Maritime Transport

Maritime Transport. Water‐borne transportation has been central to the American economy since Europeans first crossed the Atlantic. Oceans, bays, and rivers offer surfaces across which heavy vessels can be moved with comparatively little effort, and the earliest European settlers knew how to build boats and use the wind to propel them. Maritime transport remained the only practical way to move freight long distances until canals and railroads began to be built in the 1820s and 1830s. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new modes of transportation created new markets and greatly diversified the ways people and goods travel.

Three basic distinctions help explain the rise and decline of maritime transport in the United States. First, commercial ships normally operate in two quite distinct geopolitical settings. Coastal voyages between U.S. seaports and inland navigation along its rivers and canals are governed by state and federal laws. Foreign trade, on the other hand, is governed by agreements among the nations involved. From its beginnings, the United States, like the nations of Europe, restricted its coastal and internal trade to vessels built, owned, and crewed by its citizens. In international trade, however, the lowest‐cost carrier who provides acceptable service normally prevails.

A second broad distinction concerns what is being carried. Ships, trains, automobiles, and airplanes can all move people, but in maritime transport the movement of commodities and goods is of greater significance. The development of railroads, automobiles, and airplanes reduced the importance of passengers in maritime transport, yet ships are still needed to carry commodities such as petroleum and the huge volume of manufactured goods and agricultural commodities that moves among continents.

A third distinction focuses on the evolving technologies employed in maritime transport. The nineteenth‐century displacement of wooden‐hulled, wind‐driven ships by steam‐driven iron‐ and then steel‐hulled ships was profoundly important. Many other new technologies have been introduced during the long history of maritime transport, yet none has been nearly as consequential as the shift from wood and wind to metal and steam power.

These distinctions help illuminate the history of maritime transport in the United States. The period from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War was a flourishing age of sail. In this early industrial era, Americans drew upon the shipbuilding skills of their ancestors, the timber resources of the continent, and their own talents as seafarers and merchants to create a vibrant commercial society centered on such seaport cities as Boston, Philadelphia, and Savannah. They applied the lessons they had learned as colonists operating within the British Empire to the global opportunities available to them after they had been excluded from imperial trade. In this period, American ships ranked as the best and the least expensive in international trade and U.S. ships consistently carried a high percentage of the nation's foreign trade. The development of steam propulsion on inland waterways, especially on the Ohio and Mississippi River systems, enabled the United States to expand rapidly into its trans‐Appalachian hinterland.

A second phase in U.S. maritime transport began in the second half of the nineteenth century as British‐built iron steamships increasingly dominated the international carrying trade, gradually squeezing out the United States. The loss was hardly noticed, however, as the nation turned westward and focused on the continental drama of railroad building. Although the coastal and inland trades remained protected from foreign competition, the railroads soon captured most of their markets. By 1900, U.S. ships were carrying only a small percentage of the nation's trade.

A third phase encompassed the world wars of the twentieth century, including the Cold War. Even before the United States entered World War I, President Woodrow Wilson and Congress had committed the nation to building and operating a world‐class merchant marine, a service capable of providing auxiliary support for the armed forces fighting abroad and insuring that the nation's international trade would not again be disrupted by the withdrawal of foreign carriers. The massive shipbuilding programs of World War I and World War II provided the hulls while government operating programs, subsidies, and cargo‐protection laws sustained the maritime industry through the Cold War. The rapid expansion of global markets that followed the end of the Cold War, together with increasing deregulation of U.S. industry, created conditions that worked against the survival of the U.S. merchant marine. The increasing globalization of markets, services, and manufacture may render this decline a matter of limited significance. Although infrequently provided by U.S.–owned companies, maritime transport services continued to play a vital role in America's participation in the global economy as the twentieth century ended.
See also Automotive Industry; Aviation Industry; Canals and Waterways; Expansionism; Foreign Trade, U.S.; Industrialization; Multinational Enterprises; Petroleum Industry.

Bibliography

John G.B. Hutchins , The American Maritime Industries and Public Policy, 1789–1914, 1941.
George Rogers Taylor , The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860, 1951.
K. Jack Bauer , A Maritime History of the United States, 1988.
Benjamin W. Labaree et. al. America and the Sea: A Maritime History, 1998.
Andrew Gibson and and Arthur Donovan , The Abandoned Ocean: A History of U.S. Maritime Policy, 1999.

Arthur Donovan