This chapter argues that the conflict at sea was an important and frequently overlooked part of the Napoleonic Wars. Focusing primarily on the Royal Navy and French maritime forces, but also mentioning the navies of Spain, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and United States, it outlines the manifold ways in which maritime warfare shaped wider events on land, and helped determine the conflict’s final outcome. It demonstrates that French attempts to invade Britain were successfully rebuffed by the Royal Navy, ensuring that Britain remained in the conflict. The chapter then offers a more modern take on the commonly misunderstood Battle of Trafalgar, arguing that it was far from decisive and did little to change the course of the war. The naval conflict continued in earnest after 1805, and the war of trade became all-consuming, particularly after the inception of ‘Napoleon’s Continental system’. Here the navy offered a stubborn resistance to the French Emperor’s objectives, helping to encourage illicit trade with the European continent while also expanding Britain’s empire and mercantilist reach elsewhere in the globe. Finally, it demonstrates that maritime support was crucial to the land war, not least Wellington’s Peninsula campaign.

By comparison with the continental powers, Britain had no more than a medium-sized army, but the largest navy in Europe.  This chapter seeks to explore the bases of Britain’s naval strength, going back to the seventeenth-century Navigation Acts, and then to consider how that strength was deployed in the war against Napoleon.  It argues that the Royal Navy, despite the limited impact it might be thought that it could have on land warfare, played an important part in the final defeat of Napoleon.

The British Army took part in numerous operations, ranging from small expeditions to the West Indies, Africa and along the European littoral to major operations in Portugal, Spain and Belgium. Initial struggles with these responsibilities, together with those of imperial policing and maintaining order in Ireland would oblige the Army to implement extensive reforms, particularly in tactics and unit organisation, even while the system of purchase for officers remained intact. While British infantry produced mixed results in the field during the French Revolutionary Wars, in time it became noteworthy for its musketry and remarkable doggedness in battle. Chronically understrength and notoriously difficult to control, the cavalry tended to play only a minor part on campaign, while shortages of artillery and engineers plagued the Army throughout this period. Albeit comparatively small, in creating an Iberian foothold which soon developed into a major theatre of operations, the instrument forged in the battles and sieges of the Peninsula and southern France helped drain Napoleon’s resources over a substantial period and established the high standard of battlefield performance which was to reach its apogee on the field of Waterloo, from which would emerge one of history’s greatest commanders – the Duke of Wellington.

The introduction lays out the book’s main arguments and themes, and compares the Royal Navy to the two different contexts which it straddled: the maritime world, and the armed forces. Naval service was more strictly regulated and anchored in the structures of the state than work in the merchant marine, and it was invested with explicit national and patriotic meaning. However, it also differed from service in the Army, as it required a good proportion of recruits to have specialised skills, and usually integrated them all into mixed crews, rather than establishing separate ‘foreign’ units. The Navy’s peculiar status, suspended between the military and national on the one hand, and the maritime and transnational on the other, is what makes it an important case study. If ‘foreign Jack Tars’ were in some senses mercenary fighters, they were also primarily – like ‘British’ Jack Tars themselves – a transnational, mobile, and often highly professionalised seafaring workforce. Studying them in the crucial historical juncture of the French Wars allows us to present a transnational history of a national institution, expose the compromises and contradictions underlying the power of modern states, and probe and deconstruct the very meaning of the term ‘foreigner’.

Chapter 5 begins by briefly looking at the British Slave Trade Act of 1807, which also marked the beginning of the Royal Navy’s operations off the coast of West Africa. It concentrates on the developments that led from a national ban and its unilateral military enforcement by the United Kingdom to its international and multilateral implementation. A crucial turning point is marked by the Congress of Vienna, at which the political pressure built up by the abolitionists was so great that, for the first time, the proscription of the slave trade was jointly proclaimed and enshrined as a humanitarian norm in international law. This interdict then formed the point of reference for a series of highly controversial negotiations between the European states to decide on collective measures to be taken against this border-crossing problem. A bilateral approach between Britain and the continental powers finally resulted in a mechanism for implementation to be set up, which consisted of a previously unheard of combination of military and legal measures and which, in the shape of the Mixed Commissions for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, produced one of the first forms of international jurisdiction.

In the third interlude, ‘The Storm’, I examine the performance of a single song by one singer, the crippled black sailor Joseph Johnson. Taking an approach somewhat indebted to Timothy Brook’s Vermeer’s Hat, I pursue the elements bound up in Johnson’s performance right across the globe, from the Antipodes to Jamaica, from Versailles to the West End stage, placing this East End performance within an imperial narrative of cultural appropriation, assimilation, and identity formation. Johnson emerges as in many ways the epitome of the ballad-singer: a marginal figure disadvantaged by both race and injury, whose self-fashioning (based on Jamaican Jonkonnu practice) was designed to reposition himself at the heart of both metropolitan and national notions of patriotism.

The role of the Royal Navy in the British Atlantic world has been understood as projecting imperial military power and guarding inter-oceanic trade. However, the Royal Navy's role in the creation of a legal culture in early modern Sierra Leone revises our understanding of its multifaceted mission. Royal Navy regulations and customs implemented on warships translated into the rule of law and administration on land in the context of Sierra Leone. A common legal culture, grounded by the Royal Navy's legal practices, united the culturally diverse population in Sierra Leone: the Temne, the Black Poor from London, British abolitionists, black Nova Scotian settlers, Maroons from Jamaica, and Liberated Africans after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Examination of these legal dynamics over time contribute to an understanding of how the establishment of colonial law, through the Royal Navy, became formalised in Sierra Leone within the pre-colonial and early colonial period.

Rebellious collective action is rare, but it can occur when subordinates are severely discontented and other circumstances are favorable. The possibility of rebellion is a check – sometimes the only check – on authoritarian rule. Although mutinies in which crews seized control of their vessels were rare events, they occurred throughout the Age of Sail. This book is the first to analyze mutiny sytematically using techniques borrowed from epidemiology and in light of a new theory that links grievances to collective action.

The introduction explains why comparatively little is known about the musical cultures of the British armed forces despite music’s quotidian nature in the British Army, Royal Navy and Royal Flying Corps/Royal Air Force. This book will therefore examine the formal and informal applications of music in the British forces on land, sea and air, during their periods of work, rest and play, in military camps, on ships, in aerodromes, on the battlefields, in hospitals and prisoner of war camps, theatres, cinemas and canteen huts. It argues why the musical cultures of Britain’s armed forces should be examined in the social, cultural and military contexts in which they developed.

Dissatisfaction with the Royal Navy’s World War I performance led a generation of officers to analyze the fleet’s wartime record. This analysis revealed three problems: over-centralization of authority, a reluctance to fight night actions, and an overly defensive use of destroyers. In an effort to correct these issues, the Royal Navy made changes to its doctrine, training, and professional military education that improved the Navy’s World War II performance, especially in surface warfare. Reforms flowed from a variety of sources, including First Sea Lord Adm. David Beatty, contributors to the Naval Review, and Mediterranean Fleet exercise. The interwar reforms reflected an organizational culture that pursued improvement and learning in response to the perception that in World War I, the Navy failed to live up to historical standards of success.

Dissatisfaction with the Royal Navy’s World War I performance led a generation of officers to analyze the fleet’s wartime record. This analysis revealed three problems: over-centralization of authority, a reluctance to fight night actions, and an overly defensive use of destroyers. In an effort to correct these issues, the Royal Navy made changes to its doctrine, training, and professional military education that improved the Navy’s World War II performance, especially in surface warfare. Reforms flowed from a variety of sources, including First Sea Lord Adm. David Beatty, contributors to the Naval Review, and Mediterranean Fleet exercise. The interwar reforms reflected an organizational culture that pursued improvement and learning in response to the perception that in World War I, the Navy failed to live up to historical standards of success.