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51 N aval impressment has never received the credit it deserves for the success of the early British Empire.The practice came under attack during the eighteenth century not simply by philosophes, political commentators, and early humanitarians but by British statesmen, including Admiralty officials. Rather than complain that impressment was too tyrannical, these officials argued that it was not effective enough at producing seamen. In February 1741, during the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–43), an authority no less than the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Charles Wager, complained about impressment to his leading admiral, Edward Vernon. “We have now 100 of his Majesty’s ships of all sorts,small and great,out of England, which we cannot recall, and must have a fleet to defend us at home, as well as to cruise upon our enemies, and have convoys for our trade which will take up many ships,” Wager wrote. “You know how difficult it has always been to get men, having the worst way of getting them of any nation in the world, and we have many wise men that are willing to take that from us.” At the time, a number of factors contributed to the navy’s manning difficulties, including the aftershocks of Britain’s worst typhus epidemic of the eighteenth century and the ravaging of Vernon’s fleet by tropical diseases in the Caribbean. As Wager alluded, even amidst this crisis, the government could not persuade its opponents in Parliament to expand the state’s control over Britain’s seafaring labor market. Britain was left to fight the remainder of its eighteenth-century wars raising sailors one by one, with the force of cudgels, while its enemies used mass conscription schemes supported by protomodern bureaucracies.1 Wager and his contemporaries never fully appreciated how well Britain’s antiquated naval manning system actually performed.The accomplishment of impressment was implicit in the First Lord’s lament.That is,although Britain may have struggled to maintain its global naval commitments, it dispatched more warships to more places than any of its rivals. Press gangs made this vast imperial reach possible—not by targeting the poorest and weakest among Britain’s population but by harnessing the talents of one of its most vibrant professional classes. The Royal Navy was able to station so many ships around the world that its strength was often confused as weakness.In 1757,the Secretary of State for the North,Robert Darcy,Lord Holderness,informed Frederick the Great that the British could not provide naval support in the Baltic. “I am sorry to tell you chapter 2 | Ruling the Waves 52 | E m p i r e that the strength of the English marine is not equal perhaps to what is thought abroad, owing to great want of sailors,” Holderness confided, “and yet His Majesty must have a squadron in the Mediterranean,equal at least to the Toulon fleet; one in the Channel, to keep the squadrons of Brest and Rochfort in respect; one in North America; a considerable one in the West Indies, which from the nature of the trade winds is necessarily divided, and one in the East Indies.”Again,a British statesman took for granted the achievement,unparalleled for its time, of its navy’s keeping a presence in so many regions. Even if they could not provide for every request, press gangs secured the skilled manpower necessary to fulfill the main of Britain’s imperial ambitions in the long eighteenth century.2 We can best grasp what press gangs accomplished by reevaluating what empire meant in the early modern era.In the past generation,a growing historical literature has come to regard early modern states and empires as loose structures more than authoritarian entities. No European empire resembled a Leviathan in commanding its subjects and territories. In the British case, in particular , empire was quite literally a fluid pursuit. Britons applied the concept of empire to describe authority over trade and the seas as much as control of particular colonial lands.The British Empire comprised multiple social,trading , and information networks, “a heterogeneous collection of trade colonies, Protectorates, Crown colonies, settlement colonies, administrative colonies, Mandates, trade ports, naval bases, Dominions, and dependencies,” in the words of the scholar Joe Cleary.Like so many other functions of empire across such diverse spaces, manning the Royal Navy was a negotiated authority.3 With this insight, the purpose here is not to dwell on the British navy’s manning failures, as...

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