Shipping costs between Europe and Asia were reduced by two-thirds between the 1770s and the 1820s. Copper sheathing and other technical improvements which allowed ships to make more frequent voyages over longer lifetimes accounted for part of the cost reduction. British hegemony in the Indian Ocean, which ended an eighteenth-century arms race, accounted for the rest by allowing the substitution of smaller ships which cost less to build and required fewer men per ton. These changes were at least as important as the elimination of monopoly profits in narrowing intercontinental price differentials during the early nineteenth century. efore the nineteenth century, a trading voyage between Europe and Asia was long, arduous, and dangerous. The round trip generally took close to two years. Mortality of sailors was often high, and many ships were lost, wrecked, or captured. The only commodities which could bear the cost of freight were high-value, low-volume items such as tea, spices, raw silk, and cotton and silk textiles. These goods were sold in Europe for much higher prices than they had been purchased for in Asia. Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson (2002) have argued that although there was a trade boom in such goods, there was little
British slave traders were early and rapid adopters of the new technique of sheathing ships' hulls with copper. From the 1780s this innovation increased sailing speeds of British slave ships by about a sixth, prolonged the ships' lives by at least a half, and reduced the death rates of slaves on the middle passage by about half. It was, above all, the fall in death rates, and possibly the improved condition of surviving slaves, that made the investment so compelling. Copper sheathing may have paid for itself in a single voyage, even though it was usually good for several. By the 1790s few slave ships, even if making only a single voyage, were uncoppered. These results confirm that copper sheathing was one of the major improvements in shipping productivity before the use of iron and steam in the mid-nineteenth century.
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