Despite a thriving of maritime history in Europe, research in the coastal trade has been curiously neglected in most European countries. Yet coastal shipping greatly forwarded industrialisation and urbanisation during the nineteenth century and remained an important carrier of goods in the twentieth century. This volume brings together fifteen essays on aspects of coastal shipping in several countries and regions of Europe. As in its companion volume on ‘Inland Navigation and Economic Development in Nineteenth-Century Europe’ (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern 1995) the aim of the conference in which all but one of these essays originally were read as papers was to produce a preliminary balance of current research on the topic viewed from a comparative European perspective.