Nodes of knowledge, managing transfer: Shipbuilding and repair during the transformation from sail to steam (2023)
The core theme of the special issue in which this article appears is the inherent impossibility of confining the knowledge required to build and sustain the instruments of travel to a single space or institution. This is certainly true for the ships that built empires – the large sailing and later steam ships produced by navies and companies in the process of European expansion. Ships traveled between polities and required repairs overseas, taking the construction knowledge and practices with them. Skilled laborers – experienced shipwrights and increasingly also trained engineers – helped to transfer shipbuilding practices across oceans, and to adapt these practices to local conditions based on forms of “blended know-how.” This article explores how the circulation of shipbuilding knowledge and practices within and between maritime empires changed with the increasing pace of industrialization. It does so on the basis of three moments: the Dutch East India Company’s shipbuilding activities in Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the interaction between private industry and the Dutch state in advancing machine-manufacturing in both the Netherlands and on Java in the 1830s and 1840s; and the aid provided by Dutch engineers in laying the groundwork for Japanese industrial warship-construction in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such transfers put high demands on the capacities of states and naval administrators in controlling the flows of necessary resources and skilled labor, requiring complex arrangements between states and private capital. Industrialization did not change this basic fact, but it did change the nature of these arrangements. Although shipbuilding knowledge always remained practice-driven, highly mobile and susceptible to local adaptation, the increasing technological demands created by the transition from sail to steam and wood to iron, combined with the extension of the power of states and transnationally operating manufacturing companies, considerably changed the institutional embeddings and societal consequences of its circulation.
...MoreArticle Dániel Margócsy; Mary Augusta Brazelton (2023) Techniques of repair, the circulation of knowledge, and environmental transformation: Towards a new history of transportation. History of Science (pp. 3-18).
Similar Citations
Book
G. Roger Knight;
(2018)
Sugar, Steam and Steel: The Industrial Project in Colonial Java, 1830-1885
(/isis/citation/CBB104279760/)
Book
Huigen, Siegfried;
Jong, Jan L. de;
Kolfin, Elmer;
(2010)
The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks
(/isis/citation/CBB001031668/)
Book
Günter Schilder;
Hans Kok;
(2019)
Sailing Across the World's Oceans: History & Catalogue of Dutch Charts Printed on Vellum 1580-1725
(/isis/citation/CBB507660547/)
Thesis
Luthfi Adam;
(2020)
Cultivating Power: Buitenzorg Botanic Garden and Empire-Building in the Netherlands East Indies, 1745-1917
(/isis/citation/CBB491950509/)
Chapter
Fleischer, Alette;
(2010)
(Ex)Changing Knowledge and Nature at the Cape of Good Hope, circa 1652--1700
(/isis/citation/CBB001031669/)
Chapter
Jong, Johan de;
(2011)
Drawings, Ships and Spices: Accumulation at the Dutch East India Company
(/isis/citation/CBB001200093/)
Article
Susanne Friedrich;
(2020)
Caveat from the Archive: Pieter van Dam’s Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie and Crisis Management
(/isis/citation/CBB746223772/)
Chapter
Besten, Hans den;
(2010)
A Badly Harvested Field: The Growth of Linguistic Knowledge and the Dutch Cape Colony until 1796
(/isis/citation/CBB001000159/)
Chapter
Penman, Leigh T. I.;
(2011)
The Wicked and the Fair: Changing Perceptions of Terra Australis through the Prism of the Batavia Shipreck (1629)
(/isis/citation/CBB001201516/)
Article
Boomgaard, Peter;
(2008)
Technologies of a Trading Empire: Dutch Introduction of Water- and Windmills in Early-Modern Asia, 1650s--1800
(/isis/citation/CBB000850073/)
Article
Claudia Rei;
(2024)
Turning points in leadership: Ship size in the Portuguese and Dutch merchant empires
(/isis/citation/CBB340333584/)
Chapter
Ertsen, M. W.;
(2005)
Irrigation design in the Netherlands East Indies: The Tjipoenegara system in West Java
(/isis/citation/CBB001180596/)
Article
Oosterhout, Dianne Van;
(2008)
From Colonial to Postcolonial Irrigation Technology: Technological Romanticism and the Revival of Colonial Water Tanks in Java, Indonesia
(/isis/citation/CBB000950519/)
Article
Sebastiaan Broere;
(2019)
Picturing Ethnopsychology: A Colonial Psychiatrist’s Struggles to Examine Javanese Minds, 1910–1925
(/isis/citation/CBB670172565/)
Article
Pyenson, Lewis;
(2011)
The Enlightened Image of Nature in the Dutch East Indies: Consequences of Postmodernist Doctrine for Broad Structures and Intimate Life
(/isis/citation/CBB001022672/)
Book
Roberts, Lissa;
(2011)
Centres and Cycles of Accumulation in and around the Netherlands during the Early Modern Period
(/isis/citation/CBB001200085/)
Article
Pols, Hans;
(2012)
Notes from Batavia, the Europeans' Graveyard: The Nineteenth-Century Debate on Acclimatization in the Dutch East Indies
(/isis/citation/CBB001250107/)
Article
Zuidervaart, Huib J.;
van Gent, Rob H.;
(2004)
“A Bare Outpost of Learned European Culture on the Edge of the Jungles of Java”: Johan Maurits Mohr (1716-1775) and the Emergence of Instrumental and Institutional Science in Dutch Colonial Indonesia
(/isis/citation/CBB000410765/)
Book
Storey, William Kelleher;
(2008)
Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB000954010/)
Article
Ertsen, M. W.;
(2007)
Irrigation Design in the Netherlands East Indies
(/isis/citation/CBB001180594/)
Be the first to comment!