Shipbuilding and the English International Timber Trade, 1300-1700: a framework for study using Niche Construction Theory

Much scholarship has been undertaken with regards to the evolution of the European shipbuilding traditions and their physical changes, but few explanations for the changes are given. This paper seeks to identify the correlations between the expansion of the English timber trade in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries and the changes in shipbuilding at the time, thereby creating a framework for future study of this correlation and its possible relatedness using Niche Construction Theory as a framework. Directions the research can take and the data needed are the focus of this work. English trade has long been dependent upon the sea as the main thoroughfare for goods traveling to and from the island. Boats and ships of various sizes, shapes, and varieties have in tum, until the last century with airplanes and the Channel Tunnel, been the primary means of leaving England for any purpose. As such, during the Middle Ages, England began working toward creating a global naval network, first through trade networks and then through colonialization and conquest. The most marked expansion of English trade networks happened during the High Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, roughly encompassing the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. This expansion of trade coincides with other relatively rapid and influential changes at the time: shipbuilding in Northern Europe and increasing urbanization of mercantile centers. Shipbuilding traditions are conservative by nature, and so relatively rapid change in hull construction and rigging systems are not commonly seen, but both of these happened during these 300 years. Historians tend to attribute this change in shipbuilding to a combination of factors, the main one being increased contact between the tradition of Northern Europe with the tradition of Southern Europe. Aspects of the Southern techniques are seen as superior to those used in the North, and may be borne out in