Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-wp2c8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-07T05:54:57.202Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

Chapter 7 - Railways and Coastal Shipping in Britain in the Later Nineteenth Century: Cooperation and Competition

Get access

Summary

Among Philip Bagwell's many publications, one of the earliest was on the Railway Clearing House (RCH). This was the first definitive history of the establishment, functions and mechanisms of the RCH. One of the functions which Philip highlighted was its role as an impartial administrator of the various pooling agreements, conferences and grouping arrangements that the independent railway companies concluded to ensure through working and to reduce inter-company competition, especially on long-distance hauls. This work predated Philip's interest in coastal shipping and, as befits a book on a railway institution, there is relatively little about competing modes of transport. Yet the railway companies did not confine their attempts to regulate long-distance traffic to their own transport mode. For long hauls their chief rival was the coastal steamboat, which remained surprisingly competitive until the Great War. Hence, many railway conferences were only too keen to bring their seaborne rivals into an agreement in order to restrict competition, raise freight rates and allocate traffic on a “reasonable” basis. Bagwell noted that the Dundee, Perth and London Shipping Company was brought into the English and Scotch Traffic Agreement in 1856, as did Channon in his thesis, and that in 1867 “a similar kind of agreement” was concluded on the Clyde-Mersey route by railways and steamboat firms, but neither he nor Channon pursued the analysis to show what these agreements implied about coaster-railway competition.

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that there was a range of methods of restricting inter-modal competition which have previously been ignored. The use of pools and conferences by the railway companies is now well known, as is the adoption in the later nineteenth century of conferences among shipping companies in some foreign liner trades. Recently it has been shown that agreements, analogous to conferences in all but name, existed from a much earlier date among firms plying the coastal trade using steam liners and that these were widespread geographically and continued in existence at least until the First World War. In other words, the coastal liner companies endeavoured to minimize competition and regulate trade among themselves just as the railways did. This essay will show that there was also inter-modal collaboration over freight rates and levels of service, both formally through written agreements between railway conferences and coastal liner companies and by more informal understandings.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Vital Spark
The British Coastal Trade, 1700-1930
, pp. 103 - 128
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2017

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×