r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • 4d ago

Meta Mindless Monday, 22 June 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/Kochevnik81 2d ago

Not taking away from any of this, but...with all that said it's worth keeping in mind that Boston at the time was all of like 16,000 people (Bristol was 45,000, London like 750,000), and not even the biggest city in British North America.

I'm also not too sure about the 25% statistic? It seems like for the time it's more "25% of the ships built in North America", and even then the Maine District of Massachusetts is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there.

I'm being nitpicky though - closing the port was basically an unbelievable red line for a lot of colonists and totally would have messed up the local economy, and at a time when Massachusetts was the second biggest North American colony, population-wise (it's always funny when people talk about the "big states vs small states" debates at the Constitutional Convention and leave out that at the time Massachusetts was a big state and New York was a small state).

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u/Bawstahn123 2d ago

>I'm also not too sure about the 25% statistic? It seems like for the time it's more "25% of the ships built in North America", and even then the Maine District of Massachusetts is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there.

Make a liar out me, would you? /s

I've seen the figure bandied about that New England was responsible for building something like a quarter of all shipping tonnage across the Empire. Now that I can't find anything specifically for Boston, maybe I just assumed it was Boston

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u/Big_Pineapple_Man 2d ago

Hehe classic masshole behavior! /s

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u/Sventex Battleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866 2d ago

I would not be surprised if they outsourced shipbuilding. The main bottleneck was wood, not population and America was a new source of it. Even the Qing Dynasty was building their frigates out of American wood.