Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (review)

In Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal has created a worthy addition to the historiography of the Atlantic world. Amidst those waters, Perl-Rosenthal examines national identity against the backdrop of a dangerous maritime world where individual nationalities and loyalties were undulating. Perl-Rosenthal situates seafarers at the vanguard of this historic transformation and argues, convincingly, that seamen were the agents of a revolution of “being” and led the way in creating and determining a new system of identification—citizenship through paperwork. Perl-Rosenthal explains that “American sailors embraced U.S. nationality, and helped to give it new shape” (p. 15). By swearing oaths, marking their bodies, and collecting documents to demonstrate their loyalty, “sailors willingly participated in, and even led the process of creating American national citizenship” (p. 15).

Perl-Rosenthal has assembled a vast collection of primary sources to chart the actions of American sailors who proved themselves willing to define their American identity and defend its new form during and after the American Revolution. In Citizen Sailors Perl-Rosenthal offers a fresh socialhistorical perspective by considering eyewitness accounts of those sailors who, in a clear line of historical agency, participated in formulating a new American identity. As he effectively explains, France and Great Britain demonstrated an unwillingness to accept, or an inability to perceive, American national uniqueness. While the American Revolution gave mariners a significant degree of control over their national identity, Perl-Rosenthal argues, mercantilist nations in the Atlantic world pushed back against the rising tide of a new Atlantic identity not determined by imperial power, which enraged sailors and led them “into the heart of the United States” (p. 15).

In Citizen Sailors Perl-Rosenthal also argues that deciphering friend from foe in an Atlantic world was established through common sense tactics. Assumptions regarding the design of ships, language of crew, and familial attachments were used to determine a ship and crew’s “identity.” While rooted in “Atlantic trade and warfare,” these assumptions were grounded in the connection between “sovereignty and birth” for imperial navies and privateers (p. 43). If assumptions hold, then status quo remains, but as Perl-Rosenthal compellingly reasons, “The creation of the United States upended every one of the assumptions” and changed concepts of “sovereignty, culture, and allegiance in the Atlantic world” (p. 44).

In an exceptional examination, Perl-Rosenthal sheds light on the process by which nations assigned national labels and how race, ship construction, and language failed to be methods to discern allegiance and loyalty in the early Atlantic world. Thus, imperial powers looked “at the political behavior of merchants and sailors” to determine nationality when old commonsense methods proved ineffective (pp. 59–60). Looking at harrowing incidents when seafarers were forced to defend their national claims while participating in a communal profession, Perl-Rosenthal contends that it was sailors who created ways to delineate American distinctiveness. Because their new nationality was illuminated at times of difficulty, and they became the “appropriate” image of that new American existence and forced the Atlantic world to alter “the meaning of allegiance.”

Throughout Citizen Sailors Perl-Rosenthal describes citizenship as distorted and blinded in a mercantile system that Americans sailed into and the United States could not control. But as sailors left American harbors, they regularly encountered others who “struggled with the new difficulties of discerning mariner’s nationality” and ultimately the “nature of nationality itself” (p. 109). Issues like naturalization, transnational maritime border crossings, and maritime paperwork all intersect as “commonsense” broadsided the reality of a new emerging power involved in the old mercantile system of the Atlantic world. Expunging “commonsense nationality” meant blurring sovereign borders in the Atlantic and confusing who ultimately determined one’s nationality.

Perl-Rosenthal masterfully merges an important methodological Atlantic history component into Citizen Sailors, and thus continues to add to the field that Bernard Bailyn first spearheaded.⁸ Considering American citizenship...