| This dissertation is the first study of British naval impressment, or forced service, throughout the early modern Atlantic world. Whereas previous histories of impressment have focused narrowly on a single time, place, or class of people, this study explores its broader social, political, and cultural influence in the “long” eighteenth century (1688–1815). In using Royal Navy archival records, ships' logs, merchants' papers, personal letters, and diaries as well as engravings, political tracts, sea ballads, and other printed materials, it argues impressment acted as both an integrative and destructive force in Britain's early empire. Indeed, if press gangs helped to forge a common British Atlantic world, they also contributed to its ruin. Impressment first helped to unite the British Atlantic. Although the institution had legal and customary variations in England, Scotland, Ireland, the British West Indies, America, and Canada, it joined these areas in a system of common maritime defense in wartime. For all its inefficiency, impressment also outperformed the recruiting systems of other major European navies in the eighteenth century. Yet Britain paid a high price for its unified naval recruiting system. Even as it integrated the British Atlantic world, impressment violated seamen's liberties, destabilized seaports, and mobilized entire colonies against the navy's presence. Sailors also formed transatlantic escape networks to evade press gangs, and engaged in more violent resistance by leading tumultuous riots at sea and on shore.;Eventually, the destructive influence of impressment contributed to broad change in the Atlantic. The practice played a significant role in the American Revolution by inspiring resistance to British authority in America and by draining wartime morale in Britain. Press gangs further cemented national division in the Atlantic by helping to cause the War of 1812. At the same time, however, they assisted in Britain's greatest military triumph in the long eighteenth century—defeating Napoleonic France. Impressment thus left an extraordinary, if paradoxical, legacy by 1815. The institution helped to shatter Britain's first Atlantic empire even as press gangs raised enough sailors to allow the nation to become the dominant naval and imperial power of its time. |
