From Jack Tar to Union Jack proves to be another fine addition to the Studies in Imperialism series from Manchester University Press. Mary Conley's book is especially welcome because—as a quick perusal of the series titles indicates—it is the only work so far to deal exclusively with the Royal Navy. Conley demonstrates in rich detail how this service branch transformed its image in the age of imperialism so that life at sea came to be regarded less as confinement in a floating prison than as the “natural home” and “especial birthright” of Englishmen (124). Despite the magisterial works of Arthur Marder, Paul Kennedy, Bernard Semmel, Jon Sumida, and Jan Ruger, the story of the navy's modern “invention” in the imperial public consciousness has received much less attention than the similar trajectory of the Victorian army.

Conley begins her study with a thorough survey of the changes forced upon the Royal Navy by its transition from a wind-powered, wooden platform fleet to the diesel and steel behemoth of the Edwardian age. The replacement of the “hire and discharge” personnel system with a continuous service navy, competition with the merchant marine for recruits, and complicated new technologies precipitated a wave of reforms for the enlisted men who are the focus of Conley's study. Training and education opportunities enhanced their technical skills. Leave privileges, disciplinary practices, bonus pay programs, and state support for families ashore all improved. By the 1890s, recruiters were attracting boys beyond the traditional port towns that had supplied the sailing fleet, and what Conley calls the professionalization of the lower decks was well advanced. It is not surprising that the technologies of the Second Industrial Revolution required new skills from naval personnel as from other parts of the workforce, but Conley's use of admiralty records and sailors’ memoirs allows her to construct an exceptionally compelling account of how much life at sea and in port changed between the Crimean and the First World Wars.

More intriguing are Conley's arguments for the ways that evolving imperial missions and ideologies of late Victorian manhood shaped the transformation. By the late nineteenth century, according to Conley, we can discern a coherent “national agenda” to present Royal Navy seamen as exemplars of British manhood abroad and hence legitimate standard-bearers of a global civilizing mission. Her analysis of visual images (recruiting posters, advertisements, cartoons) and cultural icons like HMS Pinafore (1878) or G. A. Henty's only shipboard novel, Do Your Duty (1900), places gender constructions at the center of this story. Some of her conclusions about the process of creating a new discourse of imperial masculinity will be familiar to readers of John Tosh, Heather Streets, Anne McClintock, and Graham Dawson. But Conley also shows how public representations of naval manliness manifested themselves concretely in sailors’ lives. Enlisted men became the targets of evangelically inspired temperance campaigners (seamen could get extra pay for forgoing the grog ration); beneficiaries of official policies to encourage family life; and, by necessity, practitioners of a stoic, professional work discipline appropriate to the mechanized navy. Conley uses one fascinating source from the enlisted world itself—the periodical Bluejacket—to show how thoroughly seamen came to embrace the qualities of respectability, patriotism, and professional competence relentlessly promoted over two generations. By the Edwardian years, letters from men at sea disputed the moral improvers’ obsessions with personal uplift. Asserting the uprightness of the vast majority of ratings, the correspondents urged improved working conditions and more training opportunities to reward the initiative and work ethic already present in the fleet.

Conley notes that hers is a study of public representations and discourses about British military manliness more than a story of life below decks as experienced by the men themselves. She analyzes how media spin about opportunities for social mobility through a life at sea was not borne out by actual advancement into the officer ranks or any rough equality of status on shipboard. Navy aficionados like Lord Charles Beresford and Rudyard Kipling continued to purvey sentimentalized stereotypes of chipper deference and uncomplaining pluck that trivialized the men's own conceptions of duty. Yet, the democratizing of imperial manhood to include the Navy's enlisted ranks was a genuine advance in how British society conceptualized the contributions of working people. No longer was heroism confined to warrior elites or noble action to gentlemen. Conley finishes with an intriguing deconstruction of the official apotheosis of the boy-seaman Jack Cornwell who died a lonely and terrifying death at his forward gun on the HMS Chester during the Battle of Jutland. The passivity of Cornwell's sacrifice, standing stoic but powerless at his post, captured perfectly the form of heroism available to the masses in combat as unleashed by the technologies that created the new ranks in the first place.

Conley would be the first to admit that From Jack Tar to Union Jack does not close the door to future scholarship on the Royal Navy's interface with British society. Amid all the imagery of stalwart manliness and restrained professionalism, one almost yearns for a glimpse of Ronald Hyam's “empire of sexual imperatives,” for example, or a Foucault-inspired analysis of the navy as a totalizing institution. Conley's subtle depiction of ways that ships were presented as both sites of domesticity (129) and sexual objects to be mastered (147) shows one direction where studies of this homosocial culture might go. And though she acknowledges that a counterdiscourse of anxiety about the dangers and vices of navy life persisted, there is little articulation of it here. Thus, From Jack Tar to Union Jack is both fruitful and provocative. Its contextualizing of fifty years of interwoven changes in technology, strategy, official policy, social opportunity, philanthropy, gender constructions, and cultural representations is graceful enough to be accessible to undergraduates and well worth the read by all scholars of modern Britain.