Trading in War: London’s Maritime World in the Age of Cook and Nelson by Margarette Lincoln (review)

Margarette Lincoln’s maritime London consists of the Thames River parishes east of the Tower of London, whose economy and society were focused on building, maintaining, and supplying London’s shipbuilding and shipping industries. Her book sets out to do two things at the same time: to bring this world back to life for the reader, and to show how it made a central contribution to the growth of Great Britain into a worldwide maritime empire, ensuring that the empire survived and continued to grow through two long global wars—a contribution that, according to Lincoln, is “hardly known” (6). The book also tracks the processes by which maritime London was shaped and stressed by the working and living conditions imposed by this decades-long pursuit of global, imperial power.

Lincoln begins by leading the reader on a guided tour of the maritime parishes in 1768—Wapping, Shadwell, Southwark, and Deptford. Her prose is vividly descriptive, attentive to sight, sound, and smell, and her expository comments provide detail and context without being too digressive, just as one would expect from an expert tour guide. This material is worked seamlessly into the text itself; while citations are plentiful, there are no discursive endnotes in the book.

As for being an “expert tour guide,” that is to be expected; the author was director of research and collections, and later deputy director, at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. As she notes in the Introduction, she has explored these waterfront spaces herself. Those who appreciate a deft blending of material culture and history will find much to appreciate here. What she extracts from the archives is worked firmly into the narrative with what she has gleaned from museum collections and a study of local archaeology and architectural history.

Lincoln populates these land- and waterscapes with people who work hard and drink hard. They make, lose, and steal money. They make, sell, buy, and steal goods. We meet desperately poor women—and men, and children—who are in and out of workhouses, almshouses, and jail. We meet the Henleys, who become rich in the coal trade and eventually set themselves up as landed gentry. We meet James Cook and William Bligh, who will become famous eighteenth-century British mariners, and their wives, who manage everything—including their husbands’ careers—while those husbands are at sea for years on end. We see lascars, a catch-all term for Asian seamen and workers, and notice the absence from view of the Chinese sailors who have come in on East India Company ships; they are housed, we are told, in special quarters until their return passage.

Lincoln then presents these people as part of the great world city as a whole. Here, she situates the social tensions, economic opportunities and challenges, and politics of the maritime parishes in a broader context, noting the direct connections among what was happening on the waterfront to debates in Parliament, agitation for and against political reform, and the civil-religious life of the city. Lincoln’s ability to make clear connections between the Deptford yards and the House of Commons prepares the ground for her to make the case that the labor, technology, and materials of the Thames shipyards and wharves made it possible for Great Britain to expand its global reach even while it was sorely tested by two long, expensive global wars.

The first of those wars began as an escalation of the troubles in the British American colonies on the Atlantic Eastern Seaboard. The deterioration of that conflict into open war was most contentious in British society, and the dockyards were no exception. Lincoln explores how radicalism found fertile ground in the sawdust of the shipyards, centering the discussion on locals whose identities, activities, and sometimes very words have been preserved. Radicalism begat reaction and suppression, and we watch and listen to these struggles...