It is easy to conclude that over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries France did not develop the naval leadership needed to compete effectively with Britain in the eighteenth, and this despite the many outstanding individual exceptions and successes that can be identified along the way. This relative weakness, it seems, was due to a series of deep contradictions within the French navy. Separate Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, for example, presented practical problems of coordination and command, but also quite distinct cultures of leadership: one sea where traditions of noble, military command stretched back centuries and the other where any such traditions had to be invented. A gulf could also be said to have existed between the maritime periphery and the centre in Paris or Versailles, separated not just geographically but also by contrasting maritime and continental strategic outlooks. Similarly, it was difficult to integrate a typically jealous, privileged, and Catholic nobility with the body of active and able seamen in coastal communities, a great many of whom were Huguenots. Thus, the conflict within the naval hierarchy (traditionally said to be divided between the noble officiers rouges and the officiers bleus of the lower orders) was made all the more intractable by the wider confessional division in France. If some of these contradictions now seem less stark than they were once believed to be, they nevertheless still contribute to the perception that the navy suffered from a debilitating imbalance due to the separation of civil and military authority. The history of the navy was dominated by a succession of high-profile and powerful ministers of state which appears to have come at the cost of strong naval leadership and command. The admiralty of France seems irrelevant in comparison. That this was a larger political failure in France is reinforced by the popular image of an ineffective or uninterested monarchy acting as something of an emblem of this wider structural dysfunction. This civil-military division needs to be considered more carefully, however. Far from just the effect of serial mismanagement, it was the product of careful attempts to manage the balance between another, far more relevant, contradiction. Historically, the navy was shaped by its twin functions as an aspect of governance and as a military arm of royal power.

Foreigners, Intermediaries, Dakarois

Dakar attracted many immigrants from origins beyond sub-Saharan Africa— notably, those from Europe, North Africa, and the Levant. During the inter-war period, the Lebanese became the most prominent—and most fiercely debated—immigrant, or “foreign,” community in Dakar, as they established themselves in various parts of West Africa.1 Over those decades, Lebanese Dakarois placed themselves in sectors that made them relevant to other city dwellers’ needs and integral to the fabric of the city's transactional culture. The more locally entrenched the Lebanese became, the sharper became the exter-nal focus on their status as foreigners. It was the very ability of the Lebanese to harness local economic opportunities by serving the African clientele that not only made them integral to the urban sectors of retail and credit but also singled them out to the French. Their direct commerce with African commu-nities generated hostility among French commercial stakeholders toward the Lebanese, especially during a time of global economic downturn.

French business interests pointed most directly and aggressively to the role of Lebanese traders in rural areas, where the peanut trade was of great interest and importance to colonial commerce. However, the role of Lebanese merchants in Dakar was not fully understood or interpreted as predatory in that way. The urban setting presented transactional options that were broad and often hidden. Like Cape Verdean Dakarois, Lebanese came to occupy a position in the colonial capital's transactional culture that was difficult for colonial administrators to classify. They operated in an economic space both French businessmen and administrators had neither truly grasped nor fully controlled, seen as neither European nor African. The state, but most frequently French commercial interests, turned to the notion of the intermediary to define the Lebanese. The concept of the intermediary as applied to the Lebanese in Senegal became infused with negative overtones for French stakeholders and, at times, the colonial state. The concept was a powerful one, as it appealed to the impulse to classify and know populations. In scholarship on the Lebanese in Senegal and other West African sites, the term intermediary has persisted as a descriptor of the community's role.

Residence and Transience

Despite colonial ambitions for a European city stabilized through segregation that privileged whites, the realities of Dakar included a flexible, fluid model of residence. Living in town was broadly conceived. City dwellers of diverse backgrounds adopted of a range of strategies—including varying degrees of mobility—in this regard. Transience became a mode of residence, and as Dakar evolved, transience became more expansively infused into various aspects of urban life. The nature of transience makes it inherently elusive, and locating it in various aspects of city life requires a close look into the spaces city dwellers occupied. In urban settings, the most prominent of those spaces were places of residence, which in the colonial capital also entailed places of work. City dwellers formulated creative residential strategies in which movement and transience were useful. Likewise, Dakar's diverse residential landscape developed many features that catered to mobility and its consequence, transience. The commonplace nature of transience in the city instilled a fragility into housing arrangements, including those that were at places of employment.

Dakar's main civil court cases provide a window into the sorts of considerations and dynamics that often were hidden from view yet integral to urban life in Dakar. As disputes arose, matters surfaced in the Tribunal that revealed how city dwellers formulated their approaches to residence and maintaining working situations. The records show a flexibility in the practices of Dakarois as they navigated their pragmatic arrangements. While the colonial administration attempted to draw clear lines between city dwellers and everyone who belonged in other areas of the territory, Africans in Dakar pursued their own strategies with little need to define urban residence in precise terms. Many considered themselves to be from elsewhere, but this had little bearing on the fact that they lived and worked in the capital as Dakarois.

The civil court cases that Dakarois lodged from the mid-1910s through the mid-1930s reveal a number of traits in the city's transactional culture around housing. First, the arrangements made between property owners and renters were devised as needed and with no parameters at an official level regarding renting. Second, the housing market consistently suffered from shortages.

Transactional Relationships and State Racism1

In colonial Dakar, the intersection of urban African networks and colonial policies concerning African fiscal lives produced a local transactional culture in which informality was central. These dynamics were very apparent in Dakarois’ everyday money management. Colonial administrations in Africa created a system in which most financial resources such as credit were available through official channels over which the state had control and were limited or inaccessible to colonized populations. In Dakar, part of the mechanism of ensuring the exclusivity of the formal economy and the exploitative economic basis of colonialism was an ideological framework that cast Africans as fiscally immature, severely restricting access to funds other than the most necessary. At the height of its colonial rule in West Africa, the French state pursued the rhetoric of African fiscal responsibility to a granular level in its wage policy, marrying a paternalism that proposed a need for tutelage to shape Africans into savvy economic actors with an overt urgency to produce more and more reliable labor.

Colonial policies were fraught with unintended consequences, and as state efforts to keep permanent African settlement in town at bay ultimately encouraged expanding informal settlement, the French administration's efforts to curb African accumulation merely encouraged creative fiscal practices to flourish in colonial Dakar. In the context of racist constraints, which limited formal fiscal management and a wage regime aimed at limiting any form of real earnings, Dakarois focused on quick, adaptable, and flexible strategies of resource access. Social networks were key to such a system. People in the colonial capital forged opportunities with one another, placed in a colonial schema meant to create perpetual need among African city dwellers and retain them in the low-paid labor force. The many transactional court cases individuals brought to the Tribunal reveal that the ability of Dakarois to turn toward other city dwellers as financial resources was a key necessity in the colonial city. Particularly within the context of concerted state efforts to entrench Africans in a form of poverty prior to the end of the Second World War, maximum flexibility among city dwellers in their monetary dealings was necessary and commonplace. The French colonial state, in fact—and contrary to its own goals—helped create a vibrant informal system.

In 1777, the regulating officer for Bristol, Captain William Hamilton, the man responsible for recruiting seafaring men into the navy, ran into a spot of trouble. His lieutenant had impressed a couple of pilots for assisting men to escape the clutches of the press gangs, and the whole river came to a standstill. As Hamilton explained to their lordships at the Admiralty, the pilots and their assistants were responsible for the navigation of all inward and outward boats to Bristol, and he had no choice but to release the men his lieutenant had detained. The pilots, who all lived at Crockerne Pill, a village some five miles from Bristol and two miles from the mouth of the river on the Somersetshire side of the Avon, were ‘absolutely necessary to the trade of this City & have always been considered as such’, he remarked.1 The master of the Society of Merchant Venturers had applied for their discharge and Hamilton had conceded. What else could he do but continue to garner good relations with the merchant elite whose co-operation was always important to the manning of the British navy.

Hamilton was not the only regulating officer to be confronted with this dilemma. In March 1742, the lieutenant of a naval tender impressed another pilot, one James Rumney. He lived in Pill with his wife and four children, and predictably his fellow pilots swung into action, threatening to close the port in protest to his detention. As the town clerk reminded the Admiralty, it was quite irregular to impress pilots on duty. ‘If such Grievances are overlookt, or winkt at’, he continued, the merchants’ ‘Shipps must be kept riding at their anchors, which they shall rather choose than to hazard them loaden down our Channel without the assistance of these so usefull and necessary Conductors.’

Huge tides, blustery winds, treacherous rocks, and shifting quicksand meant that pilots were essential to the commerce of Bristol. John Stuckey remarked that the tides to Bristol ran ‘at a prodigious rate’ with a range of nearly 6 fathoms or 36 feet. Without an experienced pilot and his hobblers, ships could easily be beached on the serpentine Avon, bringing traffic to a standstill. The approach to the Avon estuary was equally treacherous.

The progress of abolition in Bristol presents us with an interesting paradox. Why did the emergence of a movement to abolish the slave trade falter after a promising start in the 1780s? The obvious answer is that Bristol was a slave port and successfully muffled and contained demands for the termination of the trade. While this is undoubtedly true, it is not an entirely sufficient answer. Bristol had many of the qualities that made it a vibrant scene of public debate: a rich assortment of clubs and associations; a newspaper press with at least three weeklies vying for public attention; and a library society and circulating libraries that meant the city had antislavery literature at its fingertips. Following up on James Bradley's research into the dissenting vote and British radicalism, David Richardson, the foremost authority on Bristol's slave trade, has surmised that Bristol had all the conditions that made Manchester and Sheffield important centres of abolition sentiment. And yet Bristol did not emulate the mass petitioning of those towns in the big push for abolition in 1791–2. Along with Liverpool it was mute; encircled by a host of West Country towns that did join in the mass condemnation of the slave trade, including Bath, Trowbridge, Taunton, Gloucester, and Exeter.

In the first seven decades of the eighteenth century, abolition was a non-starter in Bristol. Until 1745, Bristol was the pre-eminent British slave port, profiting from the termination of the Royal Africa Company's monopoly in 1698. Clearing only five ships per annum in the late 1690s, Bristol was sending out over forty a year by 1720 and over forty-five in 1730–2 and 1737–8. Over the course of the long eighteenth century, 1698–1807, Bristol carried 587,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas, of which 486,000, or 82.8 per cent, survived. In its heyday, Bristol merchants were responsible for 40 per cent of all British slaving, and the knock-on effect of this activity was immense, in terms of shipbuilding, manufacture for African markets, marine insurance, and the importation, refining, and selling of tropical products. David Richardson has calculated that in 1790 perhaps 40 per cent of all economic activity in the port was involved one way or another with the slave trade, and at its prime one can reasonably assume it was higher.

Since the first few months of 2020 the world economy has been faced by crises that it had not seen for over seventy years. The sudden progress of the virus COVID-19 throughout most of the world forced an unprecedented economic shut-down, bringing predictions of an economic jolt whose repercussions are likely to be felt for many years to come. So new was the virus that most national governments quickly turned to the scientific community to help them understand the epidemiology. They looked to this community to inform decisions relating to the immediate political questions about ending ‘lock-downs’ and organising life in the post-virus world. They barely dared to make a move without the endorsement of some part of the scientific community. However, it was not long before citizens became restless in many parts of the world, particularly the western world. This was reflected in political backlashes and even violence. It was a stark reminder of an old tension that exists within societies between political authority and the authority of experts.

Barely had the global concern over COVID subsided when another major crisis jolted world politics. In January 2022 increasingly aggressive displays of Russian military power on the borders of Ukraine sent tremors through the world's diplomatic channels. While Russian messaging was ambiguous in so far as what Russian grievances actually were and what would satisfy the Kremlin, what was not in question was the expert power of the Russian armed forces. On conspicuous display was the modern hardware and the new tactical organisation of an armed force that had been substantially reformed since 2008. It was believed that if Russia decided to launch a large-scale invasion of Ukraine it would be a short, one-sided affair.

In the event the invasion of 24 February was a dismal failure. The expertise in the operational art and the technological and tactical changes supposed to have radically altered the effectiveness of the Russian military proved illusory. On the ground, in the air, and at sea the expertise of Russian forces was far more limited in combat than initially anticipated. This came only six months after the withdrawal of Allied forces from Afghanistan had also shown that highly developed, expensive military expertise could not prevent humiliation and disaster. In the world of the military, as in civil society, the authority of the experts was undermined.

Henry Cruger is usually remembered as Edmund Burke's radical sidekick, his colleague as MP for Bristol from 1774 to 1780, a tumultuous half-decade when Britain went to war with its American colonies. Although he had stronger links with Bristol than Burke – he had been a common councilman since 1766 and became an alderman in 17821 – it has always been Burke who has stolen the limelight. This has been snobbery on Bristol's part; the pleasure of being represented by a well-known national politician and writer. In the centre of Bristol to this day stands a statue of Burke. Cruger's memory is tucked away on a small plaque off Park Street where the merchant-politician once lived.

The plaque reveals several things. Cruger had a long life, dying at the age of 87 in 1827. He was an American, but lived for thirty-three years in Bristol, becoming mayor of Bristol in 1781 and joining the elite Society of Merchant Venturers that dominated the commercial and political life of the city. Henry Cruger was also a transatlantic figure. He was one of three American-born members to sit in eighteenth-century British parliaments; he actually contested four elections and sat twice for Bristol, in 1774 and again in 1784. But in April 1790, two months before the next general election, when parliament was still in session, he left for New York and two years later became a state senator there. That made him rather unique, especially as objections were raised to his American heritage when he ran in Bristol in 1784, and to his British links when he ran in New York.

Cruger's decision to return to New York was related to the impact of the American war on his economic circumstances, but there is no doubting the strength of his roots there. He hailed from a merchant dynasty that had prospered in New York and was active in its politics. His grandfather Jan Cruger, very likely of Dutch descent, arrived in New York in 1696 and established a shipping business in association with Onzeel Van Swieton. The partnership survived some early legal challenges including one from Abraham De Peyster, a leading figure in New York.

On the 12 July 1779, the merchant James Caton was arrested at the Bristol Exchange by Lieutenant Richard Lane of the press gang. Merchants protested at his abrupt detention, especially his friend, Paul Farr, who was told to back off, otherwise Lane ‘would shoot him with his pistol’. Caton was whisked away to a lock-up in Prince Street, a ‘nasty stinking room’ in which the chimney place was used as a common latrine. Lane derisively offered Caton a shilling for victuals, ordered the sentry to bolt the door, and refused to allow any of his friends to consult with him. When the regulating officer, Captain William Hamilton arrived, Caton demanded to know the reason for his arrest and again insisted he meet with his friends to settle his affairs. Hamilton retorted that he was ‘fit to serve the king’ and would not see any of his friends or associates until he was aboard the tender at Kingroad. He also refused Caton's request to see the mayor of the city, Sir John Durbin, remarking that ‘he has no business with it’. The two lieutenants of the rendezvous, Richard Lane and William Springhorpe, were equally uncooperative, and at 6p.m. Caton was hustled onto an open boat at the Gibb and taken seven miles down the river Avon to Kingroad. There Paul Farr was denied access to his friend, but he tried again the following morning along with Thomas Mullett and a man called Davis. Despite promises that they might finally talk with Caton, they were ‘peremptorily refused admittance’. The words suggest they were never allowed on board the tender.

The Caton affair engaged ‘the conversation of all ranks of people’ in Bristol and inevitably prompted some pressing questions. Why was a merchant like James Caton arrested at the Exchange? Why was he denied an audience with the mayor and his friends? The answer to the first question was that Hamilton believed there were plausible grounds for impressing Caton because he was someone who had been in the merchant marine. He was a former captain who had commanded Bristol ships for leading Bristol merchants, very possibly in the Mediterranean trade in the mid-1750s, but also in the American trades.

This book has not been about strategy, but about the influence navies have exerted upon the strategy-making bodies in different societies. Navies cannot exist without the explicit support of political authorities, and those authorities rely upon their naval experts to help them make decisions to ensure naval power fits into national objectives. It is a symbiotic relationship that is common to almost all experts and their political masters in the modern world. In the twenty-first century the need for political authorities to understand naval power remains as important as ever, but, as the often repeated fears of ‘sea-blindness’ demonstrates, it is a difficult task. What these essays show is that the problems are not new. They have existed at least from the late sixteenth century when institutionalised navies imposed long-term fiscal, economic and political demands on societies’ leaders. The complex demands placed upon those leaders by other actors influenced how they understood their navies and what they demanded of naval power was also highly variable.

Even in strongly maritime societies, navies are just one of many organisations and groupings that influence and inform political and defence policy decision-making. Defence demands have to be satisfied or negotiated among many other pressures facing modern industrialised societies. Today, when navies are an element within a broad ‘defence’ proposition, that is expanding from the other traditional domains of land and air to space and cyber, and the message is clearly that the effectiveness of defence will depend on the joint contribution of all these domains, navies have, as always, to compete to explain and demonstrate their place within this joint endeavour. The new digital media, in some ways, makes it easier, but in others it creates an even bigger wall of competing ‘noise’.

On the other side of the equation, for societies to profit from sea power it requires an understanding and a willingness to accept the technical, social, and financial costs over a long period. Political leaders were not faced with the same defence problem, re-presented continually over space and time. What the problems are and how they are presented, varies according to the social, cultural, economic, and political circumstances.