British naval historians have long argued that a major result of the Seven Years' War was the emergence of the Royal Navy as an instrument of British power in European geopolitics. Traditional interpretations have focused upon the technological, strategic, administrative, and logistical developments that gave rise to perhaps the preeminent European military institution in the century and a half after the conclusion of the war in 1763. In his short study, Shipping and Military Power in the Seven Years' War: The Sails of Victory, the late David Syrett suggests that British naval success in the Seven Years' War would have been impossible without the emergence of a “sophisticated and highly effective logistical support operation” within the Royal Navy (ix, 7). Syrett describes the chartering, administration, and employment of merchant shipping as “an unprecedented effort,” for privately owned vessels had never been assembled so capably in support of naval operations prior to the Seven Years' War (ix, 5).

However, in recent years scholarly attention has increasingly shifted from a focus upon the administrative organization of the Royal Navy to a more nuanced analysis of the social, political, and economic disorders that accompanied the emergence of a blue-water navy in the 1750s. In The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and Its Opponents in Georgian Britain, Nicholas Rogers maintains that these disorders are best understood as a manifestation of the popular opposition to the practice of naval impressment that erupted in British ports after the outbreak of the Seven Years' War in 1756. Naval historians, Rogers maintains, are “focus[ed] determinedly” with the Admiralty, the Navy Board, and crewing ships, but offer “only fleeting glimpses of the opposition to them” (3). Rogers submits that traditional accounts “foreclose a comprehensive treatment of naval impressment” (3).

Within this interpretative framework, Rogers notes that in The Wooden World (1986), N. A. M. Rodgers claims that impressment was a “hum-drum … in-service affair” from which ordinary people kept their distance and that led to little violence. Downplaying the social repercussions of impressment, Rogers maintains that the capacity of press gangs to “inflict” harm upon maritime communities was limited both by their small numbers and their vulnerability to prosecution, conceding that while onshore resistance to the press was not uncommon, it was “invariably led or instigated by deserters from the navy” (38). Syrett echoes this view of impressment, implying that seamen were simply strategic factors whose resistance toward impressment was significant only to the extent that it threatened the success of the British war effort (121). Rogers suggests that this “benign view of impressment” fails to acknowledge that impressment was a major social and political grievance (3, 38).

The pervasiveness of anti-impressment riots or “affrays” is perhaps the most significant aspect of Rogers's research and is well demonstrated in chapter 3, “Resisting the Press Gang: Trends, Patterns, and Dynamics.” Rogers's examination of popular opposition to the press reveals that the legal status of impressment remained unclear throughout the eighteenth century, a controversial issue that involved a good deal of debate as to what was “ legal and what was just” (3–4, 18, 86). Shortfalls in recruitment persisted throughout the Seven Years' War, leading the navy to impress men with only the slightest connection to the sea regardless of whether they made suitable seamen (8). Relying upon Admiralty records for the sixty-seven years between 1738 and 1805, Rogers discovered a total of some 602 affrays, suggesting that impressment affrays “were not minor quayside incidents involving a few deserters” but, rather, embraced whole communities (129).

The prevalence of libertarian opposition to impressment forms an important theme in chapter 2, “Impressment and the Law.” Press gangs were routinely “careless of legal niceties” and illegally searched the homes of proprietors suspected of hiding “deserters” (27). Lawless and indiscriminate impressment practices, and a sweeping definition of who was susceptible to impressment, aroused great opposition in British ports. Rogers suggests that behind the issue of the legality of impressment lay the larger issue of whether impressment violated much cherished political and legal rights enshrined in the Settlement of 1689. While civil authorities were encouraged to support impressment, many hesitated to back legal press warrants and often obstructed press gangs for fear of violent popular opposition (7, 23, 57). Rogers suggests that while magistrates were unable to dispute the legality or necessity of impressment in court, they were able to “constrain its operation” (22).

Perhaps the sharpest difference between Syrett and Rogers lies in their treatment of the emergence and meaning of British identity in the latter eighteenth century. Although naval historians have long depicted British seamen as “compulsively patriotic,” Rogers suggests that a seafarers' commitment to “king and country was pragmatic and selective” (15, 105). Efforts to impress British seamen made clear that disingenuous appeals to patriotism were no antidote to violent resistance by self-interested seamen who sought recognition as free-born Englishmen, the heirs of rights they were “exhorted to defend at sea” (15, 105, 125). Rogers argues that if British naval supremacy was a national cause that drew on the nation's economic and social resources, the “contribution of the lower deck was sidelined in the interests of property and political economy” (15). However, Syrett fails to acknowledge either the class implications of impressment or the possible importance of naval service as a breeding ground for British national identity. For Syrett, the creation of a naval administrative apparatus during the Seven Years' War was de facto evidence of the nascent British nationalism that accompanied the emergence of a powerful nation state capable of marshaling the social, political, and economic resources of the island kingdom (129). Despite appeals to patriotism, ill-treated seamen saw impressment as an unjust practice that violated the rights and interests of the poorest members of coastal communities. Popular opposition to the press was, in part, a manifestation of the social complexities that informed popular attitudes toward national identity after the mid-eighteenth century. These were dispossessed men who reacted to impressment not as patriotic sailors but, rather, as oppressed workers victimized by an intrusive state that valued military necessity above the rights of freeborn Englishmen.