ABSTRACT The historiography of British distant-water fishing concentrates on the period prior to 1976 and the third ‘Cod War’ that saw British trawlers excluded from their principal fishing grounds. Little research has hitherto been done on the period afterwards, during which the industry was obliged to prosecute a variety of fisheries, mostly in home waters, on a seasonal basis. This article partially fills that gap by examining its participation in the coastal mackerel fishery, which during the late 1970s and early 1980s offered the most promising opportunity to keep the fleet employed. However, it forced upon trawler firms a different pattern of operations and required participation for the first time in the burgeoning international market for fish. Despite the difficulties of adapting to this new form of fishing, the mackerel fishery kept the distant-water fleet in business until overfishing, tightening restrictions on catches and the finalisation of the Common Fisheries Policy drove a further wave of contraction in the industry during the early 1980s.

ABSTRACT This article examines the identities and mentalités of British sailors that took part in the ‘scientific' voyages of the Royal Navy between 1764 and 1803. The ‘scientific' voyages were a distinct type of late-eighteenth-century naval activity, and this article explores the ways in which the unique socio-cultural experiences of these voyages altered the identities and mentalités of British sailors. In the eighteenth century, sailors travelled almost everywhere in the known world, but not everywhere were their experiences, identities and mentalités the same. Therefore, although this article recognizes that a sailor's rank was a major cause of variation, by incorporating all members of the professional community on board a ship within its definition of ‘sailors', it explores the intersection between general factors - such as rank or social background - and the specific circumstances and experiences of this type of voyage. Fundamentally, it contributes an additional layer of complexity to the current views of naval sailors as a more homogenous entity, by instead demonstrating how the identities and mentalités of a number of sailors, particularly their understandings of status, race, and class, were discernibly influenced, if somewhat temporarily, by their unique socio-cultural experiences of encounter during the ‘scientific’ voyages.

ABSTRACT The navy in France, like several other leading countries in the late nineteenth century, opened a school of higher learning for education of naval officers aspiring to command and staff positions. The School of Advanced Studies came out of a struggle between the ministers and officers supporting the Jeune École and those of a more conventional frame of mind within the naval establishment. The school’s background and rationale, as well as a list of naval officers who attended as students in those early years provide a foundation for further comparative research.

"South Sea Argonaut: James Colnett and the enlargement of the Pacific, 1772–1803." Journal for Maritime Research, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

ABSTRACT Throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy had a peculiar problem: it had too many talented and ambitious officers, all competing for a limited number of command positions. Given this surplus, we might expect that contracting a major physical impairment would automatically disqualify an officer from consideration. Instead, losing a limb in battle became a mark of honor, one that a hero and his friends could use to increase his chances of winning the privilege of additional employment at sea. After the loss of a limb, at least twenty-six such officers reached the rank of Commander or higher through continued service. In addition to discussing the most famous of them all, Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, this article offers information about the lives and careers of several his lesser-known fellow amputee officers. Their stories will be of interest to scholars and students of 18th and 19th-century social history, disability studies, gender studies, art history, and naval history.

ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship between the Customs and the Admiralty as agents of anti-smuggling prevention and policing in British coastal waters during the long-eighteenth century. This relationship was, at first glance, embedded in an ostensible rhetoric of co-operation. In reality, however, the various actors operated in stark competition to each other, occasioned by monetary rewards. It is argued here that such competition was seen as beneficial for the coastal duty by central administrators. Competition was the easiest means to keeping transaction costs – in the form of fraud, collusion, and negligence – low. The agenda of central departments was thus ultimately served best by encouraging rivalry over co-operation. This line of inquiry also serves to complicate typically simplistic representations of smuggling which see the efforts of state actors unanimously pitched against the smugglers. Various central institutions followed their own agenda in the anti-smuggling business, and it was the task of the Customs Board to reconcile such agendas into a coherent effort. The present case offers a suitable field to explore this complexity. It also speaks to wider concerns regarding the eighteenth-century state, such as the nature of inter-departmental rivalry and the role of contractual arrangements between private interests and the state.