Disciplining the Empire: Politics, Governance, and the Rise of the British Navy by Sarah Kinkel (review)

On the first page of Disciplining the Empire, Sarah Kinkel proposes to answer an age-old and dauntingly grand question: "why Britain became the world's greatest naval power" (1). In doing so, she dives into a vast and nuanced historiography and emerges with a fresh analysis that sees changes in naval structure as part of a larger project to reconfigure power throughout British society. The redesigned navy, she argues, became both a model for a more hierarchical society and a useful tool to enforce that societal change throughout the empire.

Kinkel's well-conceived study refutes the conventional narrative that British naval development from the 1600s through the 1780s was linear and uncontroversial. Instead, Kinkel reveals a complex political struggle over the size, structure, tactics, and geopolitical use of the Royal Navy. She notes that other historians have depicted eighteenth-century naval reform as an "apolitical" (88) project of rational modernization because they have failed to acknowledge the deep-seated divides over naval policy that often transcended the era's political lines. By making use of a broad range of sources including ballads, pamphlets, and illustrations, Kinkel not only delves into the debates over naval reform and policy in Parliament and within the Admiralty Board but also captures a wider popular discourse about naval policy and empire.

Disciplining the Empire explores the navy's journey from the "geographically restrained, less aggressive, and more deliberately defensive" force of the Stuart era, into its deployment "primarily as a tool of stability to build alliances and maintain the balance of power" (211) in the Walpolean era, to the far-reaching mid-eighteenth century reform and its creation of a professional navy primed to expand empire and enforced imperial policy. Kinkel's analysis sees a series of military reforms transforming Britain by the mid-eighteenth century into "a fiscal-naval state" (21) with a vast, expensive, hierarchical, and professionalized navy. Moreover, she argues that "in the years between the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution, the navy was tasked with shaping imperial society into the same disciplined, ordered system that the naval service now embodied" (15). By the start of the Seven Years' War, the navy was not only a larger, better organized, and more tactically aggressive force; it was also increasingly pointed inward as well as outward, as naval vessels took on an expanded role in enforcing and collecting taxes on goods traveling to and from the colonies. Soon the navy became "a means of exerting authority internally and a more effective tool than the army in policing trade and enforcing revenue measures" (20). Indeed, though many historians see Britain's shift to a more ordered and authoritarian empire as a product of the financial stress that came with the military success of the Seven Years' War, Kinkel points to the reordering of the Admiralty in the 1740s as the pivotal point. As she argues, "naval reforms of the 1740s embodied a model of society that was every bit as obedient and hierarchical as the one the authoritarian whigs of the 1760s or 1780s attempted to enforce" (19) across the British Empire.

Disciplining the Empire does much more than narrate the rise of British naval power. Above all, Kinkel shows how burgeoning naval might was a product of the politically contested and complex debates about what sort of navy Britain ought to have and what role it should play within British society. As she shows, examining the debates over the navy's use and development allows for analysis of "the ideological texture and conflicts at the heart of the eighteenth-century British Empire" (23). These debates arose from widespread dismay over the shaky record of the Royal Navy in the early eighteenth century. Though most observers saw the navy as an essential tool of empire and in need of reform, precisely how to restructure it led to deep ideological disagreement. "Authoritarian whigs...