Matthew Taylor Raffety. The Republic Afloat

In The Republic Afloat: Law, Honor, and Citizenship in Maritime America, Matthew Taylor Raffety successfully fuses legal and social history to provide fascinating new insight into the early American republic’s substantial maritime footprint. As the author reminds us, the Constitution granted the federal government exclusive jurisdiction over admiralty issues, meaning that from the founding through the antebellum period, seafarers maintained a closer relationship to the nation than did any other class of worker. Federal regulations governed the lives of sailors, and federal courts proved the primary source of redress for mariners in ways that most other citizens at the time never experienced. And yet, court records, until now, remained a relatively untapped resource for maritime historians. Working mostly out of the archives of the Southern District of New York (which encompassed New York City, the country’s busiest port), Raffety assembles a narrative that shows how law framed the experience of seamen in a number of ways. Rather than a transnational lumpenproletariat, relatively disconnected from shoreside concerns, seafarers are positioned here as actively connected to the U.S., the growth of nationalistic culture, and the development of federal institutions.

Citizenship · Constitution · Federal jurisdiction · Government (linguistics) · Honor · Jurisdiction · Political science · Redress · Sociology · The Republic · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies