The technological development of the ship between 1800 and 1914 was dramatic, encompassing the shift from wood and sail to iron, steel and steam. As a result, technological wonders such as HMS Dreadnought and SS Titanic would become integral to historical narratives and literary imaginations by the early twentieth century. Based on a 2009 symposium at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, this volume offers a multi-disciplinary approach to the history of the ship in the long nineteenth century. It illustrates some of the ways in which the material elements of the ship, together with the scientific, artisan and seafaring ideas and practices that endowed the ship with its character, may be approached from different historical, geographical, cultural and literary perspectives.Traditional historical accounts of the period have tended to place the ship as a passive element in stories of trade, naval supremacy, population migration, modern leisure and pleasurable grandeur, often concentrating on narrow technical issues such as the relative superiority of national navies. Such histories have not endowed ships with their own agency, nor have they properly acknowledged the networks of builders, entrepreneurs and opinion-makers on which the ongoing development of the ship depended. In contrast, the essays in this collection move the debate about technology in the Royal and mercantile navies into fresh waters; exploring how the ship was materially and symbolically reinvented during the long nineteenth century. As a result, the authors offer a new series of interconnected and culturally contingent considerations of maritime technology and culture.