At the beginning of the nineteenth century Scotland was not a major shipbuilding region. The Parliamentary returns of ships built and first registered at UK ports suggest that Scotland contributed about fifteen percent of UK tonnage during the Napoleonic Wars. The return for 1790-1791 indicates Scottish output of 18,817 net tons, or 15.3% of the UK total. In 1805 Scotland delivered 23,360 net tons, some 15.4% of national production. To put this in perspective, at the beginning of the century Scotland's entire annual production of merchant tonnage was roughly equivalent to the output of one of the great English shipbuilding rivers. The Thames delivered 16,370 tons in 1791, the Tyne 15,034 tons and the Wear 14,198 tons. By 1820 the position was practically unchanged; Scotland then contributed 11,004 tons, or 16.5% of the UK total (see table l). There was little at this stage to indicate that Scottish shipbuilding was soon to play a leading role in British industrialisation.

Scottish Shipbuilding in Profile

Scottish shipbuilding and the term “Clyde-built” are commonly held to be synonymous, but this is not an appropriate perspective before 1850. At the beginning of the century the Clyde regularly launched 3000-4000 tons of merchant ships each year, about one-fifth of Scottish production. The remainder were built on the east coast, with Aberdeen, Leith and Dundee leading production in that order. The great estuaries of the Dee, Tay and Forth were home to hundreds of small builders, providing employment for the majority of Scotland's shipwrights. By 1831, when the first usable census employment data are available, the Clyde employed just over one-quarter of Scotland's shipbuilding workforce, the remainder concentrating in the east coast yards (see table 2).

This reflected the historic position of east coast dominance in Scottish shipbuilding, but thereafter the locus of the industry began to shift to the Clyde. Between 1831 and 1851 the census returns of occupations in Great Britain show that adult male employment in shipbuilding on the Clyde roughly trebled to around 1900 men while the east coast rivers doubled their workforce to 2500.