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1 O n July 1, 1666, the great English diarist and naval administrator Samuel Pepys went to bed with a lot on his mind. He had spent that day, like so many during his tenure in the navy as Clerk of the Acts (1660–73) and Admiralty Secretary (1673–79, 1684–89), tending to the problems of impressed sailors.Pepys went to the Tower of London , where captured seamen were then kept, multiple times until finally at midnight he oversaw the last of them being sent down the River Thames to join awaiting navy warships. “Lord, how some poor women did cry,” Pepys recorded in his diary,“and in my life I never did see such natural expression of passion as I did here—in some women’s bewailing themselfs, and running to every parcel of men that were brought,one after another,to look for their husbands , and wept over every vessel that went off, thinking they might be there, and looking after the ship as far as ever they could by moone-light.”Pepys confided that the whole affair “grieved me to the heart”and was “a great tyranny.” Yet, having finished his work, he bade the lieutenant of the Tower good night, went home, and ended his diary entry as he did every other: “and to bed.”1 HowwellPepyssleptthatnightwecanonlyguess,buthewasfarfromthelast of England’s naval administrators for whom impressment weighed heavily on his conscience.For almost the next century and a half,until the practice ended after the Napoleonic Wars in 1815,impressment would plague sailors and their loved ones in the British Empire, destabilize Atlantic seaport communities, and challenge the reputation of Britain’s self-proclaimed “empire of liberty.” Within this long history, Pepys’s tenure represented a period of transition . By his retirement in 1689, the navy had started to expand impressment from a seasonal, limited operation to a continual practice in wartime. It took place throughout the Atlantic and claimed tens of thousands of sailors who remained in the service until they died, escaped, or a war ended—whichever came first.Given Pepys’s strong feelings against impressment (he admitted in a letter that he was “ashamed”of the practice) and his penchant for naval reform (on his watch the Royal Navy became a professional service),one might expect that he would have prevented the seizing of sailors on a massive scale. In this respect, however, his mix of horror and resignation toward the institution in his diary and other writings also anticipated later developments: Even among its most ardent supporters,impressment was always seen as a compromise,an evil necessity that allowed Britain to defend its nation and empire.2 Introduction 2 | T h e E v i l N e c e s s i t y This book’s focus begins where Pepys’s career ended. What distinguished impressment after 1688 was its expanded Atlantic and imperial contexts. Between 1688 and 1815,a period known to historians as the long eighteenth century ,Britain fought a series of wars against France,and often Spain,for control of Europe and colonial territories around the globe. Where naval actions in the Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652–54,1665–67,1672–74) and earlier conflicts were concentrated in the northern European seas, naval warfare beginning with the wars of William III and Anne (1688–97, 1702–13) also occurred in the waters of the Caribbean, North America, the Mediterranean, and beyond. At the same time, England was in the midst of an unprecedented overseas commercial expansion. The joint demands of war and trade put enormous pressure on its maritime labor market. The British state answered the manning needs of its navy in wartime by impressing, or forcing, the empire’s seafaring subjects into service.3 Impressment was more than a stopgap measure to keep the Royal Navy afloat: It was a fundamental component of Britain’s early imperial success. Press gangs, consisting of a navy officer backed by sailors and occasionally local toughs,used violence or the threat of violence to supply the skilled manpower necessary to establish and maintain British naval supremacy.Moreover, the practice helped to unite Britain and its Atlantic colonial territories in a common system of maritime defense unmatched by any other European empire .The purpose of impressment was not to target the idle,poor,and criminal elements within British society but rather the most skilled Atlantic seafarers. These elite sailors lacked incentive to join the navy because they could earn far higher...

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