The foundations of naval history: John Knox Laughton, the Royal Navy and the historical profession

2000 ◽  
Vol 37 (10) ◽  
pp. 37-5889-37-5889
Keyword(s):  
Royal Navy ◽  
Naval History ◽  
Historical Profession

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Quintin Colville ◽  
James Davey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Influences ◽  
The Past ◽  
Current State ◽  
Naval History ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Many ◽  
Historical Profession

This introduction gives on overview of the sub-discipline of naval history since its emergence in the early eighteenth-century. It outlines the various social, cultural and political influences that have shaped the subject over the past three centuries, and discusses its relationship with the wider historical profession. The second half of the introduction sums up the current state of naval history, describing the many historiographies that now have a bearing on how the subject is conducted. Each contribution to the volume is introduced in this context, offering a precis of the chapters that follow.

Escaping court martial for sodomy: Prosecution and its alternatives in the Royal Navy, 1690-1840

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-36
Author(s):  
Seth Stein LeJacq
Keyword(s):  
Full Range ◽  
Sexual Contact ◽  
Sex Crimes ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Naval History ◽  
Same Gender

This article reassesses the sailing Royal Navy’s treatment of homoerotic crimes. Historians have argued that same-gender sexual contact was rare and loathed on naval vessels, and that trials were consequently uncommon but produced exceedingly harsh outcomes. Drawing on new archival research, this paper reveals that naval actors had more varied and complex attitudes towards the homoerotic and that courts treated these crimes more moderately on average than has long been assumed. Court martial trials also represented only one – extreme – outcome of an elaborate system that naval actors used to ‘resolve’ detected sex crimes. Summary punishment, flight, dismissal and a range of other routes served as common non-judicial alternatives. Detailed exploration of a protracted late-Georgian dismissal case, that of Lt. Arthur Walter Adair, shows that it is essential to attend to the full range of naval reactions to the homoerotic if we are to fully understand its place in naval history.

scholarly journals The Case of Fabian Philip, Karlskrona’s First Jewish Entrepreneur: A Swedish example of the Port Jews Phenomenon?

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 69-89
Author(s):  
Harry R:son Svensson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Local Society ◽  
Naval History ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Naval Officers

When studying a local society dominated by naval officers and the extent to which they integrated the Jewish community in their midst, a new perspective on Swedish naval history is revealed. The Swedish Royal Navy has always been internationally orientated, but previous research has not taken this into account. Furthermore, not much research has been undertaken on the Swedish Royal Navy at all. As a metropolitan outpost, Karlskrona has generally been seen, by historians and contemporaries alike, as largely peripheral to the upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jews were not allowed to settle in Sweden until 1779, but in 1782 their settlement was permitted, though restricted to Stockholm, Gothenburg and Norrköping. The naval city of Karlskrona became an exception to the regulations. Previous research on the Jewish parish in Karlskrona was undertaken in the 1910s, and mistakenly concluded that it was the most unfriendly environment for Jews in early modern Sweden. This article seeks to reinterpret old sources and add newly found ones, which together engender a new perception of Jewish integration in Karlskrona. This is done by adopting the Port Jews concept and recognizing naval cities as internationally orientated production centres. In line with this, the article argues that Karlskrona, together with Gothenburg, should be interpreted as a Swedish example of the Port Jews concept.

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times

2021 ◽  
pp. 58-97
Author(s):  
Keith Grint
Keyword(s):  
Status Quo ◽  
Political Support ◽  
High State ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Naval History ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Military

This chapter concerns four mutinies that occur against the background of revolutionary times, when the status quo is under threat, the military subordinates are no longer willing to acquiesce quietly, and the establishment is in a high state of nervous anxiety. The first two mutinies, at Spithead and the Nore in 1797, shook the British Royal Navy to its core: in the face of revolutionary acts across the channel in France, the seamen at Spithead effectively stop working until their claims of better pay and conditions are met. Given the precarious nature of the British Admiralty and government at this time, the mutiny is a success, but the consequences for a very similar mutiny just weeks later at the Nore are catastrophic for the mutineers as the British establishment unveils the mailed fist that it had been unable to deploy at Spithead. A few months later, in the same year, the crew of the Hermione undertake one of the bloodiest mutinies in British naval history, but one aimed at disposing of the officers and escaping to foreign lands, not securing improved pay and conditions. Some of the mutineers disappear for good, while others are hunted down and executed in a show of terror as meticulous as the original mutiny. The final mutiny covered here occurs on the Russian ship the Potemkin in 1905. Once again, the action occurs against the background of revolutionary fervour, but the requisite political support remains inadequate and the mutiny ultimately fails.

Naval History

1991 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Williams ◽  
Andrew P. White
Keyword(s):  
Royal Navy ◽  
Post Graduate ◽  
Naval History

A bibliography of post-graduate theses concerning Naval History, subdivided into the Royal Navy; Naval Administration; Procurement and Logistics; Vessels; Ordnance, Gunnery and Ballistics; Naval bases and yards; and a comprehensive breakdown of Naval History by Era, spanning Ancient and Modern through to 1990.

Laughton's legacy: naval history at King's College London*

2004 ◽  
Vol 77 (196) ◽  
pp. 274-288
Author(s):  
Andrew Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Armed Forces ◽  
Academic Standards ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Nineteen Seventies ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
King's College ◽  
Current State ◽  
Inaugural Lecture ◽  
Naval History ◽  
The Subject

Abstract Professor Sir John Laughton (1830–1915) gave King's College London the leading role in the development of academic naval history in Britain. He linked the professional educational interests of the Royal Navy with the academic standards set by the English historical profession, which he had helped to create. After many years of neglect the subject was revived at King's in the nineteen-seventies. In this inaugural lecture, the first Laughton Professor of Naval History reflects on the development of naval history in the twentieth century, the current state of the subject and the problems and opportunities of working with armed forces, processes in which King's College has taken a leading role.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

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