War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750-1850 (review)

This is the latest book inspired by that intellectual movement usually called cultural history that in recent years has enlivened the social history of the British seaman. It is not immune from the common weaknesses of the doctoral thesis turned into a first book, notably a tendency to exaggerate the originality of the author's contribution and to ignore or minimise the work of those who have studied the subject before. What is more unusual, from the historian's point of view, is Isaac Land's reluctance to admit that he is writing history at all. In spite of his title and dates, he is at pains to deny that this is anything like maritime or naval history, which he clearly regards as politically reactionary and intellectually sterile. He is dismissive of archival research (my own among others); it is dull work for dull minds, he implies, useful only to apologists for the official point of view. Here we have the Land of cultural theory, hoisting the banner of a radical interpretation of the past in explicit challenge to Linda Colley. She argued that military service united different classes and nations to forge the new identity of Britons; in Land's interpretation, however, naval service tended to exclude the sailor, who was oppressed and brutalised by the representatives of the new Britain. An older generation of naval historians, he claims, considered seamen only as the raw materials of the nation's triumphs: "My emphasis is not on sailors as the nation-state's manpower problem, but rather the reverse: I consider the nation-state itself as the problem that sailors confronted" (10). Land the cultural theorist draws his evidence chiefly from contemporary printed works and interprets them through the lenses of imperialism, race, and gender theory that lie ready on the desks of American scholars. Like so many writers coming from this background, his approach is fundamentally positivist; from the most progressive corner of the modern age, he visits the past to award marks for good or bad behavior. He is less interested in learning what people thought than in teaching them what they ought to have thought. This is Land the missionary, bringing enlightenment to the benighted heathens of the past.

He is also a postmodernist, more interested in the significance of events than whether they actually happened. He is prone to sweeping statements without references: half of all seamen in the navy were pressed; naval officers "proposed that impressment into the Royal Navy was actually a blessing because Jack Tar was unfit to exercise his freedom" (120). Land is also alert to the dangers of the obvious. If a man put down his place of birth as "born at sea" it was not because he had been born at sea, but to make a statement of "cosmopolitanism," or to identify as a "son of the ocean" (24). If a jury acquitted a murderer on grounds of insanity, it was not because the accused was unbalanced but because they approved of the murder. If sailors on leave wore their best clothes, it was not to impress the girls but to defy the authorities-how, he does not explain. He is fascinated by the cultural significance of the "sailor suit" (32), which in reality did not yet exist in an age when naval ratings had no uniform. An entire chapter is devoted to a discussion of gender theory, using as its core material the autobiographies of Hannah Snell and Mary Ann Talbot, who describe their adventures at sea in disguise. Land's difficulty is that Suzanne Stark has proved that both works are entirely fictitious, but they are so attractive to him that he cannot bear to let them go. After a great deal of wriggling on this uncomfortable point he proposes that "arguably, her [Talbot's] observations on gender politics had more bite if her sensational story was founded on nothing" (75). This is postmodernism reduced...