Shipbuilding is a major Finnish national industry and this is the first publication to document its modern history. The impacts of Finnish designed and built merchant ships have been global – Finnish-built icebreakers have opened up the northern seas for year-round navigation, Finnish-built cruise ships have enabled mass-market cruising to become a world-wide leisure phenomenon (the world’s biggest examples are nearly all Finnish-built) and, earlier on, Finnish-built vessels for the USSR enabled it to gain the world’s biggest merchant fleet. 2017 is the centenary of Finnish independence and the book records and analyses shipbuilding’s vital role in Finland’s development as a successful nation state.

The research has involved a blend of business history, history of technology and design history approaches. Research questions have been: How and why did Finland develop a successful shipbuilding industry from the mid-twentieth century onwards? Why did this industry survive and prosper when its equivalents in other comparable nations failed? What were the roles of advanced technology, production methods and design innovations that helped maintain a commercial advantage?

The initial research was sponsored by the Finnish Cultural Fund and by the Finnish Association of Non-fiction Writers. The book was published under the Nautilus imprint of the Technical University of Denmark’s publishing arm, Polyteknisk Laeranstalts Forlag in October 2017.