply and efficiently than almost anywhere else. But as the nature of the shipping market, and of ships themselves, changed, the UK proved unable to change its industry in response, and it steadily lost ground to international competitors.
The rise of UK shipbuilding
For much of recent history, the Netherlands boasted the largest and most successful shipbuilding industry. Between 1500 and 1670, Dutch shipping had grown by a factor of 10, and by the end of the 17th century the Dutch merchant fleet, made up of mostly Dutch-made ships, was larger than the commercial fleets of England, France, Spain, Portugal, and what is now Germany combined. Dutch shipbuilding was “technologically the most advanced in Europe,” and Dutch shipbuilders could build ships 40-50% cheaper than English ones.
Over the course of the 18th century, however, the Dutch advantage was gradually eroded by “a failure to keep pace with advances in European sailing ship design and an inherent conservatism within the industry.” But while it briefly looked like the UK would come to dominate shipbuilding in the early 19th century, the mantle instead passed to the United States. By the middle of the 19th century, thanks in part to the easy availability of ship-quality lumber, the US could build wooden ships for 20 to 25% less than in the UK, and “the very existence of the British industry was under threat”.
But as wooden sailing ships gave way to iron and steel steamships over the course of the 19th century, the UK reclaimed its advantage. By the 1850s, the UK was building iron ships more cheaply than wood ships, and while it took decades for iron, steel and steam to displace wood and sail — sail remained a better option than steam for very long voyages until the 1880s — Britain’s access to cheap coal, cheap iron (and later cheap steel), and cheap skilled labor (compared to the US) allowed it to dominate the transformed shipbuilding industry. By 1900, UK shipbuilding productivity was substantially higher than in the US, and even further ahead of other countries. The UK had become the “shipyard of the world” on the back of its inexpensive production.
Structure of UK shipbuilding
... continue reading