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In the decades after the United States formally declared its
independence in 1776, Americans struggled to gain recognition of
their new republic and their rights as citizens. None had to fight
harder than the nation's seamen, whose labor took them far from
home and deep into the Atlantic world. Citizen Sailors tells the
story of how their efforts to become American at sea in the midst
of war and revolution created the first national, racially
inclusive model of United States citizenship. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
immerses us in sailors' pursuit of safe passage through the ocean
world during the turbulent age of revolution. Challenged by British
press-gangs and French privateersmen, who considered them Britons
and rejected their citizenship claims, American seamen demanded
that the U.S. government take action to protect them. In response,
federal leaders created a system of national identification
documents for sailors and issued them to tens of thousands of
mariners of all races-nearly a century before such credentials came
into wider use. Citizenship for American sailors was strikingly
ahead of its time: it marked the federal government's most
extensive foray into defining the boundaries of national belonging
until the Civil War era, and the government's most explicit
recognition of black Americans' equal membership as well. This
remarkable system succeeded in safeguarding seafarers, but it fell
victim to rising racism and nativism after 1815. Not until the
twentieth century would the United States again embrace such an
inclusive vision of American nationhood.
The past twenty-five years have brought a dramatic expansion of
scholarship in maritime history, including new research on piracy,
long-distance trade, and seafaring cultures. Yet maritime history
still inhabits an isolated corner of world history, according to
editors Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. Benton and
Perl-Rosenthal urge historians to place the relationship between
maritime and terrestrial processes at the center of the field and
to analyze the links between global maritime practices and major
transformations in world history. A World at Sea consists of nine
original essays that sharpen and expand our understanding of
practices and processes across the land-sea divide and the way they
influenced global change. The first section highlights the
regulatory order of the seas as shaped by strategies of land-based
polities and their agents and by conflicts at sea. The second
section studies documentary practices that aggregated and conveyed
information about sea voyages and encounters, and it traces the
wide-ranging impact of the explosion of new information about the
maritime world. Probing the political symbolism of the land-sea
divide as a threshold of power, the last section features essays
that examine the relationship between littoral geographies and
sociolegal practices spanning land and sea. Maritime history, the
contributors show, matters because the oceans were key sites of
experimentation, innovation, and disruption that reflected and
sparked wide-ranging global change. Contributors: Lauren Benton,
Adam Clulow, Xing Hang, David Igler, Jeppe Mulich, Lisa Norling,
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Carla Rahn Phillips, Catherine Phipps,
Matthew Raffety, Margaret Schotte.
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