Practically becoming international: expertise,infrastructure and classification societies in maritime governance

Abstract

Ocean governance is the subject of a vibrant and expanding literature in International Relations. Much of this literature has examined the role of rule-making sites in governing the seas, and the extensive role of private, commercial actors therein. While scholars point to expertise as one of the main sources of power and legitimacy for private actors in global rule-making, little scholarship has sought to explore how and why commercial actors have achieved a position of such prominence in maritime policy processes. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and debates in Historical IR, this paper examines the role of technical expertise and commercial infrastructure as historical drivers of the power of corporate actors in international maritime governance. To do this, it analyses the case of classification societies (in particular, Lloyd’s Register) in the development and implementation of load line regulations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This case study demonstrates how the mobilization of technical expertise and a global commercial infrastructure for the implementation of safety standards beyond the nation state was crucial to the establishment of an international standard of ship loading, centring private actors in maritime governance structures.

Introduction

The symbol of the London Underground is familiar to any who pass through London, with the circle and bar having become iconic since its adoption in 1913. However, this logo was inspired by another symbol used in transport, the Plimsoll Line (BBC News, 2013). The Plimsoll line, similarly composed of a circle cut in half by a horizontal line, has been used in maritime transport since the late 19th century to mark the safe loading level of ships. If a ship was immersed in water such that its Plimsoll line was not visible, this meant that it was overloaded, and therefore at a higher risk of capsizing or sinking. To this day, the Plimsoll line marks the side of cargo ships worldwide.

The Plimsoll line was one of the first global instruments of ship safety, emerging at a time where international regimes and regulations were first beginning to shape world order. History largely credits the MP Samuel Plimsoll with the successful invention and application of load lines (Fink, 2011; Jones, 2013, 2024), at the expense of the role played by the Chief Surveyor of the Lloyd’s Register Classification Society (LR), Benjamin Martell, which has scarcely attracted attention (Sanger, 2019).

While the role of Lloyd’s Register and Benjamin Martell in this endeavour has not been extensively researched, the involvement of a classification society in global maritime regulation is not surprising. Existing scholarship has frequently highlighted the role of commercial entities in sites of maritime rulemaking, arguing that the International Maritime Organization (IMO), in particular, is susceptible to capture by corporate interests (Baumann, 2023; Baumler et al., 2021; Hendriksen, 2020). Moreover, the pervasive influence of shipowners in maritime policy is frequently cited as a barrier to improved social and environmental outcomes in maritime governance – whether in the fields of ship recycling, emissions reduction or labour rights (Lee et al., 1997; Roe, 2013). Other accounts have viewed the influence of commercial actors on maritime rulemaking more favourably, foregrounding the role of private regulatory frameworks in environmental governance, in particular.

However, extant literature has lacked nuanced accounts of the development of the power of commercial entities in modern maritime rulemaking. This article, seeking to fill this gap, introduces a new account of how the power of corporate actors in contemporary maritime policy processes has developed historically. Specifically, this paper focuses on the role and practices of classification societies, private entities that have assumed the status of unrivalled technical authorities in the shipping sector. It argues that their prominence in maritime governance arrangements still relies on practices of expertise centred on the socio-material infrastructures that emerged to regulate maritime transport in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As the article will demonstrate, these practices integrate processes and infrastructures of survey, the gathering of ship data and the establishment of units of measurement. This analytical focus highlights the embeddedness of corporate technical expertise in infrastructures for the implementation of global rules, and the role of this dynamic in entrenching private actors in maritime governance.

In building this account, this paper draws on and complements recent literature on the history of international organisations and regimes and the role of private authority and expertise in global governance. The article expands on this literature by highlighting the embeddedness of expertise in industrial processes, in line with Science and Technology Studies−inspired scholarship on the politics of expertise and socio-material practice. In addition, the paper makes a significant contribution to debates on the role of private actors in maritime governance, historicising how technical expertise has come to structure claims to authority within the maritime sector. Overall, the paper argues that claims to expertise become entrenched through the diffusion and reproduction of technical instruments in everyday commercial practices. This gives an important account of how certain claims to expert status in regulation have spread globally and are sustained across time.

To do this, the article traces the involvement of the world’s oldest classification society, Lloyd’s Register (hereafter LR), in the creation of global standards for ship loading and ship safety in the late 1800s. In particular, the paper follows the emergence and international spread of the LR Tables of Freeboard, a measuring instrument used to determine the safe loading limits of ships. By following this object across networks of practice in the shipping industry, this paper unravels how relations of knowledge and expertise are facilitated by material infrastructures and are continually reproduced through them.

The structure of this paper is as follows: the first two sections will provide a brief introduction to the role of commercial entities, especially classification societies, in maritime rulemaking, before laying out the paper’s conceptual framework and its contribution to debates on the exercise of power through expertise and materiality. The third section will provide an overview of the emergence of maritime safety within the shipping sector in the 19th century, and set the stage for the historical case study to follow. The final section will detail the development of the Plimsoll Line, which eventually culminated in the signing of the international Load Line Convention in 1930. These sections will demonstrate how LR, through its Tables of Freeboard, became centred in this governance arrangement, translating its own commercial interests through (jointly) its claims to expertise and ownership of global ship surveying infrastructure.

Maritime governance, private authority and classification societies

In recent years, a range of analyses have highlighted the extensive role of commercial actors in maritime rulemaking (DeSombre, 2006; Furger, 1997; Lister, 2015; Lister et al., 2015; M’Gonigle and Zacher, 1979). Scholars are divided on whether private actors in maritime regulation are an asset or a hindrance in the governance of shipping (Lee et al., 1997: 350; Lister, 2015; Lister et al., 2015; Psaraftis and Kontovas, 2020), even though the centrality of their role in maritime policy processes is widely acknowledged (Lee et al., 1997; M’Gonigle and Zacher, 1979; Prehn, 2021). For instance, Baumann (2023) analyses change in the number and activity of actors in IMO negotiations, with the goal of determining which actors hold sway over IMO policy-making; she demonstrates that corporate actors (such as trade associations and the International Association of Classification Societies (IACS)) are among the most active delegations in submissions and negotiations. The influence of these actors is sometimes framed as a consequence of the technocratized character of IMO negotiations, where technical input from industry experts or nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) provides a guide to the feasibility of particular regulatory proposals (Gould, 2023; Hendriksen, 2020).

Specifically, this paper explores the role of classification societies in the provision of technical expertise and rule implementation. While classification societies are one of many private actors that participate within the structures of maritime governance, on the spectrum of actors that have cultivated ‘expert’ authority in shipping policy, they are among the most influential (Baumann, 2023; Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000; Lissillour and Bonet Fernandez, 2021). Classification societies are commercial enterprises that set standards for shipbuilding and safety, and release ‘class’ certificates to their clients (primarily shipowners). Beyond contributing to the governance of ship safety, contemporary classification societies provide advice to clients on a number of different issues, from alternative fuels to market dynamics. They also contribute to the enforcement of safety standards by carrying out surveys on ships both as part of their own practices of classification and as authorised ‘stand-ins’ for national administrations that have a duty to ensure compliance with particular standards. Importantly, classification societies are also highly influential sources of expertise in national, regional and international policy processes (Psaraftis and Kontovas, 2020).

While the sector-specific literature agrees that commercial actors hold sway over shipping policy processes, there has been little exploration of what drives the uncontested centrality of private actors in general and classification societies in particular in these processes. This paper, therefore, seeks to ask, ‘How have private commercial actors emerged as the legitimate “experts” in the regulatory practices of the shipping sector?’ What structures have made it possible for them to do so? Answering these questions enables us to put the dynamics described in extant literature in context, providing a clearer account of where the power of private corporate actors is derived from in maritime governance.

The interconnection between private authority and expertise has been a long-standing theme in scholarship analysing the role of non-state actors in global governance. In particular, scholars who have worked with the concept of private authority have often highlighted how non-state actors cultivate their authoritativeness by presenting various grounds for the legitimacy of their ‘rule’. Such proposed sources of legitimacy have included expertise, market control or even notions of morality (Büthe and Mattli, 2011; Cashore, 2017; Cutler et al., 1999; Dingwerth, 2005; Green, 2013; Hall and Biersteker, 2002; Wang and Yu, 2022). Avant et al. (2010), for instance, highlight five main grounds on which private actors might achieve authoritative status: via institutional arrangements, through delegation, on the basis of claims to expertise or principled arguments, or the capacity of actors to implement change.

In particular, the accumulation of authority on the basis of both expertise and capacity is a recurring refrain in explanations on the rise of private actors in governance arrangements. In a similar vein to Avant et al. (2010), both Büthe and Mattli (2011) and Wang and Yu (2022) have highlighted how claims to expertise are central to private commercial actors gaining authority and legitimacy in global rulemaking arrangements. Büthe and Mattli (2011), in particular, argue that forms of private regulation in the financial sector are often the result of public actors delegating their authority due to their lack of expertise or resources in the governance of a specific issue area. Private actors, therefore, emerge as authoritative figures because they can present themselves as providers of both the expertise and material infrastructures required for the implementation of regulation, Cutler et al. (1999), similarly, argue that private authority emerges where industrial actors draw legitimacy from either their technical expertise or their historical role within a particular sector, becoming embedded within the structures that govern it.

The case of classification societies in modern governance arrangements of the shipping sector exemplifies these dynamics. At first glance, classification societies participate in international shipping governance as expert advisors in the scope of IMO or EU regulations, interacting directly with policy-makers and influencing their negotiating positions. Their collective trade association, the IACS, has consultative status at the IMO, which affords class the power to directly contribute to the definition of technical issues and solutions in the organisation’s regulatory framework. Classification societies are commonly acknowledged as the foremost technical experts of the sector, due to their in-house research capacity and personnel.

In addition, classification societies also function as corporate regulators, and as enforcers of international or national regulation. On the one hand, classification societies certify ship designs, establishing technical operating standards for the industry, whether these are related to safety, environmental impact or efficiency ¹ . On the other hand, classification societies have increasingly become the enforcers of national and international regulation by offering their ship survey services to national registries and the EU. By doing so, classification societies are the actors charged with actively establishing whether or not ships comply with regulation by employing their global networks of surveyors at ports, which many states or other public authorities lack. Classification societies are so successful that there seems to be ‘no alternative’ to their system, regardless of the fact that they are often seen as either responsible for shipping incidents or too closely tied to shipowners to enforce standards that would go against their commercial interests (Lissillour and Bonet Fernandez, 2021).

It is clear then that classification societies participate in the governance of the shipping sector in a multitude of ways: setting commercial standards, providing expert opinions to regulators, constructing issues and solutions and enforcing regulation. As such, they represent an important node in international shipping regimes, acting within and beyond public regulatory schemes. Their positioning as the technical experts of the sector, allied to their unique capacity to survey ships worldwide, underlies the active enrolment of classification societies within the governance of the sector and other actors’ acceptance of their role. This line of analysis, however, leaves unanswered the questions that animate this paper: how have classification societies achieved this status? How is this state of affairs constantly sustained and reproduced in practice? In order to answer these questions, this paper turns to strands of literature in IR drawing on developments in Science and Technology Studies that have engaged with expertise and technical knowledge and practice as matters of political contestation and performance.

Expertise as authority: epistemic objects, practice and infrastructures

While expertise may be key to actors gaining legitimacy as governors, it is not merely an objective, ontologically delineated counterweight to other forms of authority in international affairs. Rather, it is something that needs to be constructed and mobilised in practice (Zürn, 2018: 63). Scholars in Science and Technology Studies have demonstrated that expert authority is produced by contingent arrangements of practices, discourses and symbols (Callon, 1984; Latour, 2007; Law, 1999). In IR, this thinking has heralded analyses that unpack the political role played by claims to expert knowledge, and the politics of measuring instruments and other technical devices within governance regimes (see, for example, Bueger, 2015, 2018; Eijking, 2023; Esguerra, 2024; Steffek, 2021).

Eijking (2023), for instance, in his historical analysis of the construction of the Suez Canal, argues that expert knowledge and status served to legitimise an arguably imperial project as scientifically sound and international in character. Eijking, therefore, describes expertise as a resource mobilised in support of political agendas rather than concerns about the efficacy or the optimisation of governance solutions, questioning the association between the technocratisation of policy issues and their de-politicisation. He demonstrates how expert knowledge acts as part of processes of contestation, where actors involved frame the terms of the debate in self-serving ways to centre their own solutions.

Expertise, moreover, is not only the basis for the legitimacy of particular regimes, but also shapes the constituting elements of regimes themselves. Many analyses in this regard have highlighted how governance regimes are underpinned by complex networks of epistemic and material infrastructures that bring together constellations of actors, practices, knowledges and material objects together in the definition of complex epistemic objects (Allan, 2017; Bueger, 2015). Such sets of relations underlie the understanding of what phenomena are (climate change, piracy, pandemics); how they can be known, measured and addressed in practice; and which methods or knowledges are more or less appropriate to guide intervention (Littoz-Monnet and Uribe, 2023).

The political role of expertise, therefore, emerges when knowledge is made authoritative and comes to structure social and political orderings (Esguerra, 2024). Here we take expertise to be inherently tied to authority. Rather than seeing it as one of many justifications for rule, which functions as a predefined or static ground for legitimacy (Avant et al., 2010), or as the provision of knowledge within the policy process as functionalist accounts of expertise have held (see Eijking, 2023 for another discussion of this), in this paper we seek to question the processes through which expertise as a form of authority emerges and particular epistemic, social and political orders are maintained.

By seeing expertise as part and parcel of the exercise of authority, the assembling of claims to expertise also becomes the assembling of ways of ordering and ruling particular sectors or fields. However, since expertise is not a fixed quantity but the product of claims and controversies (Latour, 2005), orderings based on expertise are always subject to political contestation. Scholars have, therefore, highlighted the contingency and fragility of the arrangements that produce certain regimes or interventions (Bueger and Stockbruegger, 2024; Eijking, 2023). Yet, some epistemic objects or orders show a remarkable level of stability. This has been attributed to the ways in which set types of relations become reproduced in practice as well as to the ‘stickiness’ produced by their institutionalisation, in particular organisations or procedures (Pantzerhielm, 2024). It is the constant reproduction of particular material-semiotic arrangements that imbues them with the power to shape social reality (Law, 1999). The reproduction of these orders is in turn a matter of material and everyday practices, where the gathering of data, the usage of particular instruments of measurement as well as the production of charts, indicators and inscriptions of various kinds (and their circulation) constitute the material and ideational infrastructures that enable these relations to survive.

Looking at corporate authority as a function of contested claims to expertise and material-epistemic infrastructures for the circulation and reproduction of certain orderings helps reframe the questions that animate this paper in a more productive manner. How have classification societies articulated, justified and defended their authority in function of their expert status historically? Given the stability of these claims, what sets of material and epistemic relations can explain their continued reproduction and survival? How has this set of relations been translated in socio-material practices?

To answer these questions, this paper turns to the question of safe loading standards in the late 19th century to demonstrate how LR, the world’s oldest classification society, managed to carve a place for itself at the centre of the load line regime. As an organisation, LR emerged from Lloyd’s Coffee House, a club frequented by individuals involved in maritime trade, in the late 18th century. Its practices of classification emerged soon thereafter, when ships began to be classed on the basis of their structural soundness as a means of indicating to insurers and investors the level of risk that each vessel and voyage represented. Its role in the load line regime was based on its claims to expert status. This in turn was only possible because LR had access to ship data and a global material infrastructure of survey that it could mobilise in its favour, well beyond the capacity of both its public and private competitors in this regulatory space. This set of relations coalesced and was inscribed within the Tables of Freeboard produced by the Society. The spread of the Tables, therefore, both resulted from and reproduced a global order of ship safety in which LR was the crucial linchpin.

As an indicator of ship safety, the Tables of Freeboard allow us to map the epistemic and power relations invested in the determination and placement of load lines; they define the problem of loading within parameters of data that LR already had access to, ‘rigging’ the contest over the measurement of safe loading standards in their favour. In turn, the implementation of such regulation required access to a global network of specialised enforcement that no public authority at the time could possess. The global network of surveyors and port agents that LR possessed in the 19th century, therefore, was turned from a commercial network of classification to a global enforcement infrastructure for the Tables of Freeboard, solving the challenge of regulating an industry that routinely crossed national legal jurisdictions. These two together, the measuring instrument of the Tables of Freeboard and LR surveying infrastructure, provided the epistemic and infrastructural resources that reproduced the primacy of LR and ‘locked it in’ the load line regime. The Tables of Freeboard, therefore, represent both part of the conceptual apparatus of the article, being part of the epistemic-material infrastructure that allowed LR’s expertise to travel and affirm itself globally, and a methodological entry point which allows, in classic STS fashion, to follow materials and relations as they move from place to place revealing how contingent orderings are constructed and sustained.

By tracing the development and application of the Tables through the global commercial network of LR, this paper demonstrates how the epistemic power of classification was entrenched in practice, offering a global standard for ship safety before the advent of comparable public international regimes. When regimes to regulate the same issue were later developed, the practices and expertise produced by LR remained at their core, irrespective of the presence of alternative systems of rule. In its analysis of the historical load line regime and the role of the Tables of Freeboard as the object around which these forms of power and practice coalesce, this article draws on an extensive body of archival research in four primary sites: the Lloyd’s Register Foundation Heritage and Education Centre, the UK National Archives, the Foyle Collection at King’s College London and the Greenwich Maritime Museum.

The first empirical section of this paper will first set out the emergence of the question of load lines as part of debates in ship safety in the 19th century, highlighting how LR successfully managed to monopolise the governance of load lines on the basis of its claims to expert status; the second empirical section will instead analyse how LR’s possession of a global infrastructure for the survey of ships ultimately led it to become the epistemic authority behind the international load line regime.

Load lines, LR and the Freeboard Tables: a new measure for maritime safety

The late 19th century was a period of significant global transformation. Technological advancements drove widespread change and innovation, often heralding increased transnational and international efforts to regulate these developments. For instance, engineering advancements were driving efforts to standardisation across many fields (Yates and Murphy, 2019). Together with private efforts of standardisation, this period also saw the proliferation of a great deal of international organisations, regimes and interventions which spanned various policy areas, such as environmental governance, global health policy and administrative governance of telegraph or postal systems (Howland, 2015, 2016; Yao, 2022). Recent analyses of such forms of global governance have revealed how the roots of the current international order were laid in instruments emerging in the 19th century; these analyses have provided new depth to thinking on contemporary transnational dynamics and networked governance (Howland, 2016; Ravndal, 2017).

In shipping, technological advancements were rendering journeys across the seas more predictable, enabling shipping actors to better manage the risks of seaborne capital flows (Ferreiro, 2020; Reid, 2017, 2023). Simultaneously, issues of ship safety and the regulation of maritime traffic became the subject of intense international regulation and negotiation. From international standards of signalling to the upkeep of lighthouses and buoys, this period saw the proliferation of many an international regime regulating seaborne activities.

In the United Kingdom in particular, safety standards in shipping became the subject of significant public attention and agitation in the 1870s (Fink, 2011; Glover, 2021; Jones, 2013). In 1871 and 1872 alone, the British Board of Trade, the branch of the civil service tasked with issues of commerce and trade, including sea-going vessels, recorded 434 ships lost at sea in British waters and abroad, resulting in the loss of 3782 seafarers. Public agitation on this issue eventually resulted in the establishment of the Royal Commission on Unseaworthy Ships (1874), which was tasked with investigating questions of ship safety.

Load lines first emerged as a possible instrument of ship safety in the work of the Royal Commission. Some proponents (among whom was the MP Samuel Plimsoll) argued that the placement of load lines on ship sides would enable surveyors to identify vessels that were overloaded and were, therefore, at higher risk of sinking or overturning once in open waters. While the Royal Commission gathered a great deal of information relating to shipping losses, this body of evidence failed to generate clear political progress. Three landmark issues emerged around the question of load lines.

First, shipping actors could not agree either on the prevalence of overloading as a practice or on a solution to reduce it (Royal Commission on Unseaworthy Ships, 1874: 2). The Commission’s proposals to consider mandatory survey for all British ships, and the drawing of a load line to establish maximum cargo loads, attracted opposition on principle – with shipowners resisting any form of interference with their trade (General Shipowner Society, 1875; Meeting of Shipowners at the London Tavern, 1876). No less importantly, it was argued by both private and public interests that interference with trade would result in the British shipping industry facing increased competition, from both domestic railways and foreign shipowners – the latter would be able to carry goods beyond the limits placed on Britons and be exempt from having to follow load line regulations (General Shipowner Society, 1888; Instructions to Officers Abroad, Foyle Special Collections Library, 1890; Load Line Guidance Published by the British Board of Trade, 1890; Nautical Magazine, 1873).

Second, there was no consensus on the correct ways of assessing the seaworthiness and correct load line of ships (Royal Commission on Unseaworthy Ships, 1874; MT 9/75). Experts called to give their opinion on this issue in front of the Royal Commission all described different methods of calculating where a vessel’s load line should be placed. Finally, the suggestion of mandatory survey of ships by a public authority also presented severe infrastructural and resource problems. The report of the Royal Commission, therefore, also sparked intense debate about who among the private or public actors tied to the shipping industry could and should take on the task of survey.

The public debate on load lines as a measurement of ship safety, therefore, hinged on the effectiveness and desirability of this type of regulation, as well as the uncertainty around what technical instruments were available to govern the marking of load lines. It is at the intersection of these issues that LR managed to frame itself not only as one of the foremost providers of shipping expertise, but also as possessed of the necessary infrastructure to then impose such standards on the shipping industry.

Among the many interested parties representing the shipping industry at the Royal Commission of 1873 was Benjamin Martell, the Chief Surveyor of Lloyd’s Register. At the time of the Royal Commission on Unseaworthy Ships, LR had steadily grown into a company that employed a wide network of professional surveyors and engineers and was deeply involved in setting and surveying the building standards of vessels, especially in Britain.

While being interviewed by the Royal Commission, Benjamin Martell argued for making LR the primary actor in charge of ship survey, and presented the first iteration of what would later become the LR Tables of Freeboard. When quizzed about which sort of body should take charge of surveying ships to ensure their compliance with safety standards, Martell affirmed that the only body who could ‘satisfactorily’ establish seaworthiness standards was LR:

I do not see how any body of men whatever could satisfactorily survey ships which are unclassed unless they had the records from our office to enable them to do it. . . . In our office we have the records of nearly all the wooden ships which have been built in the country; and whilst we have a staff of perfectly trained surveyors they know from past experience what to look at, and what is required in order to make a ship seaworthy. (Royal Commission on Unseaworthy Ships, 1974: 427)

LR was ostensibly the only body with the accumulated knowledge to be able to effectively establish standards of seaworthiness, as well as enforce such standards through its existing network of professional surveyors at ports. The existence of a global surveying network was also what, according to Martell, made it impossible to turn LR into a public body under the control of the government. In order for LR to enforce its rules effectively, it needed to continue being a private commercial actor whose officers were not limited by national jurisdictions and borders (Royal Commission on Unseaworthy Ships, 1974: 427–428).

At the conclusion of the Royal Commission on Unseaworthy Ships, the debate remained as open as ever. Even when Parliament made the marking of load lines compulsory in the Merchant Shipping Act of 1876, there was no consensus on how these should be calculated and affixed. In fact, two issues remained unresolved: the creation of a standardised tool to calculate load lines, and the choice of the organisation most suited to enforce this regulation. With the 1876 Merchant Shipping Act, load lines remained at the discretion of the shipowner and the enforcement of the regulation was difficult and uneven. Surveyors of the Board of Trade, tasked with enforcing load line regulation, reported that load lines were ‘universally [and fairly] marked’ in some ports, whereas in others correct markings were ‘the exception rather than the rule’. In other cases, load lines were not marked, or were marked ‘more to satisfy the wording of the act’ than anything else (MT 9/118). In addition, the Board of Trade at this time did not have the resources to undertake such a massive task (MT 9/75).

While the lack of expertise and personnel plaguing the Board of Trade at the time was certainly important in placing LR at the centre of the debate on load lines, it was by no means the only driver of the organisation’s interest in the issue. LR had commercial interests of its own pushing it to devise instruments to enforce loading requirements on ships. In 1873, the General Committee of LR, following heavy losses (especially of iron ships in the previous year), set their Sub-Committee for Surveyors the task of presenting solutions to prevent further such incidents. In August 1873, the Sub-Committee for Surveyors presented a report that considered the practice of overloading as one of the main drivers of preventable losses. This report, based on information on the dimensions and loading of 200 ships, determined that the most desirable way of determining the safe load of a ship was to consider its dimensions and capacity below water. This was a substantial change from previous standard practice, which was to assign freeboard, that is to say the distance between the water line and the upper or main deck of a ship, on the basis of an undeviating rule, such as the old Lloyd’s dictum of 3 inches of freeboard for every foot depth of hold (Report of the Sub-Committee of Surveyors, Lloyd’s Register, 1873).

Furthermore, the Sub-Committee suggested that Tables of Freeboard might be drafted in order to determine freeboard for vessels on the basis of their form and dimensions; this formula used their registered dimension and tonnage as a proxy of the specific shape of the ship. This type of calculation was only possible due to the LR’s unique epistemic role in maritime commerce; the required data on ships were easily retrievable from the existing Register Books, and the availability of such data notably influenced how the Society devised its methods of calculation. The Sub-Committee report states that ‘it was thought to be highly desirable that the principle adopted should be applicable to all vessels already built and afloat, without involving the necessity of tedious calculations’ (Report of the Sub-Committee of Surveyors, Lloyd’s Register, 1873: 10). Indeed, the global applicability and ease of calculation of this instrument was the underpinning rationale for Martell’s submission to the Royal Commission on Unseaworthy Ships in the same year.

By establishing a unit of measurement that relied on information only available to classification societies, LR was effectively excluding other actors from being able to design and assign freeboard to ships, ‘rigging’ the measurement of load lines and therefore safety in their favour. Much like Martell’s argument with regard to the impossibility of other organisations carrying out satisfactory surveys of ships because they could not possibly have the long-term expertise amassed by LR, the Tables of Freeboard represented an inscription of a set of relations (i.e. LR centrality in the shipping industry) that sought to reproduce and sustain this state of affairs.

Martell’s Tables of freeboard were declared to be largely applicable within Lloyd’s in 1875 (Report of the Sub-Committee for Surveyors, Lloyd’s Register, 1875). Internal correspondence with surveyors across the various ports in the United Kingdom and abroad and internal debates at LR make it possible to trace the geographical spread of the marking of load lines through practices of classification. Whenever shipowners turned to LR in order to determine the load lines of their vessels, the LR General Committee tasked Martell, in his position of Chief Surveyor of the Society, with drafting load lines for each vessel. While the Register at this time decided to award load lines only to a certain type of vessels classed by them (awning-decked vessels), shipowners, surveyors and Board of Trade officials often asked for further guidance from the Committee, whether relating to unclassed or different types of ships, demonstrating how deeply entrenched their role as experts in shipping matters had become (Lloyd’s Register General Committee Meeting Minutes, 1875: 51, 69, 70, 177).

However, at this point in time LR’s Tables of Freeboard were not yet widely recognised as the single standard for the assignment of load lines. During this period, many actors were involved in determining and contesting different loading standards, including classification societies (such as LR or the Liverpool’s Underwriters Registry), the Board of Trade and even shipbuilders and naval architects (Royal Commission on Unseaworthy Ships, 1874; MT 9/104). Accordingly, many different methods of calculating load lines, of varying degrees of sophistication, were being debated in these years. These debates were not only a function of technical or scientific disagreement around the issue of loading, but also reflected the interplay between technical instruments and broader political or commercial interests in this field.

Figures within LR, for instance, criticised the tables drafted in 1873 by Benjamin Martell, Chief Surveyor of the Society, because they did not make use of the characters of classification awarded by the society as a proxy to indicate ship strength. They, therefore, did not privilege ships of a higher class in the determination of load lines (Report of the Sub-Committee for Surveyors, Lloyd’s Register, 1875), failing to centre LR’s measure of ship quality in judging the ability of ships to carry more cargo. Furthermore, different methods for calculating freeboards tended to privilege certain vessels over others (MT 9/104; Sub-Committee of Surveyors, 1875), and actors had, therefore, clear incentives to support or discredit certain measurements as a way of protecting their commercial interests.

In an attempt to settle these disputes, at the end of 1875, the Board of Trade, LR and the Liverpool Association of Underwriters came together to ‘lay down some elementary principles for determining the load draught of water of ships’ (Lloyd’s Register General Committee Meeting Minutes, 1875: 375; MT 9/113). This first attempt at a commission for the determination of common principles of load line measurement made some headway, when it was agreed that the strength, dimensions and spare buoyancy of a ship could serve as the main principles for establishing load lines. When the Commission moved to consider what proportion of buoyancy should be considered necessary, however, the General Committee of LR instructed its representatives to withdraw from the conference. The reason given was that the definition of a proportion of spare buoyancy would inevitably lead to the adoption of a ‘hard and fast rule’, going beyond the definition of elementary principles (Lloyd’s Register General Committee Meeting Minutes, 1875: 410). Other actors were befuddled by this choice, especially when LR Tables themselves were based on principles of spare buoyancy (MT 9/113).

The withdrawal of LR from the conference should be read in the context of shipowner opposition to load line regulation. The ties between LR and shipowners during this period were so strong that LR routinely elected three of its General Committee members from the London General Shipowners’ Society; in 1875, LR’s Secretary became the Chairman of the General Shipowner’s Society, sat on the 1875 Load Line Commission and was largely responsible for the Commission’s eventual failure (MT 9/113; General Shipowner Society Meeting Minutes, 1875). Shipowners in the late 1870s were extremely resistant to any legislative interference in loading, but rejected especially strongly the aforementioned notion of a ‘hard and fast rule’ of freeboard (General Shipowner Society Meeting Minutes, 1875; Minutes of the General Shipowner meeting at the London Tavern, 1876). Shipowner resistance even prevented LR from publishing its Freeboard Tables in 1875 (Lloyd’s Register General Committee Meeting Minutes, 1875: 213; Report of General Shipowner Society Meeting Minutes, 1875; the Sub-Committee of Surveyors, 1875: 254). As a result, once again the technical debate around load lines was shaped by contestations guided by commercial and material interests, demonstrating the political character of the establishment of units of measurement for ship safety and overloading.

LR and surveying infrastructure: the commercial implementation of the Tables of Freeboard

Although shipowners were still resistant to load line regulations, LR did not abandon its plans to implement them. Rather, it slowly implemented more stringent requirements in order to address those avoidable losses identified by the Sub-Committee for Surveyors in the summer of 1873. That year, load lines were initially employed as a measure of safety together with other structural or operational requirements. When in 1875 the General Committee of Lloyd’s realised that shipowners were persistently ignoring these requirements, load lines and freeboard were made into a condition of classification. While classification was not compulsory at the time (much like it is today), certificates of classification were often used to assure insurers of the soundness of a ship. A lack of classification could, therefore, become a financial problem. By making freeboard certificates a condition of class, LR became the first body to regulate load lines according to a specific set of rules and technical instruments (the Freeboard Tables), in contrast with the arbitrariness of load lines employed under the 1876 Merchant Shipping Act. The wealth of data on naval architecture that LR had acquired in its many years of operation allowed it to devise its own freeboard requirements, demonstrating LR’s role as a crucial node of technical expertise in the shipping industry. Furthermore, its closeness with shipowners and its ability to weaponise certificates of classification and their financial implications in order to encourage and enforce compliance with these new safety measurements gave it an advantage in the practical and material implementation of load lines.

This level of capacity in the implementation of rules and regulations, however, is only part of the story. LR could not in fact have implemented its Tables of Freeboard without recourse to its global networks of surveyors, trained professionals that implemented the society rules both at home and abroad. This global infrastructure of survey not only enabled LR to implement its rules but also set it apart from both its public and private competitors (i.e. the BoT and other classification societies). Already in 1875, Mr. Thomas Farrer, Secretary of the Board of Trade, ahead of the passing of the 1876 Merchant Shipping Act, wrote to the Chairman of Lloyd’s to ask whether ‘it would be possible to employ Lloyd’s Surveyors for this purpose at places where [the Board has] no competent officers’ (Lloyd’s Register General Committee Meeting Minutes, 1875: 221). The Chairman replied in the affirmative, stating that LR would be glad to offer their services to tend ‘to the preservation of life and property’ and that in regard to the competence of their officers ‘they would be fully equal if not superior to any other individual’ (Lloyd’s Register General Committee Meeting Minutes, 1875: 222). The Board of Trade could not, therefore, effectively hope to fulfil its mandate of ship surveying without relying on the much bigger commercial survey infrastructure provided by LR.

LR’s continuous growth as a company during this time made it so that its manpower far outstripped the personnel available to comparable authorities. While LR’s rules of freeboard from the mid-1870s to the early-1880s were neither public nor put in practice through formal rulemaking and enforcement practices, they still managed to spread across the globe. Through its role as a classification society, LR was single-handedly responsible for drafting its own rules and enforcing them across its worldwide network of surveyors. At the time, LR employed an impressive number of surveyors both in the United Kingdom and abroad, including in major European ports, and across other continents, in Australia, North America, China, Japan and across South-East Asia. No matter where they were built, ships classed by LR were subjected to their rules and regulations, and in the case of certain vessels, also to their freeboard requirements (Letter from AG Dryhurst, LRF-PUN-W358B4-0010-L, 1895; Letter from Jules Vandercruyce, LRF-PUN-BDX1107-0278-L, 1881).

In 1881, before the Tables of Freeboard were published by the Society, and before a standard means of calculating freeboard had been accepted by the British state, a surveyor in Bordeaux, for example, replied to a letter questioning his judgement on the classification of a ship and the corresponding assigned freeboard, by citing Mr Martell’s guidance on the issue (Letter from Jules Vandercruyce, LRF-PUN-BDX1107-0278-L, 1881). This example of correspondence details the way in which freeboard was assigned through the commercial network of surveyors at ports. These practices were constitutive of the relations of expertise synonymous with load line and freeboard calculations – the business of classification was the vector by which they spread. The commercial infrastructure of LR as a global company and its many officials in ports across the world provided the necessary material infrastructure through which the Tables of Freeboard could circulate internationally. Its global practices of survey provided the bedrock for the implementation and enforcement of load line rules.

This mechanism can be traced through the contestation of load line on individual vessels. In the mid 1890s, a ship classed by LR in Christiania (Oslo), for example, did not have a load line marked after the process of classification had been concluded, in accordance with the owner’s wishes (Letter from AG Dryhurst, LRF-PUN-W358B4-0010-L, 1895). The Secretary of LR reprimanded the Surveyor for this contravention of the rules, instructed the Surveyor to hold on to the certificate of classification of the ship until the load line had been placed on the side of the ship and communicated this to the owner (Memo Regarding Classification for Bogstad, LRF-PUN-W358B4-0048-L, 1895; Copy of Letter from AG Dryhurst, LRF-PUN-W358B4-0043-L, 1895). The ship, however, had left the port of Cardiff for Singapore in the meantime, and was outside of the purview of the original surveyor (Letter from Johan Wessel, LRF-PUN-W358B4-0044L, 1895). The owners of the ship then wrote to LR stating that they were not aware of their rule regarding freeboard and that they would have the marks placed on the side of the ship once the vessel docked in Singapore. In Singapore, an LR surveyor then could both oversee the marking of the load line and produce a certificate of classification for the ship (Extract of Letter from Fearnley & Eger, LRF-PUN-W358B4-0042-O, 1895).

Therefore, LR and its operational network represented a site possessed of both the epistemic and material infrastructure to ensure seaworthiness of shipping. While it was not the sole entity capable of or engaged in drafting rules of freeboard at the time – both the Liverpool Registry (a competing UK classification society) and the BoT had made separate attempts to produce alternative tables for the certification of freeboard – these competing instruments were limited by the same dynamics that had granted LR its place of primacy within the regulation of load lines, their successful claim to expert status and their global surveying infrastructure.

On the one hand, these different standards, while circulating at the same time as the LR Tables of Freeboard, had a much more limited geographical reach. While the Liverpool Registry and LR were comparable societies in respect of their role within the shipping industry, LR far outstripped its competitor both in terms of its market share of classed ships and its global network of surveyors. A statistical report in 1886 indicates that at that point LR’s market share was 10 times that of the Liverpool Registry, and it accounted for slightly less than 30 percent of the global share of classed ships (Lloyd’s Universal Register, 1886). The Board of Trade, by comparison, only had the legal standing to enforce its rules within Britain, in addition to being further limited by the lack of resources described above.

On the other hand, the expertise of the Board of Trade’s surveyors, enforcing load lines under the 1876 Merchant Shipping Act, was soon called into question. As a memorandum prepared by the Board of Trade in 1883 highlighted, shipowners complained of the seemingly ‘discretionary’ power of BoT officers, requesting both that the Board be more transparent in laying out its understandings of freeboard (its tables had not been published), and that ‘definite principles’ be created so that complying with extant rules – which were intended to be only a ‘point of departure’ for surveyors – would be easier (MT 9/226). To shore up its authority against these accusations, the Board of Trade sought additional sources of legitimacy for their technical regulations.

In this context, the Board of Trade decided to appoint a further departmental committee to consider changes to the domestic load line regime (Memorandum from T. H. Farrer, MT 9/226). This committee included representatives of a range of countervailing centres of authority on load lines and maritime safety, most notably, Digby Murray (Nautical Adviser to the Board of Trade) and Benjamin Martell (representing LR), along with a number of representatives of UK shipowners and shipbuilders (MT 9/225). Witness testimony was heard by the Committee over 17 dates in February, March, April, May and June 1884, in hearings in London, Hartlepool, Hull, Liverpool, Newcastle, Sunderland, Glasgow, Leith, Cardiff and Bristol. Ultimately, the decision of the Committee was to co-opt the Lloyd’s tables into British law with only ‘limited modifications’ (Report by Committee of Loadline, 1885), keeping with their core principles.

It is clear that the decision to adopt the Lloyd’s tables, rather than those already in use by the Board of Trade, reflected the aforementioned centrality of LR and its classification practices in the governance of ship safety. This was not only a result of its ostensible expertise in terms of ship technology. While some in the Committee considered the LR tables to be the manifestation of the objective competence of Martell and Professor Francis Elgar of the Royal Institute of Naval Architects (an apparently influential interlocutor in the Committee’s proceedings), the tables’ authority as an object was born of the supremacy of Lloyd’s as a body of classification. There existed few alternatives to Lloyd’s surveying infrastructure and attendant practices during the period of the Committee; during a meeting of the British Corporation for the Survey and Registry of Shipping, which appeared in the Glasgow Herald in December 1890, Archibald Denny stated that at the time of the Committee sessions, Lloyd’s ‘had just finished swallowing the Liverpool Book’ (its primary competitor) and that as a result ‘there was no alternative’ to its proposed standard of vessel strength (Glasgow Herald, 1890, MT 15/238).

Ultimately, the adoption of Martell’s tables by the Load Line Committee marked a key inflection point in the development of the load line regime in British shipping; while those tables had previously been the basis for Lloyd’s classification operation, their co-option by the state further centralised epistemic power in LR. The 1890 Merchant Shipping Act ‘effectively made Lloyd’s a Government Department’, an ‘autocratic . . . oppressive power’ which had assumed near-unlimited authority to determine how ships could be built. Importantly, following the adoption of Lloyd’s tables by the Committee, the Board of Trade ‘discontinued altogether’ the assignment of freeboards by its own officers, ‘hand[ing] over the whole duty of administration of the Rules and Tables to Lloyd’s Register’ (MT 15/238, p. 119). LR’s commercial infrastructure and unchallenged expertise, which had already entrenched the Freeboard Tables as a global instrument through its commercial practices of classification, now had behind it the force of British law.

Shipping, however, is and always has been a distinctively international industry. The adoption of a national standard for the enforcement of load lines was soon to have international effects, even beyond the global commercial operations of LR. As discussed in the first empirical section detailing the birth of load lines as a policy issue, it had long been a concern of shipowners and public actors alike that national regulations might serve to commercially disadvantage a country’s shipping sector in the global shipping market. As a result, international standardisation was seen as a potential solution to even out the playing field. In this context, throughout the late 1880s, the Foreign Office engaged a range of other countries (including letters to Madrid, Bogota, Copenhagen, Guatemala, San Salvador, Managua, Tegucigalpa, Athens, Berlin, Brussels, Tokyo, Washington, Vienna, Paris, Stockholm, Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro) in formal correspondence, seeking to persuade them to formally adopt the now Board of Trade load line in their own regulations. Per one such letter, written to the Government of Siam,

With reference to my note of the 20th of October, 1885, enclosing a pamphlet containing the report of the Load Line Committee . . . the tables contained in that report have been adopted by the Board of Trade and by the Committee of Lloyd’s Register. . . Her Majesty’s Government [wishes] to come to an understanding with Foreign Governments as to the depth to which their ships should be loaded. . . I am therefore instructed to suggest to His Majesty’s Government [Siam] of the referring of the Rules and Tables to its advisers, in order that opinions may be obtained as to the applicability of these rules to merchant ships sailing under the Siamese flag, so that a common understanding may be arrived at as regards the depth to which all merchant vessels may be loaded when leaving port. (FO 83/1218)

These efforts to standardise the new Load Line internationally via inter-state negotiation, however, were generally unsuccessful; the larger maritime powers, in particular, variably stated that it would be ‘impossible’ or ‘[in]advisable’ to impose the British regulations on their own fleets. Nonetheless, the failure of these efforts heralded a change of direction in the Board of Trade’s regulation of the loading of foreign vessels. While the Board of Trade had previously scarcely detained overladen foreign vessels (generally only where Masters had repeatedly ignored the direction to lighten them) (MT 9/428/M1767/92), the Government stated that it would now begin to detain foreign vessels more judiciously (FO 83/1218). As a letter from Henry G. Calcraft (of the Board of Trade) stated, the introduction of a ‘definite and authoritative standard of safe loading’ by the 1885 Committee had ‘diminished the difficulty previously felt in determining whether or not foreign ships are overloaded, and has therefore facilitated the enforcement against them of the provisions in question . . . the increased stringency of the law as against British shipowners creates the stronger claim on their part to be protected from unfair competition’ (Glasgow Herald, 1890, MT 15/238). No less interestingly, however, Calcraft asserted that ‘foreign vessels will be relieved from liability to detention if the laws and regulation in force in their own countries with respect to loading are equally effective with the similar provisions of the Merchant Shipping Acts’ (Glasgow Herald, 1890, MT 15/238).

The establishment of the LR Tables of Freeboard as the basis for the new Merchant Shipping Acts had, therefore, provided the epistemic bedrock that the BoT had needed to strictly enforce load line regulation irrespective of vessels’ nationality. This proved to be a crucial step in the global circulation of the Lloyd’s load line, marking the initiation of processes that came to translate the relations of expertise associated with this quantification of freeboard to new places and in new ways. Such was the importance of Britain in global trade at the time, the enforcement of load line by British surveyors created newly powerful incentives for international shipping to abide by its rules.

Along with the commercial pressure exerted by Britain as an imperial power, arguably the most important such process was the enforcement of the British Load Line by overseas classification societies. Already during the 1874 Royal Commission on Unseaworthy Ships, Benjamin Martell had claimed that LR’s competitors usually followed where the society led when adopting or amending their rules. In particular, he claimed that one of their main international competitors, the French classification society Bureau Veritas had wholesale adopted LR own rules with minor modifications on more than one occasion (Royal Commission on Unseaworthy Ships, 1874). Following the 1890 Act, and in the absence of other load line regulations, a number of classification societies (most notably, Bureau Veritas and Germanischer Lloyd) obtained permission to mark load lines and issue certificates on the basis of the British tables; these certificates would protect foreign vessels from detention by the Board of Trade. As per Board correspondence, any ‘foreign ships loaded in accordance with such certificates are without question regarded as not overladen and consequentially are not subject to detention’ (MT 9/496). Once again, the commercial practice of classification, helped along by market incentives, had preceded national and international regulation, giving rise to a commercial but no less global system of governance.

From that point onward, the Board of Trade (and LR) load line became entrenched into classification practices through the expanding operations of the aforementioned societies across the world. In Spain, for example, the King issued a decree stating that ‘the load line shall become obligatory in Spain on all merchant ships’, and ‘the marks placed on Spanish ships by the Board of Trade, Bureau Veritas, Lloyd’s Register and British Corporation shall be held to mark the requirements of the previous regulation . . . [these bodies] may conduct in Spain the necessary operations for determining the line and their decisions shall be accepted as official’ (MT 9/496).

Practices of classification – both of Lloyd’s and other societies – entrenched a new quantification of safety into global shipping practice. As a letter sent from Bureau Veritas to the Board of Trade in 1909 stated,

We would point out that since 1890 many changes have occurred in connection with the assignment of freeboards, not least . . . the adoption by the French Government of the British Tables of Freeboard through the Bureau Veritas converting these to the metrical system; and further, other nations are making the Bureau Veritas version of these Tables a part of their legislation, as well as taking the society’s rules of construction as a standard of strength. In these circumstances the British Rules have practically become international. . . (MT 15/238)

The role of classification societies in this arrangement of expertise and authority is not merely that of providing a standard that governments can later employ. Class societies’ own application of the rules – and in the case of Bureau Veritas and other non-British societies, their translation – provided both the content of and the enforcement infrastructure for load line rules. Through practices of classification, load lines had become a global standard long before the intervention of domestic and international sites of formal rulemaking.

By 1913, many countries had adopted the British rules through their own statutory processes; Charalambous (1986: 56) argues that at this juncture, ‘the principal maritime countries, with the exception of the United States of America, had followed the British practice, and had adopted, with or without modifications, the British Rules of 1906’ (the British rules had been slightly modified during that year). Ultimately, the principles and language at the centre of these rules – which can be traced back to Martell’s 1882 tables – were foundational in the framing of the 1930 Load Line Convention. Annex IV of this convention gives a list of countries thought by the contracting parties to be using load line rules ‘equivalent’ to the 1906 Board of Trade regulations at the time; this list includes Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the United States and the USSR. Lech Kobylinski, on this point, asserts that the tables and rules of assignment adopted by the Load Line Conference in 1930 ‘did not differ substantially’ from those adopted by the Load Line Committee in 1885 (Kobylinski, 2006: 142).

Conclusion

Maritime governance has long been perceived to be the province of industrial and technical experts, with a range of implications for the legitimacy and accountability of governing instruments. While there exists a substantive consensus on the role of expertise in granting authority to private actors in maritime governance, there has been limited engagement with the processes through which this expertise has, over the decades, been mobilised and embedded in regulatory structures. To explore this question, the article explored the case of the emergence of the international load line regime in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Supplementing existing accounts of the process by which load lines came to be governed, which have focused on the interventions of a small number of political entrepreneurs, the article illuminated the relations of knowledge, surveying infrastructure, capital and empire that worked to define both overloading as a problem and its governance. Specifically, the tracing of the journey of a specific measuring instrument (Tables of Freeboard) revealed the pathways through which the authority of LR and other classification societies became entrenched globally. Both by virtue of their technical knowledge and expertise, and their extensive transnational surveying infrastructure, classification societies were able to harness commercial incentives to turn load lines into a global standard. While, in the late 1870s and early 1880s, the range of available tables reflected the nascent hierarchy of expertise in the area of freeboard, the ubiquity of the classification practices of one entity – Lloyd’s Register – led to its tables ultimately assuming primacy, coming to the fore in British surveying, British law, practices of overseas classification societies, the law of foreign states and, finally, the International Load Line Convention.

This article makes an important contribution to the study of maritime governance and affairs. By drawing on a classical body of literature on private authority and recent new studies of expertise in global governance inspired by Science and Technology Studies (Allan, 2017; Berger and Esguerra, 2018; Bueger, 2015), it showcased the complexity of the processes through which the epistemic authority of private actors is embedded in governance arrangements. It highlights how the role of expertise of commercial actors in the shipping sector has emerged historically as a function of, jointly, their monopoly on technical knowledge and the infrastructures through which this knowledge is mobilised. This directly contributes to nascent debates regarding maritime governance which have stressed the important role of private commercial entities by expanding the terms of the debate beyond the efficacy or transparency of maritime governance regimes. Rather than focusing on the pros and cons of private involvement in global regulation, this article analyses the conditions that have made this state of affairs possible. The analysis of the load line regime demonstrates how the proliferation of measuring instruments and their circulation in global commercial networks, both outside of and in conversation with forms of domestic and international rulemaking, embeds certain actors as providers of expertise or enforcement infrastructure in global governing arrangements.

While this article has focused on a historical case study, the dynamics highlighted can also be instructive vis-a-vis the relations of knowledge that govern contemporary maritime transport. To this day, the actors central to the story of this paper (LR, Bureau Veritas, etc.) continue to provide expertise to shipping and governmental actors, enforcing safety rules across the globe and exercising influence on how the industry understands itself and its future. While they play an important role in global commerce, only scant attention has been given to their activities globally (Fulconis and Lissillour, 2021; Lissillour and Bonet Fernandez, 2021). Further research might build on the theoretical and methodological insights of this paper to further unpick the modern networks of expertise and practice that shape the governance of the shipping industry. This is not limited to safety standards, but increasingly to an even wider variety of issues, such as the vulnerability of global value chains to conflict, decarbonisation and environmental protection, and the rise of ‘dark’ fleets.