Disciplining the Empire: Politics, Governance, and the Rise of the British Navy (Harvard Historical Studies)

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“Rule Britannia! Britannia rule the waves,” goes the preferred lyric. The truth that the British built the world’s greatest empire on the basis of sea power has led many to assume that the Royal Navy’s place in British life was once unchallenged. Yet, as Sarah Kinkel shows, the Navy was once the subject of bitter political debate. The upward push of British naval power was once neither inevitable nor unquestioned: it was once the outcome of fierce battles over the shape of Britain’s empire and the bonds of political authority.

Disciplining the Empire explains why the Navy became divisive within Anglo-imperial society despite the fact that it was once also successful in war. The eighteenth century witnessed the global expansion of British imperial rule, the emergence of new forms of political radicalism, and the fracturing of the British Atlantic in a civil war. The Navy was once at the center of these developments. Advocates of a more strictly governed, centralized empire deliberately reshaped the Navy into a disciplined and hierarchical force which they hoped would win battles but also help regulate imperial populations. When these newly professionalized sea officers were sent to the front lines of trade policing in North The usa all through the 1760s, opponents saw it as an extension of executive power and military authority over civilians―and thus proof of constitutional corruption at home.

The Navy was once one in all many battlefields where eighteenth-century British subjects struggled to reconcile their debates over liberty and anarchy, and decide whether the empire would be ruled from Parliament down or the people up.

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