Readers of this journal will hardly be surprised to learn that the early modern maritime labor market was thoroughly international, and that, even in the midst of war, large numbers of men served onboard ships that flew flags other than their own. What may, however, come as a surprise is that, until now, no one has seriously investigated how Britain's eighteenth-century Royal Navy, the world's single-largest employer of maritime labor, saw these men, or dealt with the variety of problems their presence inevitably provoked. It is Sara Caputo's immense contribution to have filled that gaping historiographical hole with Foreign Jack Tars.
The book is divided into three parts. Part One (“The State”), composed of two chapters, opens by establishing just how many foreigners likely served in the Royal Navy around 1800, and what there might be to learn about their demographic profiles. With the help of a carefully constructed sample of 4,392 men who served on nine warships scattered across the globe at different periods of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Caputo shows that the overall proportion of foreign-born men amounted to approximately fourteen per cent, though with significant growth over time, and large variations between individual ships. While this does not deviate widely from previous estimates, her discovery that more than half of these men came from continental Europe rather than from Britain's current or former imperial possessions, and that their foreign origin had no impact on their placement within the ship's hierarchy below the petty officer level, are genuinely new revelations.
This finding points to the core argument of the book as a whole: the Royal Navy was obviously not an organization committed to contemporary corporate values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, but, in its feverish pursuit of scarce manpower and the most efficient deployment of all available “hands”, it cared far less about a man's origin than his ability to contribute to the war effort. As the second chapter in Part One demonstrates, this was also in line with British legal traditions, which, in contrast to the situation in many other European states, imposed few disadvantages on foreigners, and none that really mattered to impoverished working-class mariners. If anything, they had an advantage over their native-born colleagues in not being subject to coerced naval recruitment (impressment), or at least to have representatives of their home states petition on their behalf when they found themselves illegally pressed, which was a common occurrence. On the whole, Caputo concludes, a foreign sailor's formal legal status mattered relatively little, either to the navy, or to his own experience of service.
The same largely holds true for other markers of foreignness, which is the focus of the four chapters in Part Two (“The Nation”). Perhaps surprisingly, language was mostly not an issue. Professional experience and training, coupled with the need for only a relatively limited technical vocabulary, were enough to overcome most linguistic difficulties, at least when it came to a man's ability to fulfill his shipboard duties. The same was largely true for religion: despite being an arm of the Anglican state, the navy did not care about a man's religious beliefs very much, and it was loath to impose any kind of requirement on his spiritual life that might interfere with its efforts to recruit him as a worker.
Things were not very different when it came to race, ethnicity, and regional origin. For example, while many officers keenly dabbled in contemporary racial science that suggested a link between a man's origin, his relative immunity to certain diseases that seemed to ravage European sailors on stations abroad, and his ability to work hard in extreme climates, their primary interest was once again with the most efficient exploitation of all available manpower, whatever its race or origin. Indeed, Caputo emphasizes that the specific nature of prevailing racial stereotypes actually helped create a more open shipboard society, in that they tended to consider group characteristics primarily as products of their environment, rather than to be inherent in a person's physical make-up. That, as Caputo shows, in turn, allowed naval officers to indulge in all kinds of racial stereotypes that contrasted the supposedly feckless Mediterranean seaman with his altogether more admirable counterpart from the North Sea, without, however, having to forgo the opportunity to recruit the former, as any unfortunate trait was conveniently expected to disappear as men found themselves in the more temperate climes of northern Europe, and in the more capable hands of the British officer corps.
The navy's apparent disinterest in racial distinctions has sometimes led historians to overemphasize the degree to which it served as a refuge for men escaping from slavery, or the threat of enslavement. But Caputo is admirably clear in emphasizing that the navy was not color-blind, let alone anti-racist. On the contrary, its warships played a key role in protecting and extending Britain's heavy economic and geopolitical reliance on racial slavery, and its elite personnel certainly shared many of the confused ideas about race, civilization, and environmental determinism that marked contemporary European discourse on human difference. And yet, the same dehumanizing impulse that allowed enslavers to reduce people of African descent to commodified units of labor power also encouraged naval officers to treat sailors of whatever origin as nothing more than interchangeable cogs, all equally able to put their skills and muscle power to work onboard ship. For some mariners of African descent, that cold-hearted calculus unquestionably turned the Royal Navy's warships into small spaces of freedom that stood in sharp contrast to the fundamentally racist world through which they sailed.
It is, however, difficult to know to what extent this really was experienced as such, for the book mostly avoids the perspective of the foreign sailor himself. This remains true even in the final section, Part Three (“Displacement”), where the focus turns away from how foreigners were viewed in the navy to the question of what may have brought them to work there in the first place. Caputo seeks to answer the question primarily through a reconceptualization that hopes to break with the stale dichotomy between impressment and volunteering that dominates debates on naval manning. She does so by foregrounding those men whose path into the navy was neither clearly coerced nor really freely chosen, such as prisoners of war, refugees, and other displaced persons, and by suggesting that, while their numbers may have been relatively modest by comparison, the ambiguous nature of their experience was perhaps more common than is usually assumed.
Foreign Jack Tars is clearly a major contribution to British naval historiography. Its astonishingly multilingual and deep archival research alone justify the long string of awards with which the underlying doctoral dissertation and breakaway articles have already been honored. Its carefully documented argument that even relatively large numbers of foreigners working in that supposedly most British of British institutions – Nelson's navy! – was not considered much of an issue at all by anyone involved is refreshing to read in an era of violent, even murderous state-sanctioned xenophobia. But is it entirely true? For reasons that remain unclear, Caputo simply ignores the one category of foreign sailor that most obviously complicates her core argument: the Irish, who filled the navy's lower decks by the tens of thousands. Not only, as her own data reveals, were they unique among foreign sailors in being treated as a kind of service-internal underclass, but many of them explicitly embraced forms of anti-English Catholicism and anti-monarchical republicanism that led them to sympathize and sometimes collaborate with the failed attempt to start an Irish war for independence in 1798. The officer corps at the time certainly considered their heavy reliance on such a potentially disloyal – if not openly hostile – population a serious issue, and it is odd that Caputo does not.
In her attempt to show how little a man's foreign status mattered, Caputo seems eager to distinguish herself from those historians (the present author included) who have argued that the multinational nature of the eighteenth-century maritime working class had a significant impact on how the age of revolution unfolded across the Atlantic world, onboard ship and on shore. Ignoring the Irish, and more broadly any political affiliations that may have marked a man as alien to the British nation, certainly makes that much easier to accomplish. However, given the considerable contributions of this book, and its potential to have delivered a definite statement on its chosen topic, it is impossible not to feel that the author has missed an important opportunity by simply sidestepping this complication. This does not detract from any of the remarkable insights the book delivers, but it does mean that a more complete synthesis remains to be written.
