Economic warfare during the Napoleonic era transformed international commerce; redirecting trade and generating illicit commerce. This volume re-evaluates the Continental System through urban and regional case studies that analyze the power triangle of the French, British and neutral powers and their strategies to adapt to trade restrictions.

A detailed and riveting account of the U.S. Navy's greatest mutiny and its wide-ranging cultural and historical impact The greatest controversy in the history of the U.S. Navy of the early American Republic was the revelation that the son of the Secretary of War had seemingly plotted a bloody mutiny that would have turned the U.S. brig Somers into a pirate ship. The plot discovered, he and his co-conspirators were hastily condemned and hanged at sea. The repercussions of those acts brought headlines, scandal, a fistfight at a cabinet meeting, a court martial, ruined lives, lost reputations, and tales of a haunted ship "bound for the devil" and lost tragically at sea with many of its crew. The "Somers affair" led to the founding of the U.S. Naval Academy and it remains the Navy's only acknowledged mutiny in its history. The story also inspired Herman Melville's White-Jacket and Billy Budd. Others connected to the Somers included Commodore Perry, a relation and defender of the Somers' captain Mackenzie; James Fenimore Cooper, whose feud with the captain, dating back to the War of 1812, resurfaced in his reportage of the affair; and Raphael Semmes, the Somers' last caption who later served in the Confederate Navy. The Curse of the Somers is a thorough recreation of this classic tale, told with the help of recently uncovered evidence. Written by a maritime historian and archaeologist who helped identify the long-lost wreck and subsequently studied its sunken remains, this is a timeless tale of life and death at sea. James P. Delgado re-examines the circumstances, drawing from a rich historical record and from the investigation of the ship's sunken remains. What surfaces is an all-too-human tale that resonates and chills across the centuries.

Shows how the political turmoil of the Spanish American Wars of Independence allowed an upsurge in prize-taking activity by navies, privateers and pirates. Private maritime predation was integral to the Spanish American Wars of Independence. When colonists rebelled against Spanish rule in 1810 they deployed privateers - los corsarios insurgentes - to prosecute their revolutionary struggle at sea. Spain responded by commissioning privateers of its own, while the disintegration of Spanish authority in the New World created conditions in which unauthorised prize-taking - piracy - also flourished. This upsurge in privateering and piracy has been neglected by historians yet it posed a significant threat to British interests. As numerous vessels were captured and plundered, the British government - endeavouring to remain neutral in the Spanish American conflict - faced a dilemma. An insufficient response might hinder Britain's commercial expansion but an overly aggressive approach risked plunging the nation into another war. Privateering, Piracy and British Policy in Spanish America assesses the varied and flexible ways the British government responded to prize-taking activity in order to safeguard and enhance its wider commercial and political objectives. This analysis marks a significant and original contribution to the study of privateering and piracy, and informs key debates about the development of international law and the character of British imperialism in the nineteenth century. Matthew McCarthy is Research Officer at the Maritime Historical Studies Centre, University of Hull. He was awarded his PhD by the University of Hull in 2011 and won the British Commission for Maritime History/Boydell & Brewer prize for best doctoral thesis in maritime history.

As the Atlantic Ocean was transformed from a terrifying barrier into a highway uniting four continents, the lives of people all around the ocean were transformed. After 1492 merchants and political leaders around the Atlantic refocused their attention from trade highways in their interiors to the coasts. Those who emigrated, willingly or unwillingly, had their lives changed completely, but many others became involved in new trades and industries that necessitated consolidation of populations. American gold and silver contributed to the emergence of nation-states. New foods enriched diets all over the world. American foods such as fish, cassava, maize, tomatoes, beans, and cacao fed burgeoning populations. Sugar grown around the Atlantic transformed tastes everywhere. Tobacco was the first great consumer craze. Furs provided the raw material for fashionable broad hats. Chains of commodity exchange linked the Atlantic to the Pacific; they also linked Americans to the Mediterranean and the goods of the Middle East. Creation of Atlantic economies required organization of labor and trade on a scale previously unknown. Generations of Europeans who signed up for servitude for a number of years in order to pay their passage over were gradually supplanted by enslaved Africans, millions of whom were imported into slavery. Wars, fueled by the need for ever more slaves, spread throughout West and Central Africa. The African end of the slave trade produced powerful rulers and great confederations in Africa. Consolidation of displaced tribal groups and remnants of populations depleted by epidemic disease led to the emergence of the Six Nations of the Iroquois League in northern North America, and the Creeks, Cherokees, and others in the south. Those who made a choice to travel across the Atlantic did so for economic advancement, but many also were influenced by religious concerns. Conflict between Roman Catholics and Protestants in Europe, and the power of political leaders to force conformity, caused many to feel that their right to worship was under threat. They were willing to accept servitude to make emigration possible, in order to protect their religious lives. Attempting to create and control vast networks of settlement and trade enhanced the rise of nation-states in Europe and contributed to the growth of national identities. The wars of independence in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries changed the nature of relationships, but did not end them. Abolitionism serves as a vivid example of the collision of religious, philosophical, and economic realities and the ways in which the Atlantic context posed new possibilities and new answers.

The history of the development of the unique vessels built for the New England fishing industry from colonial days to the first third of the twentieth century is here recounted by the leading authority on the subject. Mr. Chapelle gathered material from numerous sources over many years for this book, bringing together a vast amount of important information on the beautiful American fishing schooners, now extinct, built at Essex and other shipbuilding areas of New England. This book traces the evolution of the American fishing schooner from the eighteenth century to the last working and racing schooners of the mid-1930s. The designers, builders, and crews are also discussed. There are 137 plans of schooners which graphically show the development of the type. An important feature of the book is its illustrated glossary-appendix based on Mr. Chapelle's notebooks. It covers scores of items of hull construction and equipment, rigging and gear, color and carving, and includes notes by the builders and riggers themselves, in fact, everything that could be recorded about these crafts, then fast-disappearing.

The scientific and technological revolution in shipbuilding in the early twentieth century had a great impact on both the military and the industrial/commercial world. Miwao Matsumoto focuses on the relationship between this revolution and the structure and function of 'technology gatekeepers' during the process of transfer of marine science and technology from Britain to Japan in this period. His analysis is undertaken in light of a new 'composite model' of Japanese industrialization, which reveals more profound and subtle sociological implications than 'success or failure' type accounts of industrialization usually suggest.

The expansion of the Cholas from their base in the Kaveri Delta saw this growing power subdue the kingdoms of southern India, as well as occupy Sri Lanka and the Maldives, by the early eleventh century. It was also during this period that the Cholas initiated links with Song China. Concurrently, the Southeast Asian polity of Sriwijaya had, through its Sumatran and Malayan ports, come to occupy a key position in East-West maritime trade, requiring engagement with both Song China to the north and the Chola kingdom to its west. The apparently friendly relations pursued were, however, to be disrupted in 1025 by Chola naval expeditions against fourteen key port cities in Southeast Asia. This volume examines the background, course and effects of these expeditions, as well as the regional context of the events. It brings to light many aspects of this key period in Asian history. Unprecedented in the degree of detail assigned to the story of the Chola expeditions, this volume is also unique in that it includes translations of the contemporary Tamil and Sanskrit inscriptions relating to Southeast Asia and of the Song dynasty Chinese texts relating to the Chola Kingdom.

Man lives on land, but the seas of the world are crucial to his lot. Focusing on navies as instruments of power and analysing what they indicate about the nature of state systems and cultures all over the world, Black provides an overview of the most significant debates within the field. Organised into key historical periods and accessibly framed, this wide-ranging account emphasises the links between past and present throughout the history of naval power.

Foreshadowing the twentieth-century experience, the Spanish American War was America's first modern foreign war. Catapulting the United States into an international world power, the war had lasting international implications. Besides America's acquisition of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, and Guam, the war led the United States to take to the international stage, confronting Germany and Japan (foreshadowing the conflict of World War II), and creating a diplomatic bridge between Great Britain and the United States. For Spain, the 1898-1899 conflict was the death knell of empire, which led to a national crisis culminating in the Spanish Civil War. This volume provides easily accessible information on the naval and army operations, Spanish operations, and the political background to the military events, with an emphasis on future foreign affairs.

The Spanish American War is seminal to an understanding of twentieth-century U.S. foreign relations--in Cuba, the Pacific, especially Japan, and with Great Britain. It is also central to an understanding of twentieth-century Spain. U.S. military history also requires an understanding of amphibious operations, naval and army reform, deployment command and control, and interservice cooperation as reflected in the Spanish American War. This book provides a quick reference to what was once called this splendid little war.

In this engaging tale of movement from one hemisphere to another, we see doctors at work attending to their often odious and demanding duties at sea, in quarantine, and after arrival. The book shows, in graphic detail, just why a few notorious voyages suffered tragic loss of life in the absence of competent supervision. Its emphasis, however, is on demonstrating the extent to which the professionalism of the majority of surgeon superintendents, even on ships where childhood epidemics raged, led to the extraordinary saving of life on the Australian route in the Victorian era.

William Redfern, surgeon, sailor, mutineer, prisoner and pioneer. From his birth in approximately 1775 to joining the Royal Navy as a ship's surgeon, it seemed William Redfern was destined for a life of relative wealth and status, but all that changed in 1797, when he was swept up in the infamous Nore Mutiny. At odds with his fellow officers, Redfern was court-martialled for his actions and sentenced to be hanged. Due to his profession, the sentence was commuted to transportation for life and on arrival in New South Wales, his exceptional surgical skills quickly saw him granted a full pardon. He was soon central to the new colony's medical services, was appointed personal surgeon to the Governor and Assistant Surgeon of the Colonial Medical Services, but despite becoming a wealthy landowner in his own right, he would forever carry the `convict's stain' in the eyes of certain members of the British Colonial establishment. Mostly remembered for the Sydney suburb that bears his name, this outstanding new biography, in two volumes, breathes fresh life into the story of William Redfern and follows the rise and fall and subsequent rise again of one of Australia's most influential early settlers. A pioneer of immunisation techniques and an advocate for the role of hygiene and nutrition he truly was one of the first to understand that prevention was better than cure. William Redfern, surgeon, sailor, mutineer, prisoner and pioneer. From his birth in approximately 1775 to joining the Royal Navy as a ship's surgeon, it seemed William Redfern was destined for a life of relative wealth and status, but all that changed in 1797, when he was swept up in the infamous Nore Mutiny. At odds with his fellow officers, Redfern was court-martialled for his actions and sentenced to be hanged. Due to his profession, the sentence was commuted to transportation for life and on arrival in New South Wales, his exceptional surgical skills quickly saw him granted a full pardon. He was soon central to the new colony's medical services, was appointed personal surgeon to the Governor and Assistant Surgeon of the Colonial Medical Services, but despite becoming a wealthy landowner in his own right, he would forever carry the `convict's stain' in the eyes of certain members of the British Colonial establishment. Mostly remembered for the Sydney suburb that bears his name, this outstanding new biography, in two volumes, breathes fresh life into the story of William Redfern and follows the rise and fall and subsequent rise again of one of Australia's most influential early settlers. A pioneer of immunisation techniques and an advocate for the role of hygiene and nutrition he truly was one of the first to understand that prevention was better than cure.

The Royal Navy had most of its greatest triumphs in the decades up to 1815, but there has been relatively little study of its social life and shipboard administration, beyond popular myth and sensational accounts. This volume starts with the formal structure of naval discipline, with Admiralty instructions and captains' orderbooks. It then looks at how things really happened, using diaries, medical journals, petitions, court martial reports and even the menu book of a semi-literate steward. It reveals many strong characters and colourful incidents of shipboard life, while providing material for study.

Seafarers were the first workers to inhabit a truly international labour market, a sector of industry which, throughout the early modern period, drove European economic and imperial expansion, technological and scientific development, and cultural and material exchanges around the world. This volume adopts a comparative perspective, presenting current research about maritime labourers across three centuries, in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, to understand how seafarers contributed to legal and economic transformation within Europe and across the world. Focusing on the three related themes of legal systems, labouring conditions, and imperial power, these essays explore the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between seafarers' individual and collective agency, and the social and economic frameworks which structured their lives.

William Redfern, surgeon, sailor, mutineer, prisoner and pioneer. From his birth in approximately 1775 to joining the Royal Navy as a ship's surgeon, it seemed William Redfern was destined for a life of relative wealth and status, but all that changed in 1797, when he was swept up in the infamous Nore Mutiny. At odds with his fellow officers, Redfern was court-martialed for his actions and sentenced to be hanged. Due to his profession, the sentence was commuted to transportation for life and on arrival in New South Wales, his exceptional surgical skills quickly saw him granted a full pardon. He was soon central to the new colony's medical services, was appointed personal surgeon to the Governor and Assistant Surgeon of the Colonial Medical Services, but despite becoming a wealthy landowner in his own right, he would forever carry the `convict's stain' in the eyes of certain members of the British Colonial establishment. Mostly remembered for the Sydney suburb that bears his name, this outstanding new biography, in two volumes, breathes fresh life into the story of William Redfern and follows the rise and fall and subsequent rise again of one of Australia's most influential early settlers. A pioneer of immunisation techniques and an advocate for the role of hygiene and nutrition he truly was one of the first to understand that prevention was better than cure.

Slaves, convicts, and unfree immigrants have traveled the oceans throughout human history, but the conventional Atlantic World historical paradigm has narrowed our understanding of modernity. This provocative study contrasts the Atlantic conflation of freedom and the sea with the complex relationships in the Indian Ocean in the long 19th century.

The School of Salamanca in the Affairs of the Indies explores the significance of Salamancans, such as Vitoria and Soto, and related thinkers, such as Las Casas and Sepulveda, in the formation of the early modern political order. It also analyses early modern understandings of political order, with a focus both on the decline of the medieval universal world through the independence and secularization of political community and the establishment of continuous and imbalanced relations between various European and non-European political communities. Through its investigation, this book highlights how Salamancans and related thinkers clearly distinguished their understandings of political order from medieval thought, and did so in a different way to contemporary and later thinkers, such as Machiavelli, Luther, Bodin, and Grotius, particularly with regards to the Indies, "barbarian" worlds. It also reveals the strong contribution of the School of Salamanca in early modern political thought, both internally and externally. Salamancans imposed moral restrictions against "interior barbarism," that is, power beyond law, and included "exterior barbarism," that is, "barbarian" societies, in the common political order. Situating the School of Salamanca in the mainstream history of European political thought, The School of Salamanca in the Affairs of the Indies is ideal for academics and postgraduate students of intellectual history and of Spanish colonial expansion.

This book explores the historical and archaeological evidence of the relationships between a coastal community and the shipwrecks that have occurred along the southern Australian shoreline over the last 160 years. It moves beyond a focus on shipwrecks as events and shows the short and long term economic, social and symbolic significance of wrecks and strandings to the people on the shoreline. This volume draws on extensive oral histories, documentary and archaeological research to examine the tensions within the community, negotiating its way between its roles as shipwreck saviours and salvors.

During WWII the mission of the Navy was, first and foremost, 'holding the line' against the German surface fleet, preventing it from disrupting the vital transatlantic sea-lanes or escorting an invasion force to Britain. The importance of holding the line cannot be over-emphasised but it is often overlooked as there was no decisive battle on the seas surrounding Britain in WWII. This work is a strategic and operational history of the Home Fleet. It examines the role of the home fleet in allied strategy and how well the home fleet carried out the missions assigned to it within the framework of that strategy.

Since its invention in Italy in the fourteenth century, marine insurance has provided merchants with capital protection in times of crisis, thus oiling the gears of trade and commerce. With a focus on customs, laws, and organisational structures, this book reveals the Italian origins of marine insurance, and tracks the spread of underwriting practices and institutions in Europe and America through the early modern era. With contributions from eleven leading researchers from seven countries, the book examines key institutional developments in the history of marine insurance. The authors discuss its invention in Italy, and its evolution from private to corporate structures, assessing the causes and impacts of various state interventions. Amsterdam and Antwerp are analysed as one-time key centres of underwriting, as is the emergence and maturity of marine insurance in London. The book evaluates an experiment in corporate underwriting in Cadiz, and the development of insurance institutions in the United States, before applying the metrics of underwriting to discuss commerce raiding in the Atlantic up to the nineteenth century.