Boston and its maritime world, 1790--1850: Trade circuits, proto-industrialization and the historical geography of shipbuilding in New England (Massachusetts)

Wooden shipbuilding played a critical role in the rapid transformation to industrialization of the proto-industrial economy of New England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This shipbuilding industry itself, however, was not subject to industrial transformation. During this period, wooden shipbuilding remained an artisan-based, proto-industry. Its product was the end item of a chain of globally-linked commodity processing nodes within a world-wide economic system that included Baltic iron and hemp, and Filipino manila, as well as timber sourced from Maine to Georgia and from as far west as the Great Lakes. The end product---wooden ships---enabled Boston's merchants to generate the capital necessary for regional industrialization and provided important system-wide communications and transportation linkages that hastened the industrialization process.; World-systems theory has been incorporated into this work as deep background and to serve as a theoretical framework. In that context, the availability of wood had allowed the New England colonies, in an earlier period, to usurp the then core process of shipbuilding from Britain in spite of high labor costs. The presence of shipbuilding helped elevate New England to a semiperiphery: in world-systems theory terms, a region encompassing both core and peripheral processes. By the depression of the 1840s, wooden shipbuilding had been relegated to a peripheral process as its technological innovation lagged behind the other industries of New England. Wooden shipbuilding continued, however, to retain its critical niche in the transformation of the economy of New England.; Primary sources, including ledgers, journal, logbooks and maps, secondary sources, including maritime histories and local town histories were used to perform research for this dissertation. A list of vessels built in ten locations along the North Atlantic coast was compiled for this research. The list, that includes name, year built, location of construction, sail rig and tonnage as well as, in some cases, builder and first owner, was instrumental in understanding the world of New England wooden shipbuilding. The World-Systems ideas of long cycles, development of the semiperiphery and the dynamic structure of commodity chains were of particular assistance in informing the processes described here.