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The nineteenth-century Royal Navy was transformed from a fleet of sailing wooden walls into a steam powered machine. This book provides the first cultural history of technology, authority and the Royal Navy in the years of Pax Britannica. It brings to light the activities, backgrounds, concerns and skills of a group of actors who literally shaped the Royal Navy. The book demonstrates the ways in which naval architects shaped naval thinking about ship design and influenced how ships were employed in active service. The 1830 Whig government's Board of Admiralty abolished the Tory-controlled Navy Board and appointed Symonds to oversee many of its duties and made the self-fashioning of the enlightened 'sailor-designer' identity a priority. The book focuses on the implications of steam for the management of naval architecture. The shaping of the Warrior and the introduction of iron into the British warship took place against the backdrop of projecting naval power and actors building credibility for new materiel. HMS Captain fully represented Cowper Coles's ideas of what a turret ship should be, and her launch the culmination of over ten years' effort, to secure what he considered an ideal trial for demonstrating his design ideas. The Royal Sovereign was one of the Royal Navy's first warships built under the 1889 Naval Defence Act, which provided £21.5 million for ten battleships, thirty-eight cruisers and other smaller vessels. The Navy is one of the most historically significant, and yet singularly neglected, institutions in the history of technology and war.
In 1805 Susannah Middleton travelled with her husband, Captain Robert Middleton, to Gibraltar where he was to run the naval dockyard. Abroad for the first time, Susannah maintained a regular correspondence with her sister in England. Casting light on a collection of letters yet to be fully published, the paper gives an account of Susannah‘s experiences as described to her sister. Consideration is given to Susannah‘s position as the wife of a naval officer and her own view of the role she had to play in her husband‘s success. Written at a time when an officers wife could greatly improve his hopes for advancement through the judicious use of social skills, the Middleton letters provide evidence of an often overlooked aspect of the workings of the Royal Navy.
While most of the Germans who suffered expulsion during the First World War lived within British shores, the Royal Navy brought Germans from throughout the world to face incarceration in the their network of camp. This book offers a new interpretation of global migration from the early nineteenth until the early twentieth century. It examines the elite German migrants who progressed to India, especially missionaries, scholars and scientists, businessmen and travellers. The book investigates the reasons for the migration of Germans to India. An examination of the realities of German existence in India follows. It then examines the complex identities of the Germans in India in the century before the First World War. The role of the role of racism, orientalism and Christianity is discussed. The stereotypes that emerged from travelogues include: an admiration of Indian landscapes; contempt for Hinduism; criticism of the plight of women; and repulsion at cityscapes. The book moves to focus upon the transformation which took place as a result of this conflict, mirroring the plight of Germans in other parts of the world. The marginalisation which took place in 1920 closely mirrored the plight of the German communities throughout the British Empire. The unique aspect of the experience in India consisted of the birth of a national identity. Finally, the book places the experience of the Germans in India into four contexts: the global history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; German history; history of the British Empire in India; and Indian history.
Royal tours of the 1800s and early 1900s, and since, have created much documentation, perhaps the most obvious record contained in newspapers and magazines, newsreels and then radio and television broadcasts. Tours expressed and promoted royal and imperial authority, though in some instances they revealed resistance against expansionist designs. The royal visitor was the central actor in a tour, but was surrounded by an entourage of other people and a store of paraphernalia that played essential roles. This book examines how presentation is managed when ambassadors are sent in place of the royal personage. Sultan Alauddin of Aceh mounted a royal tour by proxy in which he was embodied - and concealed - in his gifts and in the humbler persons of his placeholders. Prince Alfred Ernest Albert, Duke of Edinburgh, provided a template for later royal tours in three ways. First, he pioneered a new relationship with the Royal Navy as a training institution for British princes. Second, his lengthy visits paved the way for similarly ambitious global tours. Alfred's tours cultivated a range of trusted support staff. Imperial citizenship and even Britishness were embraced by non- English and non- British subjects of the queen. One young prince who was present in Britain at some of the most glittering events was Thakur Sahib Bhagvatsinh, a Rajput who ruled Gondal. The book also discusses Kaiser Wilhelm II's tour, King Sisowath and Emperor Khai Dinh's tour to France, the Portuguese crown prince's tour of Africa, and tours during Smuts's Raj.
officers, the Australian colonial governments, the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Societies in London, and British government departments including the Admiralty. Public outrage, fanned by humanitarian publications and the agitation of sympathetic members of Parliament, produced the Pacific Islanders Protection Act in 1872 1 and an extension in the boundaries and resources of the Royal Navy’s Australian
naval architecture in iron, and of gunnery, [we hope] that our men-o’-war will still be constructed to look as much as possible like ships’. This article was not just interested in appearances, but also 1 ‘The successful launch of the Warrior’, The Times 23818 (1 January 1861), 7. 2 ‘Iron ships’, Engineer 10 (26 October 1860), 275 – 6, esp. 275. 90 Shaping the Royal Navy 3.1 HMS Warrior, artist unknown (1872) in the prospects of the sailor in these ships that seemed to resemble scenes from Britain’s growing urban industrial cities more than the history
maritime protection. New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand formed small auxiliary naval units over the succeeding decades, though they were legislatively restricted to territorial waters. 3 Imperial expansion and technological advances increased the cost of the Royal Navy for British taxpayers. The colonial empire, which derived defensive and economic benefits from
popular disturbances, by sending in troops, or by introducing an embargo on trade’, leaving Hong Kong in an almost perpetual state of insecurity. 51 The defensive unpreparedness of the colony was brought into focus between 20 April and 31 July 1949, when Chinese Communist forces fired upon and held hostage in the Yangtze River the Royal Navy sloop HMS Amethyst , undermining British
Particular skills v 1 v Particular skills: warrant officers in the Royal Navy, 1775–1815 Evan Wilson Warrant officers are the forgotten men of the Georgian navy. Above them, commissioned officers have received substantial historical attention, beginning with, but not limited to, the ever-increasing biographies of Nelson.1 Below them, the lower deck has come under growing scrutiny, much of it focused on the question of impressment.2 Warrant officers of wardroom rank, on the other hand, have only been studied in fits and starts. These men – the master, the
, technology, and experience aboard the USS Monitor (Baltimore, MD, 2000), 7–12. 272 Shaping the Royal Navy institutional authority of their makers.4 It has brought to light the activities, backgrounds, concerns and skills of a group of actors who literally shaped the Royal Navy; and rather than taking them for granted, it has examined their authority to act by resurrecting controversies and has recovered the politics of ship design. Through this contextual approach it has shed new light on the history of naval architecture. It has followed naval architects through the