scholarly journals ‘Arbitrary and cruel punishments’: Trends in Royal Navy courts martial, 1860–1869

2021 ◽  
pp. 084387142110376
Author(s):  
Andrew Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Formal Expression ◽  
Legislative Changes

Despite minor amendments to the Royal Navy's Articles of War throughout the eighteenth century, and a major reworking in 1749, both capital and corporal punishments were frequently employed as punishment for minor offences in a system that made England's ‘Bloody Code’ look positively humane. The 1860 Naval Discipline Act provided the first substantive overhaul of the original Articles of War, but historians have generally lamented this act as providing little comprehensive change to the governance of the navy. Using statistical data collected from thousands of courts martial records, this article takes a broad look at trends in naval courts martial, studying how these courts interacted with the legislative changes of the 1860s. Viewing how charges and sentences altered on the global scale, it becomes clear that the ‘arbitrary and cruel punishments’ of the previous century had at last given way to a centralized, formal expression of discipline.

scholarly journals Broken Worlds: Towards an Archaeology of the Shatter Zone

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Raffield
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Physical Geography ◽  
Trigger Factors ◽  
Eastern Woodlands ◽  
Term Change ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
Historic Change

AbstractIn recent years, archaeological studies of long-term change and transformation in the human past have often been dominated by the discussion of dichotomous processes of ‘collapse’ and ‘resilience’. These discussions are frequently framed in relatively narrow terms dictated by specialist interests that place an emphasis on the role of single ‘trigger’ factors as motors for historic change. In order to address this issue, in this article I propose that the study of the ‘shatter zone’—a term with origins in physical geography and geopolitics that has been more recently harnessed in anthropological research—has the potential to facilitate multi-scalar, interdisciplinary analyses of the ways in which major historical changes unfold across both space and time, at local, regional, and inter-regional levels. This article unpacks the concept of the shatter zone and aligns this with existing archaeological frameworks for the study of long-term adaptive change. I then situate these arguments within the context of recent studies of colonial interaction and conflict in the Eastern Woodlands of North America during the sixteenth to eighteenth century. The study demonstrates how a more regulated approach to the shatter zone has the potential to yield new insights on the ways in which populations mitigate and react to instability and change while also facilitating comparative studies of these processes on a broader, global scale.

The Navy

2019 ◽  
pp. 194-211
Author(s):  
Rory Muir
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Running Away

This chapter takes a look at the navy. For many boys growing up in England in the eighteenth century, the Royal Navy was immensely glamorous, the object of intense fascination. There was almost universal agreement that the navy was Britain's own particular strength, and that unlike the army, the navy defended the country and promoted trade without threatening traditional English liberties. Even in peacetime there were naval exploits to capture the imagination. A career at sea, especially in the navy, appeared exciting, romantic, and desirable; and there were numerous cases of young boys either running away to sea or demanding that their parents allow them to join the navy. Many parents favoured the navy as a career for their younger sons on more pragmatic grounds. It was traditional, patriotic, and thoroughly respectable.

Sierra Leone

2019 ◽  
pp. 138-152
Author(s):  
João José Reis ◽  
Flávio dos Santos Gomes ◽  
Marcus J. M. de Carvalho ◽  
H. Sabrina Gledhill
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Western Coast ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
British Colony ◽  
History Of

After being captured by the Royal Navy brig Water Witch, the Ermelinda is taken to Sierra Leone, a British colony, the history of which is narrated from its foundation by philanthroposts, including the leading abolitionist Granville Sharp, in the late eighteenth century up until Rufino landed there in December 1841. British cruisers deposited scores of liberated Africans there40,000 in the 1830s alone. As a result, Sierra Leone’s population included people of different faiths and ethnicities from all over the western coast of Africa and Mozambique. Anti–slave trade Mixed Commissions were installed in Freetown, where the trial of the Ermelinda was carried out for two months.

“The Seaman Feels Him-self a Man”

2004 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 40-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey D. Glasco
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Labor Dispute ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Historical Agency

To date, most interpretations regarding the agency of maritime workers in the late eighteenth century have posited the seamen as a united working-class body. However, the application of gender as a mode of analysis illustrates that a division existed amongst the working-class seamen in their vision of what it meant to be a worker, specifically a maritime worker. These differing ideas of masculinity drove a wedge between the seamen of the British Royal Navy, thus weakening their class solidarity. One faction of seamen favored the existing social contract accepted a society based on inequality, even amongst men, but in return demanded that their contributions as workers and as men be acknowledged by their rulers through both material and symbolic rewards. Similarly, another element of the seamen sought a more revolutionary solution in seeking rewards for their masculine contributions, which included acknowledgement of their roles as workers and rights as men through political equality. What it meant to be a seaman and the contestation of that definition motivated and limited the historical agency of seamen in the greatest labor dispute during the Age of Sail: the British seamen's Spithead and Nore mutinies of 1797. As a new approach to labor history, the examination of the power of internalized gendered definitions to limit the actions of workers' agency offers powerful new insights.

scholarly journals Counter-Theatre during the 1797 Fleet Mutinies

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Callum Easton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Potential Danger ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Popular Protest ◽  
Collective Resistance ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain

AbstractIn the spring of 1797, when French invasion appeared likely, the Spithead and Nore mutinies successively immobilized the two Royal Navy fleets responsible for home defence. The Spithead mutineers gained more pay and greater food rations for all Royal Navy sailors, and a general pardon for themselves. The Nore mutiny ended in collapse, courts martial, and the execution of approximately twenty-eight prominent mutineers. In their scale and potential danger, these fleet mutinies rank among the most serious manifestations of collective resistance in eighteenth-century Britain. In complexity, they far exceeded single-ship mutinies like the Bounty or Hermione. The mutineers deliberately subverted symbols of the legitimate rule of officers and deployed them in support of their own rival regime. “Counter-theatre” allowed the mutineer leaders to perpetuate their rule with minimal recourse to coercion by combining familiar symbols of naval order, new mutineer power structures, and sailors’ traditions of resistance. As such, the mutinies speak to wider literatures: to histories of the age of revolutions, to the revolutionary Atlantic, and to histories of popular protest and resistance.

scholarly journals Assessing the Economical Efficiency of Intermodal Chains in Global Trade

2018 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 01032
Author(s):  
Bogusz Wiśnicki ◽  
Dariusz Milewski
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Efficiency Analysis ◽  
Global Trade ◽  
Transport Efficiency ◽  
The World ◽  
The Usa ◽  
A Chain ◽  
Different Parts

The paper relates to the development of intermodal technologies used in international trade, together with factors which will influence that development at present and in the future. The aim of the paper is to assess impact of the integration of intermodal chains on logistics costs and thus on global trade. The special emphasize is laid on the problem of the diversity of standards of containers and transport technology in different parts of the world. This research is based on the available statistical data and information obtained from leading logistics operators. The authors conducted comparative analysis of the economic efficiency of usage of different sizes of cargo units, both standard and non-standard, relating to representative intermodal chain between the USA and Europe. In order to assess different scenarios a model was elaborated for calculating the total costs of such a chain, and transport efficiency analysis with the use of this model were conducted. The results of research presented in the paper confirm that integration of intermodal chains thanks to standardization of loading units in a global scale could be profitable. The results of logistics cost analysis prove measurable benefits for logistics operators and as well as their customers.

scholarly journals Raman spectroscopic analysis of archaeological specimens from the wreck of HMS Swift , 1770

2016 ◽  
Vol 374 (2082) ◽  
pp. 20160053
Author(s):  
Howell G. M. Edwards ◽  
Dolores Elkin ◽  
Marta S. Maier
Keyword(s):  
Raman Spectroscopy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Spectroscopic Analysis ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Materia Medica ◽  
Raman Spectroscopic ◽  
Raman Spectroscopic Study ◽  
First Pass ◽  
Alternative Techniques ◽  
Archaeological Excavations

Specimens from underwater archaeological excavations have rarely been analysed by Raman spectroscopy probably due to the problems associated with the presence of water and the use of alternative techniques. The discovery of the remains of the Royal Navy warship HMS Swift off the coast of Patagonia, South America, which was wrecked in 1770 while undertaking a survey from its base in the Falkland/Malvinas Islands, has afforded the opportunity for a first-pass Raman spectroscopic study of the contents of several glass jars from a wooden chest, some of which had suffered deterioration of their contents owing to leakage through their stoppers. From the Raman spectroscopic data, it was possible to identify organic compounds such as anthraquinone and copal resin, which were empirically used as materia medica in the eighteenth century to treat shipboard diseases; it seems very likely, therefore, that the wooden chest belonged to the barber-surgeon on the ship. Spectra were obtained from the wet and desiccated samples, but several samples from containers that had leaked were found to contain only minerals, such as aragonite and sediment. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Raman spectroscopy in art and archaeology’.

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