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 the fight for authority in nineteenth-century Britain. Shaping the Royal Navy provides the first cultural history of technology, authority and the Royal Navy in the years of Pax Britannica. It places the story firmly within the currents of British history to reconstruct the controversial and high-profile nature of naval architecture. The technological transformation of the Navy dominated the British government and engineering communities. This book explores its history, revealing how ship design became a modern science, the ways that actors competed for authority within the British state and why the nature of naval power changed.

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