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(More customer reviews)Building the Steam Navy is subtitled "Dockyards, Technology and the Creation of the Vistorian Battle Fleet". A better subtitle would have been the "The Industrial Infrastructure of Royal Navy Dockyards" since only the Government owned yards are described and the focus is the the functional architecture of the built structures. Given that and some other limitations to be further discussed this is a wonderfully researched work that really immmersed me in the Victorian time. The level of detail unearthed and the beautiful old technical plans, blueprints and illustrations reproduced testify to the historians art and craft. Of particular note are the occasional asides into social history relating to pay scales, work rules, social classes, and the like - all in ferment and change under the impact of an emerging industrial technology. By letting many of the protagonists speak for themselves, David Evans has brought to life a full array of characters with the normal mixture of human motives and aspirations. It is clear from this work that the Royal Navy as an institution was by no means technically retrogressive in it's
construction of dockyard facilites and incorporation of the latest technology in applied power to them. In fact, the period of maximum progressive adoption would appear to be from 1850 to 1880, the time we might normally think of as being under the sway of white headed old admirals raised in the sailing navy. Evans does an adequate job of relating the constructional and equipment programs of the RN dockyards to the political and military climate of the times, certainly a better job than most naval histories of the era do in considering the shore infrastructure of the Navy.
Given all this praise, why did I give this book just three stars ? First, due to the really pretty narrow focus and the architectural emphasis in the early chapters. I am concerned that a casual student of naval affairs would not realize that this is a specialist treatment focused more on description and discovery than explanation and interpretation. In many respects this is a scholarly book for academic use and as I am not an academic my judgement will be limited. Second, and related to the academic character of the book, many things could have been done to make this work more acessible. For example, a single map showing all the naval bases covered would have been helpful. Also some of the beautiful old plans were reproduced in too small a scale to allow reading the text on them. In those cases arrows and boxes with labels would have made many things clearer. In addition there was good description and illustration of the machine tools introduced in these dockyards but not always helpful explanations of how they actually worked. I suppose these these remarks are simply a request for a "popularized" version of this work, though actually the best that can be realistically hoped for is an incorporation of some of the insights gleanable from this work into some the the popular works that continue to be produced on the ever-fascinating Victorians.
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By the end of the Napoleonic wars, the shore-based facilities of the Royal Navy employed nearly 16,000 people in the UK. This volume is an account of the development of the dockyard as the continuing introduction of new technology forged a revolution in ship design and construction.
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