Abandoned Ocean: A History of United States Maritime Policy (review)

Abandoned Ocean: A History of United States Maritime Policy. By Andrew Gibson and Arthur Donovan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+362. $39.95.

This is a historical study with a political mission. Andrew Gibson and Arthur Donovan argue that present-day U.S. maritime policies are wrongly conceived, ineffectively administered, fatally underfunded, and, worst of all, based on obsolete technological and strategic assumptions. If the American merchant marine is to be saved from total oblivion, legislation should be adopted similar to that in other high-cost maritime nations. American shipowners should be allowed to purchase vessels and hire crews on the free market and also be freed from bureaucratic and fiscal shackles.

The Abandoned Ocean offers a solid account of the evolution of America's maritime policy and merchant fleet from their colonial origins. Fundamental to that evolution and the current crisis is the requirement--since 1789 maintained with quasi-religious commitment and effective lobbying by vested interests--that U.S.-flag shipping be built at home and predominantly crewed by U.S. citizens. During the age of wooden sailing ships, this could propel the nation to world leadership, but after the transition to iron and steam its merchant marine collapsed into insignificance as a result of high construction and operational costs. No system of subsidization brought effective relief. Though successive regimes were often maladministered, the authors conclude that in the final analysis bureaucratic bungling made little difference to what were fundamentally flawed policies. They also note that U.S. steamship operators often abused subsidy regimes but fail to ask whether the tendency toward fraud and corruption in the merchant marine was an endemic rather than an incidental problem.

Why should U.S.-flag shipping be revitalized? In the absence of an explicit economic analysis, most arguments appear to be based on nostalgic, nationalistic, or strategic considerations related to America's historic status as a maritime nation. The past achievements of its merchant marine still exercise a powerful influence. These include, above all, America's leadership in the wooden sailing-ship industry and the massive emergency shipping and shipbuilding programs it instituted during World Wars I and II. Cold war strategic scenarios continued to include a transoceanic logistic capability. But, as the authors demonstrate, after the 1950s technological change not only rendered merchant vessels--bulk carriers, tankers, and container vessels--increasingly unsuitable for naval and military purposes but also led the navy to build up its own transport capacity, based mainly on "roll-on roll-off" tonnage. The end of the cold war and the logistics of the Gulf War confirmed that the U.S. merchant fleet had negligible strategic value.

Without strategic justification, current maritime policies are obsolete. Moreover, they were unable to assist the only post-1970 area of strength of the U.S.-flag fleet, container shipping, whose major companies (Sea-Land and Australian President Lines) flagged out before being taken over by foreign corporations. It is a pity that Gibson and Donovan do not give more attention to the post-1945 disposal of the U.S. tanker fleet and the petroleum shipping industry in general, as bulk carrier and tanker operators are among the major users of Liberian, Panamanian, and other flags of convenience. United in the Federation of American Controlled Shipping--which the authors might have discussed in some depth--these owners enjoy the entrepreneurial freedom advocated by Gibson and Donovan, albeit without using the U.S. flag. But the question of why flag-of-convenience users should be lured back remains unanswered.

A weakness of The Abandoned Ocean is that, with the partial exception of container shipping, its themes are largely discussed in isolation; a more global historical and historiographical perspective would have sharpened its argumentation. Nonetheless, this is an important book that deserves to be read by everyone interested in the hoary question of U.S. maritime policy and, more widely, the survival of protectionism and...