River navigation provides an interesting historical example of market failure and how it was overcome. Transport by river was a critically important part of the inland transportation system in Britain before the development of railways from 1825, especially for bulky and heavy commodities. However, not all rivers were navigable. Rivers could be blocked by weirs, for either mills or fishing. Also, a towpath suitable for horses did not always exist, which meant that boats had to be hauled by men which was four times more expensive per mile than horse haulage. In the absence of modern (pound) locks at key points, rivers could be too shallow for boats to operate. These problems mostly arose from the private ownership of riverbanks, watermills and their associated weirs and ‘flash-locks’ giving rise to a classic ‘hold-up’ problem. These market failures led to a series of acts of parliament, one for each particular stretch of river, giving power to a river commission for the compulsory purchase of land to build towpaths, remove weirs or bypass them with pound locks and to install further pound locks as required to maintain a good river depth. Studying this process is the object of this research proposal.

Crucially, we already have a Geographical Information System (GIS) dataset of the navigable waterways of Britain 1600-1948. However, we cannot currently identify whether any stretch of navigable river, did or did not have a horse towpath, or where navigation was limited or made impossible or difficult because of shallow depths or weirs and flash-locks. This project would enhance our existing GIS, thus strategically benefitting the applicants’ wider transport project. The two papers arising directly from this project will document, for the first time, (i) the nature and scale of market failure in river navigation and the extent to which, and means by which, it was overcome through (ii) the progressive integration (measured in terms of market access and accessibility) of the navigable waterways network between 1600 and 1830, and the chronology of its development.