Sources and methods in the British impressment debate

British naval impressment has been a subject of public and scholarly debate for centuries. When it was an active practice for manning the English and later British Navy, it was hotly debated in Parliament, often resisted by maritime communities, and generally disliked by the naval officers tasked with carrying it out. It effectively ended with the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, and afterward it was frequently a political issue as the Royal Navy went through a long series of reforms. Today, British naval impressment is the subject of a small, yet often heated, academic debate, where the different sides often talk past one another, criticizing opposing arguments, rather than examining where and how these approaches actually fit together in our understanding of the 18th century Atlantic world. Some historians generally look at how the policy of naval impressment affected political culture in the British state and Empire, and created friction between the British government and its subjects. They have linked naval impressment with social unrest in the British colonies, as a contributing factor to the American Revolution, and as a major issue of contention between Britain and the early American Republic. ¹ Other historians examine the practice of impressment through an administrative lens as part of the larger issue of naval manning during the 17th and 18th centuries. They seek to highlight naval manpower problems and draw out lessons of contemporary value. ² Understanding these different methodologies, their merits and their problems is critical to understanding that multiple approaches can coexist with only relatively minor points of contention. In doing so, each method can, and should, provide critical information for our broader understanding of history.

The immediate purpose of this article is to respond to Nicholas Rogers’ recent comments on my book, The Myth of the Press Gang, ³ in his article ‘British impressment and its discontents’, which appeared in this journal in early 2018. ⁴ More broadly, this article illustrates the current state of the debate in the hope of suggesting a path towards a middle ground where the multiple approaches to British naval impressment can work productively to advance our greater historical understanding.

In order to contextualize these different approaches to impressment, understanding the issue of British naval manpower during the wars of the 18th century is central. Manning the Royal Navy was an immense problem that got worse throughout the 18th century as the scale of warfare, and global trade, increased. ⁵ This resulted in an ever larger struggle for the scarce resource of skilled manpower. Further, naval manning and mobilisation could not be allowed to destroy merchant sea trade by depriving it entirely of skilled manpower. Neither Britain nor any other European country had enough seamen to fully man their naval forces and their merchant fleets at the same time. ⁶ Unlike soldiers, the skills of sailors were in high demand on both the civilian and naval market, creating a large deficit between the number of men employed at sea in peacetime and the number necessary during war. ⁷ To an extent, this deficiency was made up by the flexibility of the seafaring community, as unemployed and underemployed mariners made their way back to the sea in response to the increase in demand in the wartime labour market. ⁸ However, the dramatic growth of the Royal Navy in wartime over the course of the century meant that the maritime labour market was far overstretched before naval forces reached full mobilisation. ⁹

Seamen and petty officers formed the core component of a warship’s manpower. Petty officers were the most experienced and competent men of the lower deck and served in positions of authority over seamen, but were subordinate to warrant officers and commissioned officers. Able seamen were highly skilled men who had mastered the ability to reef, knot, splice, and man a ship’s wheel, as well as work aloft in the ship’s rigging, among other duties. These men could work efficiently at any of the duties aboard ship that required ‘sea skills’, and it generally took five or more years of experience to master the necessary skills. Ordinary seamen were semi-skilled men who knew, though had yet to master, the skills of able seamen. Often ordinary seamen had many years of sea experience in the coasting trade where they had served in small ‘fore and aft’ rigged ships, rather than the large square-rigged ships that made up the bulk of the Royal Navy. Landsmen, as their title implies, were men with little or no maritime skill who could not perform the basic tasks of a seaman. Generally, it took about two years for a landsman to gain enough experience to become an ordinary seaman, though this depended on the ability of the individual. Landsmen, however, were not useless aboard warships. The majority of the heavy work in trimming and shifting sails and spars was performed via lines that ran to deck, where strength rather than skill was needed. Unskilled men, who needed an experienced able seaman or petty officer to direct their work, performed these tasks from the relative safety of the deck.

The essential quality in all positions of the lower deck was the ability to work in unity, as sailing a large warship was a complex task that involved the most technologically advanced and expensive components of the day. Whatever the skill of the individuals aboard, the necessary teamwork could only be gained by working together at sea as a crew, and just like well-trained military units of today, the crew had to be able to anticipate the actions required of an order, as well as how orders carried out by one portion of the crew would affect others. Robert Hay is a good example of a sailor who first showed up in the Royal Navy as a boy with no maritime skills and later became a skilled seaman. He volunteered for naval service in 1803 at the age of 14. He wanted to go to sea, because he did not want to be a farmer in Scotland, and partly because he had heard tales of adventure from old seamen. As he had no sea skills, no merchant ship would hire him, so he joined a Royal Navy ship. ¹⁰ There was also the promise of less work aboard a warship and the possibility to gain prize money. ¹¹ Hay went on to serve for two years as a landsman, then spent four more years as a carpenter aboard a warship. In July 1809, he took two weeks leave and returned to his ship voluntarily. In February 1811, his ship, HMS Amethyst, was wrecked near Portsmouth. Hay survived the wreck, but decided not to report back to the Royal Navy and was presumed dead – technically Hay had deserted. He soon found a position aboard a merchantman from April to July 1811. Upon returning from his first merchant voyage to the West Indies and back, after four months at sea, he received only meagre pay once deductions had been taken out by the ship’s master. In September, Hay was pressed as a skilled seaman back into naval service, but deserted in October 1811, because he wanted to return home to Scotland after having been away for eight years. ¹² Hay is an example of a British citizen who was both a volunteer (initially) and then an impressed sailor who eventually deserted. His story is therefore a revealing example of the complex system of naval manning and its relationship to the merchant labour market in the age of sail.

By the time of the French Revolutionary Wars, British naval recruiting was mostly controlled by the Impress Service, an administrative branch of the Royal Navy that answered to the Admiralty. The Impress Service was first deployed as a wartime establishment during the Seven Years War. Making press gangs a permanent fixture, with Regulating Captains to manage them, made naval recruiting, including impressment, more effective. Regulating Captains, as the title implies, managed the practice of impressment by inspecting men taken up by press gangs, imposing common standards and ensuring that those taken were men of seafaring skill. Regulating Captains released men with protections, those who belonged to other ships, or those suspected of being criminals or vagrants who had been pressed by local magistrates to rid their jurisdictions of the burden. ¹³ Further to this responsibility, they directed the operations of press gangs that functioned in the region under their control. ¹⁴ Each Regulating Captain had several press gangs working under him. As the 18th century progressed, Regulating Captains became more numerous and thus the Impress Service was able to recruit from more and more British ports and coastal areas.

Press gangs of the Impress Service were manned with local men and were assigned naval lieutenants to command them. As working in a press gang required little or none of the skills of a seaman, it was more efficient and cost effective to fill the position with people whose skills were not needed at sea. Press gangs consisted of one lieutenant and generally fewer than 10 men, depending on the area. They set up bases of operations, referred to as rendezvous, usually in a local inn. ¹⁵ The lieutenants of the gangs were issued press warrants that gave them the right to legally take men for service in the Navy. By 1793, these gangs were actively working in and around 51 ports. ¹⁶ The process of creating a dedicated administrative branch of the Navy, specifically for the purpose of recruitment, greatly streamlined the process of naval manning and mobilisation. ¹⁷

Impressment operated in two main ways, on shore and at sea. The best known of these methods are the shore-based operations, in which the infamous press gang played a central role. ¹⁸ By the 1790s, most of the press gangs operating on shore fell under the direction of the Impress Service; however, individual ships also sent gangs ashore to press men, particularly if they were not near one of the major naval centres where the Impress Service concentrated its efforts. The richest grounds for naval recruitment were the maritime communities and the major merchant and naval centres of the south and southeast coasts of England.

Conscripting men was not the sole occupation of press gangs. Rendezvous and press gangs were also critical points at which men volunteered for naval service. Volunteers made up over 70 per cent of the total seamen found aboard warships during the French Revolutionary Wars. Most of these men volunteered on land via impress officers. ¹⁹ Processing volunteer men was a major component of the average press gang’s day-to-day work. ²⁰ Thus the rendezvous was highly visible, marked with flags, and was sometimes advertised by drummers and men marching up and down the streets. ²¹ It was important that these places did not look ominous. Press gang officers also went to lengths to encourage men into naval service by recruiting drives. These took place in areas where seamen congregated and involved posters, improvised bands playing patriotic tunes, speeches, and talk of the excitements of naval life, such as glory and prize money. ²²

It was always in the interest of Regulating Captains and officers of the Impress Service to establish a good rapport with the local community, as the ability to recruit volunteers depended largely on how they were viewed by the local populace. These officers also had to live in the area. ²³ However, no number of patriotic tunes or stories of prize money would have ever made press gangs a soft sell. Impressment was problematic and contentious, especially in maritime communities. Riots as a result of impressment certainly happened, and sometimes escalated to include whole communities. In January 1793, sailors in Newcastle banded together and paraded the streets for two days in protest at the presence of press gangs in the port. ²⁴ In October of that year, over 400 people rioted in Liverpool after a frigate captain ignored the local Regulating Captain’s advice and deployed a press gang into the port. The situation spiralled out of control and two rendezvous were destroyed by the mob. ²⁵ All told, Liverpool experienced 66 ‘acts of violence’ against press gangs and supporters of impressment between 1739 and 1805. ²⁶ The problems it caused and the stresses that accompanied it meant that impressment had no real friends. ²⁷

Within the community of seamen serving aboard warships, impressment was culturally accepted as a necessity. It may have been an evil, but it was viewed as a necessary evil. ²⁸ Resistance to impressment took the form of evading press gangs ashore or riots. However, once aboard a warship there was a sense of resignation. Pressed men found it in their best interests to serve and serve well, and acts of violence or resistance seldom carried over to naval service. ²⁹ Seamen accepted naval conscription as unavoidable, as evidenced by the fact that in all of the grievances of the mutineers at Spithead and the Nore in 1797, impressment was not mentioned. ³⁰ Beyond not receiving a bounty for volunteering, pressed men were no more disadvantaged than volunteer seamen, once aboard a warship. The discontented might desert when opportunity presented itself, but most remained to serve. The majority of deserters were unskilled landsmen volunteers who did not understand the sea when they joined and did not adapt well to being a stranger in a strange environment aboard a warship. ³¹

***

Why are we arguing about British naval manning in the 21st century, more than two centuries after the fact? Impressment matters in the modern world for the same reasons it mattered in the 18th century: for its political and moral implications. Through the lens of the Royal Navy, historians have created different interpretations of the 18th- and 19th-century British Empire. On one extreme is the 19th-century view of Britain’s emergence as a triumphant march, where the morality of national virtue and political freedom feature heavily. Impressment does not appear often in this historiographical era, and when it did it was a necessary evil in the defence of Britain. Men serving in the Royal Navy were part of something bigger that brought about a greater good: the Pax Britannica. This began to change with the rise of modern social history methodology in the 1960s. The historiography of Britain’s empire became far more complex and problematic. It was not an empire of equals, but one that was constructed on the foundation of centuries of chattel slavery, marred by wars fought with the blood of society’s most vulnerable people, and ultimately benefited the wealthy and powerful far more than those who sacrificed heavily for its creation. This placed renewed attention on impressment, but not as a function of naval manning. Most work on impressment during this era was concerned with life aboard ships of the Royal Navy, rather than the mechanisms of naval recruitment. In A Social History of the Navy (1960), Michael Lewis, a pioneer in the social history of the navy, based his study almost entirely on printed sources with little evidence of any archival research. ³² The resulting conclusions were based on antiquated views of naval recruitment, including exaggerated numbers of impressed men and an emphasis on poor conditions aboard ships.

The social history of the Royal Navy and Georgian Britain has made many advances in the decades since Lewis’ book. Recent trends in scholarship generally break down into two coalitions –social historians and naval historians, each asking different questions and using different sources. The result has produced scholarly disagreements that should not necessarily exist and need contextualization. Scholars are asking different questions, using different sources, and too frequently ignoring the arguments of the other side. Recent scholarship on the social history of impressment in the 18th century tends to focus on the friction produced between the British fiscal-military state, often engaged in wars of empire, and British citizens or members of the Anglophone world, eager to protect their liberties. This work often concentrates on specific events and major geographical locations of contention, such as Bristol during Seven Years War or American Revolutionary War. Impressment also played a role in British North American colonies before 1775 and the fledgling United States through 1815. In these areas and times, impressment created highly visible social tension that provoked resistance within maritime communities, which occasionally descended into violence or riots, all of which was reported in local and national newspapers. These often led to debates at local and parliamentary levels, and produced correspondence from merchants and local officials, as well as naval officers.

The new social history has brought to light the friction between the British Government, which used naval impressment to man its warships, and British society, particularly in maritime communities where press gangs operated. Historians have described impressment as tyrannical, with the elite forcing men to fight wars that they neither wanted nor benefited from. This argument has often portrayed conditions aboard Royal Navy warships as harsh, and thus created an environment where relatively few men volunteered. Impressment was therefore necessary to acquire large numbers of men for naval service, which was nasty and brutish. Given this view, arguments that a significant number of men volunteered for naval service is perceived as a plea by old-fashioned historians to show that British sailors were patriotic, loyal and defended their liberties, therefore painting the British Empire as virtuous. ³³

It is true that military historians of previous generations were, to a great extent, responsible for writing histories of the British Empire that were draped in ‘national virtue’, and that social historians have worked hard to correct since the 1960s. However, this style of military history has fallen out of favour in academia, and most serious historians who study navies or militaries are not doing so to glorify military actions or the countries involved. The new generation of military historians is relatively small, especially in comparison to the number of active social historians, and the number of naval historians is smaller still. The modern treatment of naval history has its roots in the 1980s, and has become more active since the turn of the 21st century. Unlike military history of the first half of the 20th century, recent work in military history is less concerned with great men and great battles; rather, researchers are interested in administration, finance, infrastructure, the fiscal military state, the people who fought, and how militaries functioned during both war and peace. ³⁴

For example, my research scrutinizes British naval manpower during the French Revolutionary Wars, between 1793 and 1802. Specifically it examines how seamen and petty officers of the Royal Navy were recruited, where they were from, and their age and skill level. It looks at how well ships were manned, how men were turned over from one ship to another, how pay, victualling and general shipboard conditions in the Royal Navy compared to merchant shipping, and how British naval manning practices compared to those of France and Spain. Other naval historians have been similarly concerned with the backgrounds and career paths of naval officers or the prospects of young midshipmen, the infrastructure behind supplying naval stores and victualling, the construction and running of dockyards, and how all of these elements came together to create success or failure. ³⁵

These different approaches – primarily, but not limited to, social history and naval history – are asking different questions concerning British naval impressment. Social historians are interested in how impressment affected the relationship between the British government and British society, as well as the rest of the Atlantic world. To them the friction that impressment caused within maritime communities, which manifested in riots and violence, are a chief concern. These historians use the appropriate manuscript sources – newspapers, correspondence from members of the maritime community, and the assortment of documents produced from political debates. ³⁶ Naval historians interested in impressment are concerned with how the mechanism of naval manning worked, of which impressment was an important component. My book, The Myth of the Press Gang, is concerned with the administrative function of naval manning. Simply put, it asks how Britain recruited the men necessary to field the world’s largest navy? Understanding how many men served in the Royal Navy, how they were recruited, where they came from, and how old they were creates firmer ground on which to examine how the Royal Navy, as well as the British government, interacted with society during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, but does not itself define that interaction.

This article proposes an alternative to this argument, and demonstrates that there is room for consensus between these different groups of historians by connecting impressment to the wider context of the revolutionary era. It was certainly a grievance in United States’ Declaration of Independence, and a topic of contention that contributed to the War of 1812. In Britain, impressment was often met with heavy social friction. It was not a universal experience, but one experienced by society’s lower class and almost exclusively within maritime communities. Often this friction led to popular protest, some of which degraded into violent riots. ³⁷ This was largely true of the two decades following the Seven Years War, when Britain was politically divided and almost any action by Parliament could send the masses to the streets, particularly in North America. ³⁸ However, naval manning practices were also a core element of British success at sea, particularly between 1793 and 1815 when the size of the Royal Navy and the scale of wartime operations at sea were unprecedented.

One of the major points of contention between social and naval historians has been the different primary source material used by each party. For social historians, newspapers are one of the best sources for illuminating the social friction between maritime communities and the British government. Violence or rioting by maritime communities resisting impressment was big news, and was covered heavily in newspapers in first-hand accounts. The 18th century was a period of proliferation for newspapers as literacy increased among the general public. For researchers today, newspapers offer wide coverage of events from the local to national level. They offer a useful, often first-hand perspective on events happening in real time. So many have been digitized that researchers can instantly access thousands of articles with simple searches. Few other sources are as easily uncovered and offer such valuable perspectives. On the other hand, newspaper reports can be subjective. Scholars must necessarily be as sceptical of newspaper reports as they would be to broadsides and editorials. The same lens applies to all primary source material, and historians should be openly critical of any document, and endeavour to contextualize its creation. Newspapers are written to inform the public, but also to sell. Therefore printers were heavily invested in the public opinion of their readership, and two different newspapers covering the same event could produce wildly varying accounts. This does not mean they do not have value for historians.

For the examination of naval administration, government documents are a more useful source. In my research, the best sources for illuminating the impact of impressment are ships’ muster books. Muster books list data for each member of a ship’s crew and created accurate numbers for supply purposes and tracked the arrival and departure of men for the calculation of pay. In doing so, these records listed an individual’s rating or skill level, age, manner of recruitment, date of entry, place of birth, and discharge.

Muster books certainly have limitations and problems, primarily that they rely on individual ships’ pursers keeping accurate accounts. They were produced for government use, and they vary in the level of detail provided; for example, we might learn that one sailor was from a small parish in Devon, while another might simply be from ‘England’. Since muster books were compiled on ships, often a degree or two removed from the moment of recruitment, the purser may not always have had accurate information about how the recruitment had actually happened. The most common example cited by critics of muster books are the so-called ‘coerced volunteers’ – men who were allowed to volunteer when cornered by a press gang, leaving them no other option. Nicholas Rogers has written off muster books as a ‘dead end’ for examining naval recruitment, and believes that documents produced by the Royal Navy, particularly those produced by shore-based recruitment efforts ‘were the consequence of efforts by the Admiralty and their regulating officers on the ground to manage recruitment seamlessly, so that it appeared that the British seamen were indubitably loyal and ready to risk their lives against the revolutionary virus of an insurgent France.’ ³⁹

We should not be so quick to dismiss well over 100,000 sources compiled at the time by men intimately involved in the process of recruitment. Rogers suggests that the muster books were produced to deceive someone (presumably the public), though he does not cite any evidence to support this assertion. If there was in fact a collective effort by shore-based recruiting officers to alter returns, then muster books kept by ships’ pursers should function as the best source available for understanding recruitment. Pursers were financially liable if the supplies they took on board, used and ultimately returned to the victualling board did not match up, but they were not liable for the pay of the lower deck. ⁴⁰ Whether a man had been pressed or volunteered and was eligible to receive a bounty was not the concern of a purser – his job was to keep a record so men could receive wages from the Navy when the ship paid off. Grand collusion that included shore-based recruiting officers and ship-based pursers, who answered to different chains of command and were under different pressures, fiscally and from their respective superiors, would have been on a scale so vast that there would be evidence of it today. However, no evidence has been uncovered to indicate that large-scale corruption in muster books, or returns from shore-based recruiting records, took place.

Rogers is correct to point out that individual muster books can certainly be deceptive. However, we can mitigate this possibility by using many ships’ musters and comparing individual books to overall averages, which identify anomalies and allow us to question the differences. By taking a large sample, spread over a variety of ports, ships and years, we can suggest some conclusions from the study of these musters. My statistics were based on the muster books of 81 British warships, and covered a total of 27,174 men who served between 1793 and 1801, or roughly 10 per cent of the likely total to have served in the Royal Navy during those years. Such a large sample allows us to trace patterns across different ports and through different recruiting atmospheres. When we do so, we find little evidence for sustained levels of ‘coerced volunteers’. Had pursers been encouraged or forced to falsely enter recruitment figures, the response would not have uniform across the navy and the percentage of pressed men would not have been relatively steady across ships of the Royal Navy. We would expect instead that some pursers would have recorded very few pressed seamen, whereas others would have had very high numbers of impressment. My research shows no evidence for this. ⁴¹

Muster books have a limited use for understanding impressment riots, or the political climate of maritime communities in the 18th century. But they are an essential source of historical information on the men serving on the lower decks of British warships, primarily because returns from all of the shore-based recruiting stations have not survived in archives. Some shore-based records exist, contained within personal papers of Royal Navy officers, or their letters to the Admiralty, often penned when recruiting was problematic. However, those are only select officers in particular areas and for brief periods of time. Therefore, while it is impossible to examine all of these records, most of the muster books for Royal Navy ships from 1790 onwards still exist in good condition. ⁴² If we wish to produce accurate accounts of both British naval manning and the effect of impressment ashore, we should be wary of dismissing large swathes of the historical record as dead ends, including those that come in the form of personal correspondence, newspapers, Admiralty reports, or muster books. Each has a historical function and value depending upon the questions being asked.

The use of data obtained from ships’ musters allows the examination of recruitment trends across large numbers of men. Statistical techniques have great value when studying large organizations like the 18th-century Royal Navy, and should not be easily dismissed. ⁴³ By using statistical approaches, far more can be learned about the men serving in the Royal Navy than simply how they were recruited. Through muster books we now know where seamen came from and where they were recruited, as well as their ages and skill levels. When looking at similar sources, such as the Quota Act returns of 1795, statistics can also show the previous professions of people who volunteered for naval service. Statistical examination of 18th-century documents is not easy. It requires lots of work entering information manuscript sources into databases by hand, a task that can be monotonous and time consuming, but the value of the results is real.

For all this rather rosy view of impressment, we cannot forget what newspapers and other contemporaneous accounts tell us about the challenge of impressment in maritime communities. For three days in 1747, Boston, MA, was gripped by the ‘Knowles Riot’, which pitted colonial sailors against local naval authorities. After Admiral Knowles had pressed 46 men, a mob captured several naval officers and seized control of the port. The governor fled and called the militia to restore order. Though no other riots matched it for its duration and intensity, it was not a unique event. As a result of episodes like this, Christopher Magra has recently argued that impressment contributed to the outbreak of the American Revolution. This kind of analysis provides an essential – but fundamentally different – perspective on the issue of naval impressment than my research because he is using different sources and methods. ⁴⁴

The debate between social and naval historians has much to do with the approaches each group has taken to defending their views of naval impressment, and at times neither side has been open to considering the merits of the other. These arguments are not mutually exclusive, and apart from a few minor points, actually agree with one another. My statistical research shows that between 1793 and 1801, 16 per cent of seamen were pressed into naval service. However, at no point has my research claimed ‘that impressment was statistically, politically, and culturally insignificant’, as has been suggested. ⁴⁵ This may appear to be a low number on the surface, but closer examination of recruiting over the individual years between shows that the percentage of pressed men increased as the French Revolutionary Wars progressed. From 1798 to 1801, rates of impressment accounted for 19 per cent (1798), 26 per cent (1799), 25 per cent (1800), and 27 per cent (1801) of the seamen serving on the lower deck. Therefore, in 1801, when the Royal Navy totalled more than 135,000 men, of which approximately 89,000 were seamen, over 24,000 seamen were serving aboard British warships as a result of impressment. In the same year, there were over 12,000 petty officers in the Royal Navy, of which approximately 2,200 had been pressed. The result is that over 26,000 pressed men served in the Royal Navy in 1801. That is not ‘statistically, politically, or culturally insignificant’. My research shows that, while impressment never accounted for the majority of men serving in the Royal Navy between 1793 and 1801, it still accounted for tens of thousands. That is significant, especially when considering that British impressment affected a relatively narrow band of the population, the maritime communities where skilled sailors lived and worked. ⁴⁶

It is important to recognize that the time and place that we study makes a difference. Naval recruitment in 1793 was different than in 1801, and 1801 was different than 1805 or 1778 or 1747, and in the same light geographical place made a difference as well. My research so far has examined naval recruitment for British warships stationed in home waters during the French Revolutionary Wars. Between 1793 and 1802 more than half of British seamen consistently remained in fleets and squadrons that were based in home waters and recruited from home ports, such as the Channel Fleet, the Western Squadron and the Baltic fleet. ⁴⁷ By 1800 and 1801, 64 and 66 per cent of British seamen, respectively, were employed in ships stationed in home waters. ⁴⁸ Understanding specifically how naval recruitment worked for ships stationed on the North American station, and how it was different from recruitment in home waters, will require a different study that examines specifically those fleets, which varied greatly in size and structure throughout the 18th century wars.

Although impressment is only one part of the larger administrative history of the British navy, it has aroused emotion and passion (at least among historians) over the past six decades. Some recent handlings of the subject have implicitly or even explicitly linked it to modern political debates in ways that should be regarded as extraordinary and improper in any scholarly context. ⁴⁹ Why, then, are contemporary debates being mapped onto, and ultimately polarizing, the most recent historiography of impressment? More is at stake here than the reputation of the Royal Navy or how it manned its warships. The larger debate is tied to the origins of the British Empire and the British state. How coercive was Britain’s fiscal-military state? Was Britain emerging from the 18th century not as a nation defending liberty, but rather one built by and in support of the liberty-denying elite?

As historians, we should concede that many seamen were patriotic and volunteered for naval service, while others volunteered for any number of reasons, one of which was the desire to escape from the dearth created by poor harvests during much of the 1790s. At the same time, there were plenty of seamen who chose not to volunteer, and when threatened by impressment, chose to resist. In many cases, entire communities chose to resist and occasionally it turned violent. Forcing thousands of men into naval service caused real social problems that were not solved during the long 18th century. However, the fact that some men were pressed into naval service did not mean that the Royal Navy was a floating hell where men were kept in appalling conditions.

It cannot be stressed enough in this article that we, as a community of historical researchers, are all on the same team and trying to get to the same place: to study the past in order to better understand the present and inform decisions about the future. The scholarly debate over impressment is only one very small part of the greater historical study. However, there is more on the table than simply how the 18th-century Royal Navy was manned or how the state interacted with society. We must appreciate that our understanding of the past is ever evolving, as new evidence is uncovered and different questions are continually asked. Our comprehension of historical events today is different than that of a decade, two decades, or half a century ago. That does not mean that books from 40 years ago, or two centuries ago, should easily be dismissed, but rather they are built upon as new generations of historians add to those foundations. That also means that no single publication or research project will ever be the final statement on a historic event. Though we will always have scholarly arguments over many of the details, and over which queries are more or less important, it is our duty as historians to find middle ground and keep the academic debates open, professional, and most importantly, constructive.