The French or the British: Who Built "Better" Ships?

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "From the Bottom Up: Socioeconomic Archaeology of the French Maritime Empire" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Throughout the 1700s, France and Great Britain warred over command of the sea. Internally, administrators of both countries, inspired by the rationalism of the Enlightenment, pushed shipwrights to design ships scientifically, convinced that this would give their navy an edge in battle. Shipwrights resisted, pointing out the uselessness of early theories on ship resistance and the long success of traditional design methods. French administrators established formal schools that taught mathematics and scientific theory; British shipwrights continued the traditional apprenticeship system into the mid-1800s. In part due to this difference, historians have long debated whether either nation’s ships were technologically superior. This analysis uses logbook data from the Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans (CLIWOC) to directly compare the performance of French and British naval ships in different wind conditions 1750-1800. What (if any) differences exist? Are these differences due to the different type of training or to different naval tactics?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From the Bottom Up: Socioeconomic Archaeology of the French Maritime Empire   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 212