Current- Littrature
• 4,- A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD'S SHIPPING , INDUSTRY
i • - Ernest Payle - Mr. C. Ernest Fayle, who is known for his elaborate accolint
1 'of our-shipping difficulties-in the War,-haa written a useful
'Short History of the World's Shipping Industry (Allen and
. Unwin, 12s. 6d.), illustrated from prints in the Macpherson collection. He is concerned with the shipping. trade rather than with ships, and he traces its dev.elopment. through the ages with a full sense of its international importance. Marine :insurance -was invented by the Italian merchants and ship- owners and adopted by the Hanse towns, which for centuries -"dominated the trade of Northern Europe by virtue of their :control of the Baltic herring fishery. When the herring left the Baltic for the North Sea, the Dutch took the lead in the ;shipping trade ; they now had outward cargoes of salt herring -- to carry to Western Europe and the Baltic, and could therefore quote lower rates for the homeward voyages, Seventeenth- 'century Holland owned nearly half- Europe's shipping and knew how to finance it. In the eighteenth century England 'overtook and passed Holland, partly no doubt, by the help of the Navigation Acts, but mainly because of her greater -,resources and her larger colonies. Later still America became ,a formidable rival with her clipper ships and her fast Atlantic , packets, but, when the steamer supplanted the sailing ship, America dropped out of therunning, since she could not build steamers so cheaply as we could. Mr. Fayle takes a serious view of the post-War position, now that more countries than
. ever are giving artificial encouragement' to their merchant
tfieets by subsidies and restrictions on foreign competitors. Every merchant ship that is really superfluous tends, as he says, to bring down the freight rates for all ships. He sees • no remedy save in international agreement to raise the standards of seaworthiness and of the sailors' pay and working conditions to the British level, -but, as he says, the post-War conventions already drafted and signed have yet to be applied.
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