Naval Impressment Research Articles

Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail

Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail

“Inter arma enim silent leges?”: Impressment and the Scottish Courts in the Later Eighteenth Century

This article examines legal pleadings in Scottish cases involving naval impressment in the period 1778-1795. The Session Papers provide a rich source of both law and fact, and these cases, as well as reflecting on Admiralty practice across Britain, demonstrate reliance by counsel on English sources – including pre-Union statutes – alongside Scots law. Impressment sparked constitutional debate concerning the relationship between the crown prerogative and the liberty of the subject, while the detail of the cases reveals much of the social context behind the practice of impressing men to serve the crown.

World Citizenship in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Juvenilia

World Citizenship in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Juvenilia

Poseidon's Curse: British Naval Impressment and Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution

Poseidon's Curse: British Naval Impressment and Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Denver Brunsman; Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution by Christopher P. Magra

<i>The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World</i> by Denver Brunsman; <i>Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution</i> by Christopher P. Magra

Sources and methods in the British impressment debate

British naval impressment has been the subject of debate for centuries. In the 18th century, it produced political debates and resistance from maritime communities, and it was generally disliked by naval officers tasked with pressing men into naval service. After the effective end of the practice in 1815, it was hotly debated in parliament and finally abolished in the mid-19th century. Since then, impressment has been the topic of a scholarly debate that has become increasingly active over the last two decades. In the 21st century, impressment matters for its political and moral implications. The modern debate has, regrettably, broken down and entrenched historians into camps where the different sides have begun to talk past one another, rather than examining how different approaches to the subject actually fit together. This article examines the current state of the debate and offers a path forward that illustrates that none of the scholarly approaches are mutually exclusive. Rather, they can be combined to produce a greater historical understanding of the 18th-century Atlantic world.

British impressment and its discontents

This article restates the argument that naval impressment was a contentious issue in the eighteenth century. It was subject to legal challenges during the American War of Independence. It engendered mutinies and affrays and a growing volume of litigation as the century progressed. The notion that impressment was insignificant is based on an atypical set of years during which the Admiralty strove to make naval recruitment as seamless as possible by allowing regulating officers in the ports to volunteer men who might otherwise have been impressed. The Admiralty had no wish to make impressment a contentious issue in the volatile political climate of the 1790s. It was aided in this endeavour by the circumstance of dearth and destitution, and the willingness of local authorities to augment existing bounties. As the example of the Sea Fencibles subsequently revealed, volunteering was an imperfect index of patriotic endeavour, despite claims to the contrary.

Christopher P. Magra. Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution.

Christopher P. Magra. Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution.

Book Review: Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and the Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution

Book Review: Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and the Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution

Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and the Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution by Christopher P. Magra

Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and the Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution by Christopher P. Magra

An Empire of Liberty's Evil Necessity: Naval Impressment and the Nature of the Eighteenth-Century British Empire

A review of Denver Brunsman's The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

Review of 'Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution'

Review of 'Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution'

Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas

With this collection of eight essays (plus an introduction and coda), the editors Nicole N. Aljoe and Ian Finseth seek to reconceptualize the slave narrative genre in multiple ways—by extending its periodization back to the early eighteenth century, incorporating transnational and transcultural narratives, and including texts not actually written by enslaved people. Aljoe and Finseth make a compelling case to expand the traditional slave narrative canon to include lesser-known works that do not always adhere strictly to convention. Those narratives reveal meaningful experiences among black actors and authors operating within the Atlantic world during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The essays in this volume demonstrate that in this time period individuals of African descent could assume a host of identities over their lifetimes, often due to voluntary or involuntary transnational geographic movement. The cohort of black men that José Guadalupe Ortega discusses shifted from slaves terrorized by Bahamian masters to critical agents in the transformation of the Cuban sugar economy to litigants who used Spanish law to gain their freedom. As Keith Michael Green highlights, Briton Hammon maintained multiple identities representing various states of unfreedom common in the Americas during the eighteenth century—slavery, naval impressment, captivity by American Indians, incarceration, and indentured servitude. The collection reveals a population of black men who were intensely mobile, shifting from one culture, one form of captivity, or one economic state to another, sometimes multiple times during their lives.

The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Denver Brunsman

The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Denver Brunsman

Collective Action when Needed: The Kingston Chamber of Commerce in Jamaica, 1778–85

A chamber of commerce in Kingston was a response to defects in local projections of the British imperial state. It met immediate needs to organise naval convoys and liaise with the local naval commander in the face of breakdown of effective government resulting from conflicts between Governor John Dalling and Jamaica's Assembly. The efforts of collective action were mitigated by being shared across a range of activities that the chamber either developed or collaborated in providing: convoys, negotiations over naval impressment, a coffee room, help with credit and specie, marine insurance and response to the disastrous hurricane of October 1780. The chamber is a significant illustration of the growing development of voluntary formal rules-based business interest representation in the eighteenth-century British Empire. Although short-lived, it is important as an early example of chamber bodies that later helped the management of empire and covered all its major cities. It shows these locally based bodies seeking new opportunities to represent commercial interests directly, rather than through traditional intermediaries, and beginning to fill gaps to support the development of trade.

The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, by Denver Brunsman

The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, by Denver Brunsman

Denver Brunsman. The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.

Denver Brunsman. The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.

The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Denver Brunsman (review)

The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Denver Brunsman (review)

The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World