Shaping the Royal Navy: Technology, Authority and Naval Architecture, C.1830-1906

Description

The nineteenth-century Royal Navy was transformed from a fleet of sailing wooden walls into a steam powered machine. Britain's warships were her first line of defence, and their transformation dominated political, engineering and scientific discussions. They were the products of engineering ingenuity, political controversies, naval ideologies and t

Don Leggett is Assistant Professor in the History of Science and Technology at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan -- .

'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 -- .