Two centuries since they disappeared from the ports of Britain's Atlantic world, the press gangs of the Royal Navy continue to fascinate students and historians alike. Monographs published since the turn of the millennium include Daniel James Ennis's Enter the Press-Gang: Naval Impressment in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (2002), Nicholas Rogers's The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and its Opponents in Georgian Britain (2007), and Denver Brunsman's The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (2013). The latest entry into the field, The Myth of the Press Gang by J. Ross Dancy, is an important work with bracing conclusions.
Impressment is currently the subject of a polarized debate between those who posit that it was rational, selective, and tacitly accepted, and those who believe it was always fundamentally coercive, at times indiscriminate, and frequently attended with violence. Considerably more is at stake here than the specific question of the prevalence of impressment or the historical reputation of the Royal Navy. Rather, the answer is relevant to a wider set of questions: How coercive was Britain's fiscal-military state? Did British naval power originate in the activities of a polite and commercial people? Or was it ruthlessly implemented by a liberty-denying elite? That said, Dancy's work is decidedly one of naval history, and so it is desirable to draw immediate attention to three particular findings that will be of interest to those working outside the field.
The first concerns the scale and role of impressment. Impressment has been presented as a major source of naval manpower, with some historians suggesting that it was responsible for raising as many as 40 to 50 percent of naval seamen during wartime. Dancy finds otherwise. Pressed men formed only 16 percent of the navy in the period 1793–1801 (39). The Royal Navy depended, overwhelmingly, upon volunteers. Impressment was used not to supply the overall manpower of the navy but to supplement it with the most skilled and necessary seamen. Volunteering was crucial—but impressment, even in small doses, was critical. It was in the synergy of the two that British naval power was derived.
A second revelation concerns Dancy's figures on Irish membership in the British navy, which are relevant to recent discussions concerning the effect of the French Wars on national identity. At a time when Ireland held a third of total population of the British Isles, Irishmen formed 19 percent of naval seamen—51 percent were English, 10 percent were Scots, 3 percent were from Wales, and 8 percent were foreign (49–50). Not only is the figure for the Irish lower than some have suggested, but it contrasts with the significantly larger Irish contribution to the army in the period, a figure usually adduced at around 30 percent. But, as Dancy points out, it is consistent with how we should understand naval recruitment: Irish seamen were more likely to be unskilled, reflective of the fact that “Ireland did not play a large role in international trade” (50).
Third, is the significance of the fact (mentioned almost in passing) that only 24 of the 27,174 men in Dancy's sample listed their place of birth in Africa (116). In recent years, the claim that 25 percent of Britain's naval seamen were African in the 1790s has resurfaced in the literature. While others have questioned it, Dancy's work furnishes the strongest evidence for setting it permanently aside.
Where do these arresting numbers come from? They are derived from a deep statistical study of the muster books of the British navy. Scholars have long known of these records but have been challenged to find ways to exploit them fully. The problem is not just that they are voluminous. The problem is that in the recording how a naval recruit came to be mustered on ship, they reveal that a large proportion were “turned over” from naval vessels on which they had been already serving. Since tracing sailors individually from ship to ship back to the moment of their original entry is considered practically impossible, scholars seeking hard numbers on impressment have had to content themselves with small samples bedeviled by the problem of the men turned over. Dancy gets around the problem by tackling it on such a scale that he can use a factoring process to accommodate for the turning over. Taking the entire French Revolutionary War (1793–1801) as his period, and assuming that the navy of 1792 was all volunteer, he performs factorings that ultimately reveal that 73 percent of seamen serving in the 1790s were volunteers, 9 percent were volunteers under the terms of the Quota Acts of 1795 and 1796, and only 16 percent were pressed men (39). Moreover, by attending to the skill ratings of recruits, Dancy is able to give solid statistical support to the argument that impressment targeted the most skilled of seamen. Sixty percent of the volunteer seamen were skilled, while among the pressed the figure rises to 84 percent (132–33).
Such formidable statistical findings require that current understandings of both volunteering and impressment be revised, which Dancy does in substantial chapters that integrate other findings and arguments into the literature of the field. In a final chapter he explores the impact of the Quota Acts. Repetition is an issue in some of these discussions, which are otherwise effective presentations of the state of the questions. Tables, bar graphs, and pie charts are used throughout (these are small, presented in grayscale, and thus some are hard to read).
Dancy closes by reiterating the call for a new social history of the navy (first delivered by N. A. M. Rodger some thirty years ago). It is not a call intended for the faint of heart: the process of data entry for his project took twenty-two weeks. And given that these findings are limited to the period 1793–1801, scholarly work on impressment is unlikely to cease. It would be particularly interesting to discover whether impressment's role in the British Atlantic varied over time and place. That is one of several questions that this work implicitly poses.
