This article compares the shipbuilding industry of the Malabar Coast and the Swedish realm s territories of Finland from 1500 to 1700. Instead of seeing shipbuilding as a narrowly technological craft, or ships as tools of commerce and warfare, it sees the construction of ships as a maritime knowledge system: a historically constituted assemblage of environmental intelligence, material selection, artisanal skill, labour organisation, navigational experience, commercial capital, administrative regulation, and coercive power. Malabar and Swedish Finland were in different maritime regions, both with very different environmental and political characteristics.The latter was a part of a monsoon-dominated Indian Ocean trade network supported by Asian merchant communities, hardwood forests, port cities, and long maritime histories. The latter constituted the eastern part of the Swedish composite state and was involved in a Baltic economy that was organized around forests, tar production, archipelagic navigation, seasonal ice, coastal transport, and growing naval administration. But both areas show that maritime power was built up on land, as well as at sea. Ships originated in forests, river systems, labouring communities, workshops, credit networks, and political institutions. These dispersed systems of knowledge and resources were sought after by Portuguese and Dutch interventions in Malabar and by Swedish naval expansion in the Baltic. The article suggests that early modern maritime expansion was not as much about individual innovations as it was about the ability to coordinate the diverse modes of practical knowledge within institutions, using a common analytical lens of timber, tar, shipyards, labour, technological encounter, capital, warfare, and forced mobility. The comparison challenges Eurocentric narratives on technological progress and places shipbuilding at the nexus of environmental history, history of science, labour history, maritime archaeology and global history.