Overbearing, avaricious and difficult, yet talented and ambitious, George Brydges Rodney has never attracted much sympathy or understanding. He was nevertheless an original thinker and one of the great admirals of the eighteenth century. The contents of this volume, the first of three, document his career from 1742 until 1763 a his private and political life. His early years as a captain were spent in the severe conditions of the North Sea and in taking privateers in the western approaches. During the peace after 1748 he was Governor of Newfoundland and in the Seven Years' War blockaded Le...

By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the seven home dockyards of the British Royal Navy employed a workforce of nearly 16,000 men and some women. On account of their size, dockyards add much to our understanding of developing social processes as they pioneered systems of recruitment, training and supervision of large-scale workforces. From 1815-1865 the make-up of those workforces changed with metal working skills replacing wood working skills as dockyards fully harnessed the use of steam and made the conversion from constructing ships of timber to those of iron. The impact on industrial...

This collection of naval court martial transcripts and related documents from the time of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars contributes not only to our understanding of military jurisprudence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but also to our knowledge of Georgian and Regency criminal law in general. Each chapter presents transcripts relating to different groups of offences. Chapter one deals with procedural matters; Chapter Two covers trails arising from transgressions of the laws of Georgian and Regency society like drunkenness, theft, violence and...