Anyone currently hesitating to purchase an electric car because of anxieties about its battery's limited range and the sparsity of recharging points along the highway will empathize with mid-nineteenth-century shipping companies, their potential investors, crew, and passengers aboard oceangoing steamships, whose hopes and fears are at the heart of Crosbie Smith's excellent monograph. They will simultaneously appreciate the “systemnness” of large technologies, one aspect of which is encapsulated in its title: the integration of steamshipping with its fuel supply and the resultant prioritization of fuel economy over other innovations. While today's motorist often plays safe by purchasing an electric/gas “hybrid,” similarly, oceangoing steamers were always rigged with sails throughout this period. Not only could sails offer additional speed from a following wind, but they provided a reassuring backup in case of either engine failure or an exhausted coal supply.

To send a steamer to sea without sails would have been to tempt God's providence: it was unthinkable, especially in a period without radio or telephonic communications. Moreover, steamshipping itself generated a new role for sailing ships as auxiliary coal transporters (themselves sometimes fitted with very low-powered steam engines) that slowly but cheaply kept far-flung coaling stations stocked, thereby both extending the potential range of steamers and freeing up more space in their holds for more valuable freights or for fare-paying passengers who appreciated the steamers’ relative speed, regularity, and punctuality. Consequently, while the total steam tonnage of Britain's merchant fleet grew, between 1850 and 1874, from approximately 190,000 to 2 million tons, its sailing ship tonnage rose from 4 million to nearly 5.5 million tons (364–65).

As Smith shows, it was this combination of early steamers’ advantages and limitations—the motive power that produced their independence of wind and tide together with a concomitant shortage of freight-carrying capacity—that made the acquisition and retention of a government mail service crucial to the success of several pioneering companies. Understandably, there was fierce competition for mail contracts, provoking fears that safety was being sacrificed to speed in steamers’ design and operation. Since such fears could fatally undermine a shipping company's reputation, the management of public opinion was vitally important: the sinking, grounding, or disappearance of a ship might spell disaster not only for the crew and passengers; more than one such occurrence was certain to create a dangerous reputational crisis for a line's owners, investors, and shipbuilders. The commercial and maritime press, in particular the mid-century Railway Magazine, mercilessly dissected and debated putative faults in design or operation, regularly challenging any shipowners’ attempt to scapegoat an errant captain, especially one who had been lost with his ship. Multiple errant captains, of course, would prompt doubts over a line's managerial competence.

Smith never loses sight of the human dilemmas and business calculations involved in the introduction of this important new technology, nor does he neglect its implications for Britain's imperial ambitions. As a result, this is primarily a cultural and socioeconomic history; it is only secondarily an engineering history, where technical explanations are sufficient but never dominant. Smith is concerned, nonetheless, that the engineers and shipbuilders should receive their due regard and that recognition should reach well beyond the usual “heroic” figures. It is a relief to find Isambard Kingdom Brunel for once allowed no more than a walk-on part, one appropriate to the relative lack of success of his steamships and the companies that employed them.

It is a major conclusion of Smith's meticulous research that technical bravado was rarely the route to lasting commercial success. Indeed, if this determinedly antiheroic book has any heroes, they are the ingenious but cautious, god-fearing shipbuilders and marine engineers associated with (and often trained by) John Wood, Robert Napier, and David Elder on Scotland's Clydeside. Providentially (as they would themselves have said), it was to their “privileged site of skill” (12) that Samuel Cunard was directed in 1839, when this merchant from Halifax, Nova Scotia, arrived in Britain to commission a line of steamers for the transatlantic mail service that he was projecting.

The close, long-term business relationship that Cunard developed with these Glasgow men quickly gelled thanks to their recognition of shared cultural values and consequent mutual trust that owed not a little to their Presbyterian and Quaker backgrounds. Furthermore, Napier drew on his local contacts and his high moral and technical reputation to rapidly draw twenty Glasgow merchants into a financial partnership that allowed the project to proceed. By January 1841, the Cunard line's four steamers were operating a year-round transatlantic service, carrying mail and passengers between Liverpool and Boston, via Halifax, on a fortnightly (monthly in winter) schedule—delayed a day if departure was due on the Sabbath. Yet Cunard was no saint. He soon came to see the Atlantic Ocean almost as his personal fiefdom, evincing some less attractive personal qualities, though apparently not ones that hampered his success.

As Smith demonstrates, the Cunard line's financial structure was as unusual as was its rarely dented reputation for safety, reliability, and relative comfort. Other entrepreneurs, struggling to raise sufficient capital, turned instead to the stock market, which required greater openness and allowed closer public scrutiny of their operations. With the North Atlantic mail service already monopolized, they pioneered other, more complex and dangerous routes, across the South Atlantic and round Cape Horn into the Pacific, or incorporated land journeys that anticipated the Suez and Panama canals respectively. Not all of them found shipbuilders and marine engineers with capabilities equivalent to those of Cunard's Clydesiders or managed their reputation so carefully. Yet, among the many who failed, several companies found their own routes to long-term success. Smith investigates the early histories of the other three that were still household names in postwar Britain: P&O (Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company), Royal Mail, and Pacific Steam.

Just as “Rain, Steam and Speed,” the painting by J. M. W. Turner that Smith's title echoes, illuminates the “interconnectedness of natural and human-built systems of power” (xv) represented by the early steam railway, so Smith's splendid monograph succeeds in giving us “the Big Picture” (14) of steam's initial ventures out across the oceans. It is both a good read and great history.