ABSTRACT
Shipowners, like most businessmen, find that regulation often conflicts with their efforts to earn a reasonable return on their investment. When Samuel Plimsoll first started his campaign against the notorious ‘coffin ships’ in the 1870s, British shipowners argued that the imposition of load lines would put them at an unfair competitive advantage. Fayle, writing in the 1930s, observed that:
In their efforts to raise both the standard of safety and the standard of working conditions afloat, the Board of Trade frequently found themselves, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, at loggerheads with the shipowners. They were accused of cramping the development of the industry by laying down hard-and-fast rules which in effect punished the whole of the industry for the sins of a small minority, and hampering British shipping in international competition, by imposing restrictions from which foreign ships were free, even in British ports.1
