Abstract
J. E. Cookson, in the opening pages of his book The British Armed Nation, 1793–1815, concedes that he spends little time on sailors, but excuses this neglect on the grounds that “the navy does not seem to have impinged on politics, government, and society to nearly the same extent as the land forces, perhaps mainly because of the physical remoteness of seamen in comparison with soldiers and auxiliaries.”1 This is an extraordinary claim. At the height of the struggle with Napoleon, the Royal Navy reached its peak at around 140,000 men.2 To appreciate the scale of that mobilization, in this same time period a town of just 10,000 people was considered a substantial urban conglomeration. Although London—the great exception—was passing the one million mark, just a few other cities in the British Isles had more than 50,000 inhabitants. Nelson’s sailors were drawn from a constellation of occupations —fishing, whaling, and merchant shipping—each of which was a major national industry in its own right. It is hard to see how such a vast mobilization of maritime workers would not “impinge” on society, or would appear in any way “remote” from the daily life of a nation in which the largest cities were, almost without exception, ports. These conscripts and volunteers formed an integral part of a war effort that necessarily centered upon defending islands and maintaining contact between those islands and a far-flung seaborne empire.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
J. E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), v.
Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman, 1200–1860: A Social Survey (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1968), 123.
H. V. Bowen, War and British Society, 1688–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3.
Alan Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society during the Revolution and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990);
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
The best studies of impressment are likely to be local histories for this reason. Keith Mercer, “Sailors and Citizens: Press Gangs and Naval-Civilian Relations in Nova Scotia, 1756–1815,” Journal of Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society 10 (2007): 87–113;
Keith Mercer, “The Murder of Lieutenant Lawry: A Case Study of British Naval Impressment in Newfoundland, 1794,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 21, no. 2 (2006): 255–289.
Anthony G. Brown, “The Nore Mutiny: Sedition or Ships’ Biscuits? A Reappraisal,” Mariner’s Mirror 92, no. 1 (February 2006): 63, for sailor shortage.
Margarette Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy: British Sea Power, 1750–1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 32.
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963);
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); the term in quotation marks frst appeared in
Rosemary Ommer and Gerald Panting, eds., Working Men Who Got Wet (St. Johns: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1980).
See also Colin Howell, and Richard Twomey, eds., Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Acadiensis Press, 1991).
Nicholas Rogers, The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and its Opponents in Georgian Britain (London: Continuum, 2007) came into my hands too late for me to engage with it fully here.
The best-known work is Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (New York: Norton, 1986), 145–204.
I am referring to Robert Colls’s bold reading of Rodger’s work in
John Hutchinson, Susan Reynolds, Anthony D. Smith, Robert Colls, and Krishan Kumar, “Debate on Krishan Kumar’s The Making of English National Identity,” Nations and Nationalism 13, no. 2 (2007): 193.
N. A. M. Rodger, “Stragglers and Deserters from the Royal Navy During the Seven Years’ War,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 57, no. 135 (May 1984): 56–79.
See also Robert R. Dozier, For King, Constitution, and Country: The English Loyalists and the French Revolution (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983);
Ian R. Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections on the British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984);
Clive Emsley, “The Social Impact of the French Wars,” in Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815, edited by H. T. Dickinson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 211–228;
H. T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995).
Samuel Leech, A Voice from the Main Deck (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999), 17.
Stephen Conway, “War and National Identity in the Mid-EighteenthCentury British Isles,” English Historical Review 116, no. 468 (September 2001): 863–893.
The admittedly awkward-sounding term “trans-local feeling of solidarity” does have the merit of approaching this problem with the appropriate humility: Juliane Engelhardt, “Patriotism, Nationalism and Modernity: The Patriotic Societies in the Danish Conglomerate State, 1769–1814,” Nations and Nationalism 13, no. 2 (2007): 206.
See also J. E. Cookson, “The Napoleonic Wars, Military Scotland and Tory Highlandism in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Scottish Historical Review 78 (1999): 60–75;
J. E. Cookson, “Service without Politics? Army, Militia and Volunteers in Britain during the American and French Revolutionary Wars,” War in History 10, no. 4 (2003): 381–397;
Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Mark Philp, ed., Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
Linda Colley, “The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty, and the British Nation, 1760–1820,” Past and Present 102 (February 1984): 94–129.
Robert Fahrner, The Theatre Career of Charles Dibdin the Elder (1745–1814), (New York: Lang, 1989).
Conrad Gill, The Naval Mutinies of 1797 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1913) is still the standard work on these events.
Linda Colley, “Whose Nation?: Class and National Consciousness in Britain, 1750–1830,” Past and Present 113 (November 1986): 97–117;
Linda Colley, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies 31 (October 1992): 309–329;
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
For the continuing debate and response to Colley’s work on nationalism, see Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
Stephen Conway, War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852; London: George G. Harrap, 1956), 628–629.
For material culture that made a fetish of the sailor, see the lavishly illustrated J. Welles Henderson and Rodney P. Carlisle, Marine Art and Antiques: Jack Tar, a Sailor’s Life, 1750–1910 (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1999).
For an account focusing on this phenomenon, broadly defined, in the 1880s and 1890s, see Cynthia Fansler Behrman, Victorian Myths of the Sea (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977).
John Nicol, The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1822), 208–210.
My argument here has affinities with, but goes beyond, E. P. Thompson, “Which Britons?” in E. P. Thompson, Making History: Writings on History and Culture (New York: New Press, 1994), 319–329.
Tyne Mercury, October 23, 1815; Norman McCord, “The Seamen’s Strike of 1815 in North-East England,” Economic History Review 21 (1968): 127–143.
Copyright information
© 2009 Isaac Land
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Land, I. (2009). Introduction. In: War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101067_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101067_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-99950-7
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10106-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)