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Navy, nation and empire v 4 v Navy, nation and empire: nineteenth-century photographs of the British naval community overseas Cindy McCreery This volume provides a timely opportunity to reconsider how we define and approach British naval history. Ships and war are of course a fundamental part of this history, but so too are people – civilians as well as officers and sailors. This is particularly true in periods of ‘peace’, such as the second half of the nineteenth century, when the Royal Navy depended on a diverse range of personnel on the spot as much as its
‘What is the British Navy doing?’ v 9 v ‘What is the British Navy doing?’ The Royal Navy’s image problem in War Illustrated magazine Jonathan Rayner This chapter examines the representation of the Royal Navy in the popular British publication War Illustrated, a weekly magazine published throughout the First World War. The magazine was in its own words ‘a weekly picture-record of events by land, sea and air’, incorporating maps, photographs and illustrations and the work of war artists alongside weekly reporting, editorials and informed commentary on the events
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.
Although Britain’s national identity had long been defined by its position as an island nation, its relationship to the sea, and its reliance on the navy, British and imperial identities became even more sharply attached to Britain’s naval heritage during the Age of Empire. The Royal Navy remained central to this new phase of imperial conquest that witnessed the expansion of
TNWC07 16/11/06 11:26 AM Page 173 7 Popularising the navy, rewriting the past: contemporary naval films World War II holds a celebrated position in the benign meta-narrative of American foreign relations. This narrative holds that the United States is a benevolent nation whose foreign policy is based not on pure selfinterest but rather on the greater good of all humankind . . . World War II was designed to defeat the evils of Nazism and Japanese expansionism . . . the Cold War was pursued in order to defend the rights of free peoples everywhere against
On 25 September 1911 the battleship Liberté exploded in Toulon harbour. This tragedy is just one of the many disasters that the French fleet suffered at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries and also represents the peak of these calamities, since it is undoubtedly the most deadly suffered by a French Navy ship in peacetime. The aim of this article is to study how the navy managed this disaster and the resulting deaths of service personnel, which were all the more traumatic because the incident happened in France’s main military port and in circumstances that do not match the traditional forms of death at sea.
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.
Sociocultural analyses of the Royal Navy v 3 v The Admiralty’s gaze: disciplining indecency and sodomy in the Edwardian fleet Mary Conley It is difficult to imagine that a historical study about homoerotic practices in the navy represents a new naval history – when it has been a site for naval research for forty years, yet the approach to engaging in studies of maritime sexualities has changed since Arthur Gilbert’s initial studies on disciplining sodomy cases in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Royal Navy.1 Within the past twenty years, there has
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
of the Three Universes of EU Border Control: Military/Navy–border guards/police–database analysts ’, Security Dialogue , 45 : 3 , 209 – 25 . Boltanski , L. ( 1999 ), Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press