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The nineteenth-century Royal Navy was transformed from a fleet of sailing wooden walls into a steam powered machine. This book provides the first cultural history of technology, authority and the Royal Navy in the years of Pax Britannica. It brings to light the activities, backgrounds, concerns and skills of a group of actors who literally shaped the Royal Navy. The book demonstrates the ways in which naval architects shaped naval thinking about ship design and influenced how ships were employed in active service. The 1830 Whig government's Board of Admiralty abolished the Tory-controlled Navy Board and appointed Symonds to oversee many of its duties and made the self-fashioning of the enlightened 'sailor-designer' identity a priority. The book focuses on the implications of steam for the management of naval architecture. The shaping of the Warrior and the introduction of iron into the British warship took place against the backdrop of projecting naval power and actors building credibility for new materiel. HMS Captain fully represented Cowper Coles's ideas of what a turret ship should be, and her launch the culmination of over ten years' effort, to secure what he considered an ideal trial for demonstrating his design ideas. The Royal Sovereign was one of the Royal Navy's first warships built under the 1889 Naval Defence Act, which provided £21.5 million for ten battleships, thirty-eight cruisers and other smaller vessels. The Navy is one of the most historically significant, and yet singularly neglected, institutions in the history of technology and war.
evacuation and exile upon imperial and service unity; the re-establishment of Britain’s imperial and naval presence in Malaya, and issues of force expansion and nationalisation, or ‘Malaysianisation’, during the Emergency and decolonisation. Part IV presents the final case in East Asia. The primary threat that preoccupied British naval thinking for most of the interwar period was
book has demonstrated the ways in which naval architects shaped naval thinking about ship design and influenced how ships were employed in active service. Nathaniel Barnaby, in one of the most reflective pieces of writing by a nineteenth-century naval architect, looked back on a career and a century of naval change, placing the reshaping of the British warship within a narrative of political, naval, social and technical ‘development’. He compared the warships being designed when he joined the constructor’s office, like Isaac Watts’s HMS Minotaur – an ‘extra vagance
science became technical’, Isis 100 (2009), 292–309. 24 John Knox Laughton, ‘The scientific study of naval history’, RUSI Journal 18 (1874), 508 –27; Andrew Lambert, ‘The development of education in the Royal Navy: 1854 –1914, in Geoffrey Till (ed.), The development of British naval thinking: essays in memory of Bryan Ranft (Oxford, 2006), 34 –59. 25 Edmund Fishbourne, Observations on the present state of naval architecture addressed to the right honourable Sir John Pakington (London, 1858), 1, 3. 138 Shaping the Royal Navy sentiment existed in the press coverage