SUMMARY: For hundreds of thousands, the naval wars of the 1790s meant shock proletarianization at sea. Unprecedented numbers of men -many without previous experience of the sea, many of them foreign-born -were forced into warships and made to work under the threat of savage violence. Desertion rates reached previously unimaginable levels as men fled ships and navies. The greatest wave of naval mutiny in European history followed in their wake. Hundreds of crews revolted, sometimes paralyzing whole fleets in the midst of the annual fighting season. This article considers the struggles in the French, Dutch, and British navies, concluding that the key development that precipitated the sudden explosion of mutiny was the internationalization of Europe's lower decks.When the inter-imperial arms race accelerated in the late eighteenth century, European navies entered a three-decade long period of vast expansion.

On September 21, 1797, the crew of his Majesty's frigate Hermione, cruising in the Mona Passage between the islands of Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico, rose on their officers, brutally murdered ten of them, handed the ship over to the Spanish authorities in Caracas, and then, with only the slightest of traces, disappeared into the gaping crevices of the war-torn Atlantic world. It was the most violent mutiny in the history of the British Royal Navy.And only as such has it been remembered. Even though contemporaries linked the mutiny to the revolutionary upheavals of the 1790s, historians have made no effort to reconstruct that context. Instead, dazzled by the unusual level of violence, previous work has started with the assumption that the mutiny was a unique event, and then gone on to explore in what ways the crew, their commander, and their experiences together were different from those of other ships in the navy. The most common explanation has been to heap blame on Hugh Pigot, the frigate's exceptionally sadistic commander, and to accuse the crew of having suffered an episode of collective psychological breakdown when they violently revolted against him and his cruel shipboard regime. The mutiny, according to this explanation, was an isolated failure of command, not the intentional action of those who no longer wished to be commanded, and thus it would serve little purpose to look beyond the Hermione for reasons that drove the men to rise up. 1 Naval historians have not only perpetuated a miniature version of the great man theory of history in this way, but they have also overlooked ample evidence which connects the mutiny to the unprecedented explosion of lower deck unrest across navies in the 1790s, and beyond that to the vast transnational networks that sent revolution thundering across the Atlantic throughout the decade. The blinders imposed by writing their histories from the top down have thus been reinforced by an approach which takes single nations and empires as its primary units of analysis and rarely considers what happens beyond or between these as in any way relevant. Social historians, by shifting the perspective from the quarterdeck to the forecastle, have long since demonstrated how the mobility and cosmopolitanism, early proletarianization, and everyday experience of both cooperative labor and sharply enforced social hierarchies made deep-sea mariners an especially unruly element throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. 2 Yet despite having added crucial dimensions to our understanding of the dynamics of early modern Atlantic history, social historians, even those who study the maritime world, have for the most part done relatively little to challenge the limitations that the national/imperial approach continues to impose on their analyses. 3 at University of Texas at Austin on June 8, 2015 http://jsh.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from journal of social history 160 fall 2010The persistence of this approach -and that despite the rise of Atlantic and other transnational histories -has o...

The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that during the age of revolution (1760s–1840s) most sectors of the maritime industries experienced higher levels of unrest than is usually recognized. Ranging across global contexts including the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans as well as the Caribbean, Andaman, and South China Seas, and exploring the actions of sailors, laborers, convicts, and slaves, this collection offers a fresh, sea-centered way of seeing the confluence between space, agency, and political economy during this crucial period. In this introduction we contend that the radicalism of the age of revolution can best be viewed as a geographically connected process, and that the maritime world was central to its multiple eruptions and global character. Mutiny therefore can be seen as part of something bigger and broader: what we have chosen to call maritime radicalism, a term as well as a concept that has had virtually no presence in the literature on the revolutionary era until now.

Colonial and postcolonial port cities in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions functioned as crucial hubs in the commodity flows that accompanied the emergence and expansion of global capitalism. They did so by bringing together laboring populations of many different backgrounds and statuses – legally free or semi-free wage laborers, soldiers, sailors, and the self-employed, indentured servants, convicts, and slaves. Focusing on the period from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, a crucial moment in the establishment of the world market, the transformation of colonial states, and the reorganization of labor and labor migration on a transoceanic scale, the contributions in this special issue address the consequences of the presence of these “motley crews” on and around the docks and the neighborhoods that stretched behind them. The introduction places the articles within the context of the development of the field of Global Labor History more generally. It argues that the dense daily interaction that took place in port cities makes them an ideal vantage point from which to investigate the consequences of the “simultaneity” of different labor relations for questions such as the organization of the work process under developing capitalism, the emergence of new forms of social control, the impact of forced and free migration on class formation, and the role of social diversity in shaping different forms of group and class solidarity. The introduction also discusses the significance of the articles presented in this special issue for three prevailing but problematic dichotomies in labor historiography: the sharp borders drawn between so-called free and unfree labor, between the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, and the pre-modern and modern eras.

Jerram shows how women, completely outside the legal, political, and economic realm, claimed access to more and more spaces. In his chapter on sexuality Jerram follows more or less the same line of thought. He analyses the places where homosexuals were able to meet, and shows the fluctuating freedom of gay practices in the course of the twentieth century. His leading argument is that, influenced by the varying spatial possibilities, sexuality changed from being something people did to something they were, from a practice to an identity.The last chapter of the book is dedicated to the city itself. ''Building Utopia'' describes the origins and outcomes of town planning, and of planning as a general tendency in the twentieth century. Jerram elaborates on the various consequences of the idea that all problems in society could be solved by the government. For the city, he claims, the vision of modern planners to provide all residents with a warm and well-constructed house delivered great results. More than in the other chapters, Jerram takes a clear position, especially when he defends the postwar high-rise estates built across Europe. From the 1970s onward, he claims, the suburbs had a bad reputation among intellectuals and in the media. But it was not the estates that formed the problem; it was the policy of the city that allocated the houses almost exclusively to poor people, underinvested in education, and neglected health care. For decades, Jerram claims, residents were happy to live in the suburbs. His defence of suburbs contrasts with a large discourse on city planning that originates with the work of Jane Jacobs. She claimed that a high concentration of residents and the unplanned nature of older city neighbourhoods were essential to creating a successful city, with entrepreneurship, social control, and social contact.2 Jerram criticizes this idea, without mentioning Jacobs's work. Leif Jerram has written an outstanding book on the street level of European history, and convincingly showed its importance for the course and understanding of the twentieth century. Especially in the last few chapters, he has adopted a very personal style and showed his deep affection for the modern metropolis. This makes his book a joy to read, but it will also raise some eyebrows concerning the academic basis for some of his statements. As an argument for his idea that poverty is not necessarily synonymous with disintegration, he mentions the nicely decorated alleys of the poorer residents in his home city, Manchester, contrasting them with the alleys of the wealthy yuppies. But is every space that easy to interpret? On the whole, however, this personal approach is not at all problematic; indeed, it challenges us to look more closely at our own surroundings. With his ability to combine many different themes and subjects in a clear and comprehensive way, Jerram has written both an important historical study and a real page turner.