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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.
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
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
‘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
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.
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
A New Naval History brings together the most significant and interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary naval history. The last few decades have witnessed a transformation in how this topic is researched and understood, and this volume captures the state of a field that continues to develop apace. It examines – through the prism of naval affairs – issues of nationhood and imperialism; the legacy of Nelson; the sociocultural realities of life in ships and naval bases; and the processes of commemoration, journalism and stage-managed pageantry that plotted the interrelationship of ship and shore. This bold and original publication will be essential for undergraduate and postgraduate students of naval and maritime history. Beyond that, though, it marks an important intervention into wider historiographies that will be read by scholars from across the spectrum of social history, cultural studies and the analysis of national identity.
This book provides a broad account of the nineteenth-century cult of King Alfred. It reveals the rich cultural interest of the corpus of texts as a whole. The book redresses a misleading modern emphasis on Arthur and the Victorians, and addresses a genuine gap in the current literature on nineteenth-century medievalism. The book focuses on what was probably the apex of Victorian Alfredianism. It provides the background to this event both in terms of the wider cultural movements and in the sense of the Alfredian tradition which the nineteenth century inherited. The intersection of the cult of Alfred with nineteenth-century British politics is considered in the book, which focuses upon the role that Alfredianism played in debate about the future of the monarchy. The book speculates how the Saxon king was enlisted to vindicate and ennoble those institutions of which Victorian Britain was most proud - notably its navy, law-code, constitution and empire. It examines the conceptions of ninth-century Wessex as a time of immense cultural change - the mirror-image of the nineteenth century - and reviews Victorian appropriations of Alfred's reign as a prestigious starting point for myths of national progress. The book further focuses upon more domestic narratives - the use of Alfred, by Victorian authors, to exemplify moral values, and the rewriting of his life as a parable of error and redemption. Finally, the crucial question of Alfred's decline in fame is addressed in the book, which surveys the diminished interest in the Saxon king after 1901.