There has been no case study hitherto of the merchant fleet of a single port over a long period of growth and stability in the early modern age. This book considers the constituent parts of such a fleet between 1600 and 1750, and the capitalisation, profitability and risk inherent in such an enterprise. It also examines the changes in the infrastructure of the port, and the effects of this industry on the community that financed, built, repaired, owned, manned and supported it.

Since Ralph Davis's The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries was published in 1962, there has been an increasing interest in maritime history, though much of this has concentrated on the economic effects of overseas trade, or on the development of ports within studies of urban history.

Associated industries, such as the coal trade, the Yorkshire fishing industry and whaling in the north-east of England, have been well studied, and even some individual ports have been examined. Indeed, Stephanie Jones's PhD thesis of 1982 studied the trade and harbour development of Whitby itself between 1700 and 1914. Simon Ville looked at a single family of shipowners.

Sarah Palmer examined the effect of particular legislation. Marcus Rediker looked at shipping on the Atlantic, and described its work-force.

In many ports such an exercise would be difficult to the point of impossibility, because of serious gaps in the source material on which such a case study would depend. There are certainly, particularly from the eighteenth century onwards, national sources for most ports, such as Port Books, Port Registers, Customs and Excise archives, and the records of Admiralty and other statutory bodies. However, such sources give an external view of the town, based on information imparted, often reluctantly, to the government of the day, and therefore suspect. In any case, many of these documents deal with the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and provide only limited information about earlier periods.

The town of Whitby had been bereft by the dissolution in 1539 of its abbey, of which it had been a dependent borough. In the years after the dissolution it had passed to the Cholmley family, still as a dependent town with a low economic status.