Denver Brunsman. The Evil Necessity

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Britain attained an unprecedented degree of maritime mastery, developing Europe's most powerful navy while expanding its merchant marine across its burgeoning empire. But as Denver Brunsman illustrates in this wide-ranging and enlightening study, this seaborne success came at a great human cost, as perhaps a quarter of a million men—after slaves, the largest group of forced laborers in the British Empire—were forcibly impressed into naval service in Britain's nearly perpetual wars. Deploying an impressive set of widely varied sources, Brunsman explores how “cultures of impressment” (p. 13) varied across the empire, and how Britons attempted to square their claim to be building an “empire of liberty” (p. 35) with the widespread use of coerced maritime labor. While impressment had existed in England from the late medieval period, it became crucial to the manning of the navy in the late seventeenth century, when imperial needs expanded at the same time that merchant seafaring became a significantly more attractive option to the nation's limited population of sailors. Imperial administrators upheld a “blue water” policy that stationed navy ships around the globe, but at the same time were adamant that Atlantic commerce, the nation's lifeblood, must continue even in wartime. But not any man would do for a sailor, and among Brunsman's successes in this monograph is his careful deconstruction of the persistent myth that press gangs in both Britain and its colonies specifically targeted the poor and other perceived undesirables, as a sort of class- and ethnicity-based warfare. In reality, it was “able seamen,” also known as “topmen” (p. 53), whom the gangs sought, seizing them off the streets of seaports, from taverns and inns, and, most gallingly for their victims, literally off the decks of merchant ships approaching their home ports. As Brunsman points out, press gangs engendered tremendous popular hatred—from mariners, their families, and the general public—“simply by fulfilling their primary charge of entering qualified seamen into the navy” (p. 83).

Ancient history · Archaeology · Economic history · Empire · Globe · Mutiny · Navy · Political science · Population · Quarter (Canadian coin) · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Demography · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies