Abstract
This paper explores how technological changes affected labor allocations within the U.S. Navy. During the latter nineteenth century, the officer corps was highly specialized, split between groups of line and staff officers. Developments in general purpose technologies created a dilemma for the organization, as it balanced between the benefits of a specialized workforce implementing increasingly complex technologies with rising communication and coordination costs. We first document the nature and extent of labor specialization in the mid-nineteenth-century Navy—engineers worked more with newer and larger vessels, while line officers worked more with unskilled personnel. The Navy endeavored to destroy this distinction, forcing generalized training and tasks for all officers. We suggest that the Navy’s phased-in approach was an effective strategy, helping the U.S. to become a world-class naval power.
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Notes
Examples abound where the Navy was used as a tool of macroeconomic policy. One such example was the United States’ “gunboat diplomacy” in Latin America, which began in the mid-1890s and was motivated in part by concerns over debt repayment (Reinhart and Rogoff 2009).
See for example Glaser and Rahman (2011, 2012). Some words of caution from a military historian are worth noting—“The past—even if we could be confident of interpreting it with high accuracy—rarely offers direct lessons” (Paret 1989). Maybe, but the issues raised by technological changes within the naval steamship can surely provide indirect evidence of the effects of industrialization on labor for the other complex industries of the day.
Lipsey et al. (1998) define general purpose technologies by four criteria: a wide scope for improvement, an applicability across a broad range of uses, the potential use in a wide variety of processes, and strong complementarities with new or existing technologies.
The literature on dynamic capabilities stresses the importance of similar tasks and experiences in order for workers to be productive in rapidly changing environments (Zollo and Winter 2002).
“There is hardly any part of economics that would not be advanced by a further analysis of [labor] specialization” (Houthakker 1956).
“What a motley assemblage [the old ships] were! Monitors with rusting armor and rotting or rusting hulls, wooden cruisers limited to 7 or 8 knots under steam” (Vlahos 1989).
Even back in 1637, the English warship Sovereign of the Seas was likely the most complex man-made construction in all of England at the time (McBride 2000).
“The protestations of some economic historians notwithstanding, the steam engine is still widely regarded as the quintessential invention of the Industrial Revolution” (Mokyr 1990).
From “Queer Doings in the Navy,” Scientific Machinist, July 1, 1896.
See Borghans and Weel (2006) for a study of labor specialization with computer technology adoption.
Taken from Robinson (1839), Nautical Steam Engine Explained and its Powers and Capabilities Described for the Use of the Officers of the Navy.
Fleet limberness has been of key importance for modern navies. Fleet Admiral Ernest King attributed the U.S. Navy’s victory in the Pacific during World War II to the “flexibility and balanced character of our naval forces.” (Introduction, “Third Report of Operations of the United States Navy in World War II, 1 March 1945–1 October 1945,” in Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, USN, U.S. Navy at War, 1941–1945: Official Reports to the Secretary of the Navy, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946, 169.)
Hadfield (1999) explains customary gender divisions of labor as a mechanism that mitigates coordination problems in the marriage market. But while household technologies have been fairly stagnant for millennia, technological changes in other organizations can severely disrupt such coordination. Thus, a modern Navy might be considered like a modern marriage—everyone is responsible for everything.
McBride (2000) draws the amusing parallel between the post-bellum U.S. Navy and the Starship Enterprise, where it seems that in both cases, officers and engineers operated very separately. “[With] Captain Kirk’s Star Trek dealings with Chief Engineer Scott,…the captain demanded more power, speed or shield strength with no interest in how Scott’s engineers provided it.”
Evidence of the explosive growth in engineer employment in manufacturing abounds. In 1880, there were 7,061 engineers in the U.S.; at the turn of the century, there were 43,239 (Blank and Stigler 1957).
From the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 1864.
From the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 1866.
Before this time, engineers came exclusively from private organizations and were considered non-commissioned personnel.
Papers of George H. Melville, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
Ira N. Hollis quoted in the Army and Navy Journal in 1897.
Lt. Commander L. H. Chandler, “Is Amalgamation a Failure?” USNIP 31 (1905): 823–943.
McBride (2000) describes how the battleship is the most relevant observational unit for our period of study: “During this period, the battleship technological paradigm was dominant, and the battleship retained strategic importance even after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.”
One might question the causal direction in these specifications. However, in general, it makes sense to regress personnel numbers (or personnel characteristics) on ship characteristics, as the decision over which ships to launch were typically made far in advance of the number and types of personnel to service the ship. The Navy chose personnel based in part on the characteristics of the vessels (Bennett 1896).
For example, a vessel could be stationed in the Pacific for five years while the officer and engineer counts aboard vessels vary year to year as the ship docks at ports and personnel change stations.
See Glaser and Rahman (2011), where this data are discussed at greater length.
Displacement serves as a good proxy for technology since it was widely understood that larger vessels needed more advanced steam and mechanical engineering systems in place (Bennett 1896) and thus used general purpose technologies to a greater extent. We cannot capture other measures of technologies (such as the use of different boilers) due to lack of computability and/or comparability.
Particularly important is controlling for the build-up and draw-down of battle readiness from 1897 to 1899 due to the Spanish-American War.
Most specifications include ship random effects.
The overall correlation coefficient between vessel age and cumulative sea experience for all years is 0.44. We generally include both in the specifications to mitigate omitted variable bias but occasionally exclude cumulative sea experience to demonstrate robustness of findings.
Along with improved fuel efficiency, a primary goal for the improvement of steaming technology was to increase the potential cruising speed of a vessel. We have this information for only 80 % of the sample of vessels. Ceteris paribus, vessel speed does not appear to influence engineer numbers assigned to ships (results not reported).
Although we do not report the estimates for the 29 additional age-cohort interaction terms, the reader can be assured that these estimates echo the results shown in Fig. 4. The authors will provide estimates of interaction coefficients upon request.
We are able to extrapolate the information up to 1899.
The inclusion of speed measures do not meaningfully alter results. The inclusion of quadratic terms somewhat weaken the results.
These four sub-fields tend to have the most consistency and relevance across graduating classes and years (Glaser and Rahman 2011).
The inclusion of complement does not produce a statistically significant coefficient, does not significantly alter our coefficients, and simply limits the number of observations (results not reported).
Detailed results for all subjects are available upon request.
As a simile, consider an academic department consisting of tenured and tenure-track faculty who are solely judged on research output, and visiting/adjunct faculty who solely teach. The school is then compelled to adopt a more liberal arts college model, whereby all faculty must both research and teach. This model of course does not preclude the possibility for faculty to get course reductions for research output, or for less research-productive faculty to teach more classes.
We explicitly regress these outcome measures on total naval expenditures from Modelski and Thompson (1988), distance to naval front, decade-effects, and various interaction terms, to verify this empirically. Even controlling for expenditures, which were certainly higher during the 1900s, naval “output” was considerably higher during this time. Results not reported but available upon request.
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Glaser, D.J., Rahman, A.S. Engineering and labor specialization during the industrial revolution. Cliometrica 8, 173–200 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-013-0098-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-013-0098-y