This chapter considers the financial impact of war on British shipping during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It attempts to discern the number of merchant ship losses during the Anglo-Spanish War, Anglo-French War, Seven Years’ War, and the Dutch Wars by scrutinising Admiralty records of loss estimates. It examines privateering activity; wartime insurance rates; the rise in seafaring wages; naval impressment; the disruption to trade cycles; the hiring of ships by the government; and a contrast of tonnage rates between periods of peace and war to determine the financial cost of war to the shipping industry. It concludes that though war made many demands of the merchant shipping industry, merchants and shipowners knew that successful campaigns would lead to the expansion of a British shipping monopoly, and so deemed war financially worthwhile in the long run.