In Youth, heroism and war propaganda D.A.B Ronald charts the emergence of the young hero in British naval news-reporting, propaganda, literature and poetry from the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite R...

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal for Maritime Research on 25th November 2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/21533369.2015.1095004.

During the long eighteenth century, European navies saw the emergence of a class of highly specialised and professionalised naval officers. These officers were in command of ships and squadrons at major naval battles, led explorations, and in some countries also served ashore as administrators of admiralties and dockyards. Officer training differed from country to country, and careers in different navies were subject to a variety of systems of ranks and promotions that relied both on cultural and on systemic factors. This article explores how the three northern European nations of Sweden, Denmark and Britain developed systems suited to the particular demands of their social and political situations. It presents the results of new research in a comparative context to examine the factors that shaped the development of officer training systems and the criteria used for determining officers' career prospects. Shore-based academies are a useful point of comparison: despite a common curriculum, the development and significance of each navy's academy varied widely. All three navies struggled with the tension between the fundamental demands of life at sea and the behavioural and educational expectations of gentlemen officers. By focusing in particular on officer training, this article provides a variety of perspectives on the origins, emergence, and development of professionalism and expertise in the eighteenth-century maritime world.

In October 1805, two massive fleets met off the south-west coast of Spain for what became the best known and most celebrated naval battle in the history of the Atlantic World. In 2005, Britain cele...

Roger Knight, having written a rightly acclaimed biography of Nelson (The pursuit of victory: the life and achievement of Horatio Nelson, 2005), turns his attention in this substantial new study to...

This article investigates British imaginations of the Asian and African seamen, known as lascars, during the steamship era and its immediate aftermath. The role of these seafarers was much debated by shipowners, marine officers, politicians, civil servants, trade unionists and others in Britain in these years. In this debate, lascar identity was a highly ‘slippery’ and contested one. There was a complicated relationship between ideologies and material interests in discourse about their role, with shipping companies and captains tending to support employment of lascars, and racial ideologues, British trade unionists and the Board of Trade opposing, or at least striving to limit, their inclusion in the labour force. Representations of the British sailor and the ‘lascar’ tended to be interdependent. The social agency of lascars shaped the way they were represented. The article proposes a periodisation of these struggles. It is suggested that an intense battle over the role of lascars at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth tended to produce a dominantly anti-lascar ideology. However, this did not actually result in an effective reduction in the role of the Indian seafarers in the British Merchant Navy. Changes in racial ideology and the political conjuncture led to a shift in policy towards the Asian and African seamen in the 1940s. But by then the end of the steamship and the coming of Indian independence were bringing the period of the ‘lascar’ presence on British ships to an end.