The Politics of Protection: The Royal Navy and the Atlantic World, 1756–1815 Event
For more information regarding this event, please telephone John McAleer on 023 8059 2239 or email j.mcaleer@southampton.ac.uk .
Event details
Historians of the Atlantic have tended to take a curiously landed approach to their work, studying the regions of the Atlantic littoral without much direct reference to the sea or to seafarers. Perhaps even more curiously, historians of the British Atlantic world have yet to turn serious attention towards the seaborne institution that made that world possible: the Royal Navy. Similarly, while historians of the navy have offered detailed and often forensic analyses of the Royal Navy in a number of British social, political and military contexts, no major study of the institution has yet taken an Atlantic perspective, connecting it directly to the themes of migration, slavery, plantation agriculture, colonial politics, and imperialism.
This conference aims to redress these imbalances by emphasising the importance of the Royal Navy in Britain's Atlantic and wider imperial history. As a mobile and pan-imperial arm of the British state, deployed across and around the Atlantic in a variety of contexts, the navy provides a unique prism for assessing the ways in which the British Atlantic was both integrated and differentiated in the late eighteenth century.
To explore this, the event will bring together scholars currently working on aspects of the Royal Navy and the British Atlantic in order to gain a better understanding of the ways that the navy protected, facilitated, and shaped the British-Atlantic empire in the era of war, revolution, counter-revolution, and upheaval between the beginning of the Seven Years War and the end of the conflict with Napoleonic France. Papers will assess the varied roles of the navy, addressing themes such as the politics of identity, technologies of power, and the strategic importance of maritime considerations in the British Atlantic world. It will build on recent work in Atlantic history that focuses on the possibilities offered, and problems posed, by the maritime nature of Britain's eighteenth-century Atlantic world. It will also seek to question the limits - conceptually and geographically - of that world, suggesting that, by bringing together historiographies of the Royal Navy and the British Atlantic, we can gain greater insights into maritime, Atlantic, imperial, and naval histories.
Programme
Panel 1
James Davey (NMM): ‘The Royal Navy and the role of Empire in a European War, 1803-1815'
Stephen Conway (UCL): ‘The Navigation Acts, Atlantic Commerce, and British naval power'
Coffee
Panel 2
Patrick Walsh (UCD): ‘The view from the "Irish Station": Ireland and the Royal Navy, c. 1700-1782'
Helen Paul (Southampton): ‘The Royal Navy and convoys in the Atlantic World'
Joshua Newton (NMM): ‘Naval power and empire in West Africa, 1750-1807'
Lunch
Panel 3
Sian Williams (Southampton): ‘Circuits of Knowledge: The Royal Navy and the Caribbean'
Christer Petley (Southampton): ‘Nelson's Caribbean and the British Atlantic empire'
Tea
Panel 4
Mary Wills (Hull): ‘Envoys of abolition: Royal Navy officers and the anti-slavery cause in the Atlantic Ocean'
John McAleer (Southampton): ‘Atlantic periphery, Asian gateway: The Royal Navy and the South Atlantic'
(This draft programme might be subject to alteration)
Delegate fee
Waged day delegate - £35
Unwaged day delegate - £15
Payment
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