Overview

The British Royal Navy of the French Wars (1793–1815) is an enduring national symbol, but we often overlook the tens of thousands of foreign seamen who contributed to its operations. Foreign Jack Tars presents the first in-depth study of their employment in the Navy during this crucial period. Based on sources from across Britain, Europe, and the US, and blending quantitative, social, cultural, economic, and legal history, it challenges the very notions of 'Britishness' and 'foreignness'. The need for manpower during wartime meant that naval recruitment regularly bypassed cultural prejudice, and even legal status. Temporarily outstripped by practical considerations, these categories thus revealed their artificiality. The Navy was not simply an employer in the British maritime market, but a nodal point of global mobility. Exposing the inescapable transnational dimensions of a quintessentially national institution, the book highlights the instability of national boundaries, and the compromises and contradictions underlying the power of modern states.

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9781009199810

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Reviews

'Sara Caputo's Foreign Jack Tars is an impressive debut by a gifted young historian. Based on a heroic trawl of the archives, her study combines clear and concise writing with a command of quantitative methods. It also marries transnational and national history, revealing that the Royal Navy, the focus of much national pride and widely perceived as a symbol of Britishness, in fact relied to a significant extent on foreign manpower.' Stephen Conway, University College London 'This book shows the signal importance of foreign sailors to the British Navy in the Age of Revolutions, while offering original interpretations of wartime manning policies, the impressment debates, race and ethnicity on the ships, and the meaning of national belonging. This is one of the best transnational histories I have read.' Margaret R. Hunt, Uppsala University 'In this very fine book about foreign seamen in the British Navy during the European wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Sara Caputo examines their demographic characteristics, their participation in naval enterprises, their racial, national, linguistic, and religious differences, and their personal experiences in the Navy. … her book is germane to the current differences between attitudinal and structural/conjunctural approaches to the study of racial and ethnic inequalities. You do not have to be a historian to profit from reading it.' Sam Clark, International Journal of Military History and Historiography 'This book should mark the beginning of a new era in the history of the lower deck. … It is a sign of a quality work of scholarship that it leaves the reader with an exciting new research agenda.' Evan Wilson, International Journal of Maritime History

Author Information

Sara Caputo is Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, and Research Fellow at Magdalene College. Her work has won the Prince Consort and Thirlwall Prize and Seeley Medal for a historical doctoral thesis completed at Cambridge, and the British Commission for Maritime History Prize for best UK thesis on maritime history. She has also been awarded the international Ideas Prize, the Sir Julian Corbett Prize in Modern Naval History, and the Scottish History Society Rosebery Prize. She has published several articles on maritime social and cultural history, and held visiting fellowships at various institutions in Britain, Germany, and the US.

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