Eleanor Hubbard has placed English sailors at the center of her engaging and provocative account of England's emergence as a maritime power with global outreach. This she accomplishes in seven chapters, each portraying English sailors as skilled workers bent on seizing opportunities wherever they might reside. In the book's first chapter, she emphasizes the centrality of plunder and wealth acquisition by individual sailors in shaping English maritime culture. In chapter 2, however, these acquisitive impulses run headlong into the interests of England's emerging chartered companies doing business abroad. In the chapter that follows, Englishmen defend their traditional rights (as they understood them) against the prerogatives of trading monopolies and the claims of colonial governors. English sailors continued to transition in and out of piracy, as portrayed in chapter 4, all the while projecting a strong English identity, but these men, when playing an active part in their country's commercial expansion, demanded respect and achieved modest benefits. In chapter 5, for example, East India Company ship commanders allowed sailors to engage in private trade and reduced the severity of shipboard discipline. In Hubbard's sixth chapter, sailors are shown moderating their unruly ways in order to benefit from expanding trade, and in her final chapter, the English state attempted (with mixed results) to align its maritime labor force with England's national interests.
Hubbard sets her story in the context of a rapidly changing English labor market. The middle decades of the sixteenth century were years of severe social and economic disruption. Rising demand abroad for English woolen cloth drove fundamental changes in the structure of agriculture, the spearhead of which was the enclosure of arable land to provide pasturage for sheep. Enclosure and the resulting unemployment, a rapidly increasing population, persistent inflation brought on by a massive infusion of gold and silver from Spanish America, and deep sectarian divides unleashed by the English Reformation exacerbated the unsettled state of affairs.
Readers unfamiliar with the mid-sixteenth-century English economy—Hubbard's starting point—might be surprised by England's low standing among early modern European states and the sorry condition of the English merchant marine. But economic forces were stimulating growth in the stock of ships and mariners. Among these was rising demand for fish and coal. England's increased presence in the Newfoundland fishery grew the number of sailors and vessels capable of long-distance voyages. And expansion in the coal trade rejuvenated the coasting commerce and overall shipping capacity. As Hubbard emphasizes, the surge in maritime plundering that accompanied conflict with Spain late in the century swelled England's maritime workforce and shaped its ethos.
A propensity toward lawlessness—at least beyond the sight of land—was endemic in early modern maritime culture and had been since antiquity. That Englishmen should share in such violence is hardly surprising. What made the experience of Englishmen distinctive, however, was the degree to which opportunities to pillage and plunder lured men into the undermanned maritime workforce just as England struggled to keep pace with the growing demand for labor in long-distance trade. It was a sellers’ market, and English sailors took advantage of the opportunities it offered—legal and otherwise. Hubbard's sailors differed markedly from their landbound brethren. Unlike miners, and others struggling to survive in England's overstocked pool of labor, sailors enjoyed exceptional mobility and could demand high wages. As English ships ventured ever further from home, Hubbard tells us, the scarcity of mariners gave “Englishmen at sea” increased leverage to shape the circumstances of their employment. When more appealing (i.e., lucrative) opportunities arose, sailors moved freely across borders in the international maritime labor market. Opportunities for private gain were as likely to be found aboard Mediterranean corsairs and Atlantic pirate ships as on conventional trading vessels.
Readers familiar with older works such as Cheryl A. Fury's Tides in the Affairs of Men: The Social History of Elizabethan Seamen, 1580–1603 (1962) and Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína's Spain's Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century (1992; translated 1998) will find much of interest in Hubbard's book, particularly regarding national identity. But one must be cautious about ascribing the plundering tendencies, naked self-interest, and shifting allegiances she describes exclusively to English sailors. Marauding pirate ships, for example, drew recruits from wherever they could be found, and sailors from throughout the maritime world gravitated—as they do today—to the best paying berths, regardless of a vessel's origin. The reason is obvious: to quote Willie Sutton, the legendary American bank robber, “because that is where the money is.”
Hubbard's Englishmen at Sea: Labor and the Nation at the Dawn of Empire, 1570–1630, will appeal to scholars interested in labor history, especially as it relates to the sea as a workplace. The book will, as well, find an audience among those exploring connections between global commerce and empire building. Hubbard's approach, as she explains, “centers the remarkable experiences of early English mariners, flawed and forgotten men who played a central role in their nation's rise to global prominence, but whose small victories and devastating defeats were very much their own” (p. 25). Because this is a story told on a global scale, it is striking that the author missed the opportunity to include a set of illustrative maps that would have provided visual orientation to England's expanding presence on the world's oceans. But this is not to take away from the author's considerable achievement in underscoring the significance of English sailors in this transitional period—the decades shortly before and after the turn of the seventeenth century—to the development of the world economy.
