Description
Book SynopsisProvides a new understanding of the Victorian engineering professions, and their rise within the British government and Royal Navy
Trade Review‘Shaping the Royal Navy is an impressive piece of scholarship. It is an engagingly written, deftly
organised and nicely illustrated volume, its arguments lingering the mind long after the last page
has been turned. It is an effective and timely demolition of conventional teleological views asserting the inevitable triumph of scientific engineering against untutored craft and the replacement of patronage by meritocratic professionalism. It deserves to be read with care by all those interested in the history of the reconstruction of the Royal Navy in an age of reform, by historians of technology, and by imperial historians.’
Ben Marsden, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK, International Journal of Maritime History, February 2017
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Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. Authority, judgement and the sailor-designer
2. Steam and the management of naval architecture
3. Iron experiments and guaranteeing naval power
4. The Captain catastrophe and the politics of authority
5. A scientific problem of the highest order
6. The politics of management and design
7. Re-engineering naval power
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
