This wonderfully written and expertly researched book from Steven Pfaff and Michael Hechter is an example of historical sociology at its very best. It addresses an important question that is relevant beyond the specific context at hand: how do we comparatively understand why rebellions against authority break out here and not there? It is empirically rigorous by clearly defining the universe of cases—mutinies in the British Royal Navy from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—and by combining and triangulating between different methods. These include narrative exploration of particular cases of mutiny as well as the statistical analysis of a variety of original datasets: on the organizational structure and governance practices on mutinous and non-mutinous ships; the grievances articulated by sailors and the personal characteristics of those who led or joined an uprising; the characteristics of ships that stuck to and those that abandoned a multi-ship mutiny; the evolution of corporal punishment over time; and the naval court decisions reached on individual mutineers.
The book offers an empirically saturated, theoretically complex and yet reasonably parsimonious answer to the core question it poses. In a nutshell, the authors, both very accomplished and well-respected students of political insurgency and rebellion, argue that mutinies happened where customary expectations regarding seamen’s living standards and proper treatment by superiors were violated routinely and where, in addition, a particularly egregious episode of such violations led the seaman to overthrow a ship’s command. Most of these grievances resulted from bad governance by the officer corps: importantly, their excessive use of corporal punishments (usually in the form of public flogging with leather leashes); the failure to maintain a healthy environment on board through effective quarantining of sick seamen; problems with the provision of water, food, and rum; and withheld payments or broken promises to delist.
Grievances caused by bad governance need to combine, however, with the seamen’s ability to organize a rebellion and, even more importantly, to sustain it. Somewhat surprisingly, though, the usual social capital explanations do not hold here—perhaps the consequence of the particular social organization of ships, where tightly knit crews can function both as a tool of social control helpful in detecting insurrectionary moods early on as well as the organizational backbone of mutiny. Shifting to the question of individual participation in mutinies as ringleaders or as common supporters, dense ties to other seamen from previous service, however, combine with personal grievances (such as having experienced corporal punishment recently or serving involuntarily in the navy) to make seamen more rebellious. Sustaining a rebellion—meaning avoiding individuals or whole ships jumping the cause and shifting sides—is mostly a matter of control, they find, including the ability to control what information about alternative courses of action (such as accepting a royal pardon) were made available to ordinary mutineers. In short, the authors offer a moral-economy argument, well known from the historiography of the British working class and subsequently applied to peasant communities from around the world, and modify and enrich it with a variety of arguments of a more organizational nature centered on the idea of social control.
This argument unfolds in a more or less systematic way over the course of the chapters. Each is introduced with a detailed narrative of a mutiny. These sections are all written in superb prose and draw the reader into the lived everyday worlds of navy ships in the age of sail—true gems of historiographical story telling. The first chapter sets the stage, summarizes the argument, relates it to the larger literature on protest and rebellion, and gives an overview of the book. The second chapter offers a fascinating tour through the social organization of a typical ship—the military hierarchy, the social boundaries between crew members of various skill levels, the spatial layout of the ships, and so forth. It sets the stage for understanding the more detailed arguments of how social organization and control affected rebellions on ships.
The third chapter details exactly this dynamic: how the internal hierarchy among commoners (led by petty officers and able seamen), the dense ties of solidarity woven into everyday routines of cooperation and codependence, and the commitment devices such as oath-taking made it possible for seamen to overcome the massive deterrents to rising up in mutiny—the prospect of facing a court martial and its very likely outcome of being hanged. The fourth chapter is perhaps the core of the book (previously published as an article in the American Sociological Review), as it analyzes some of the impressive datasets that the authors have assembled, toiling through detailed information on hundreds of ships and individual seamen. It supports the main arguments of the book in perhaps the most straightforward way. Chapter 5 is dedicated to an analysis of two mass mutinies in 1797, and to understanding why one soon collapsed while the other was sustained and largely victorious, thus allowing the authors to zoom in on some of the more specific processes at work. Chapter 6 moves beyond the general framework of the book’s main argument to understand the macropolitical and macrohistorical forces that influence discipline and insurrection on British ships. It shows how the threat of insurrection—sparked by the French revolution—led British naval officers to resort to corporal punishment much more frequently than before, because they feared that insubordination of seamen would eventually undercut the estate order of British society and thus their own social standing. The seventh chapter asks if mutinies were effective in improving the welfare of seamen. Overall, it seems that they did improve the conditions of employment over time, if only in a piecemeal fashion and mostly due to the mass mutinies of 1797 mentioned above. The final chapter concludes and asks interesting questions about the scope conditions that may or may not make mutinies in the Royal Navy a special case compared with other cases of rebellion.
Overall, the achievement of the book—an in-depth understanding of the dynamics of rebellion in a specific social and historical setting—are remarkable and put the book at the very top of my list of recommended readings for students of rebellion, protest, or insurrection. The insights, especially into how grievances spark rebellion, are empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated. The specificity of the case of the Royal Navy obviously also indicates the limits of its generalizability, some of which the authors discuss in the concluding chapter: how far does the logic of insurrection uncovered by the authors apply to cases where superiors have less than total control over subordinates—in the form of the threat of legally unlimited and arbitrary corporal punishment, not unlike under slavery—or in less closely knit communities? After all, ships rarely comprised more than 700 individuals who were crammed together onto a tight space and made codependent on each other. Similarly, how might these dynamics operate under less formalized social hierarchies—with a noble officer corps formally in charge of commoners of often very low social status? Or, remaining within the limits of the time period and the specific organization that the authors are interested in, what made British navy ships less mutinous, on average, compared with their French or Spanish counterparts, and what was it about the way British ships were organized that secured the supremacy of Britain at sea and thus its dominance in world politics for roughly two hundred years?
