Subject to – but also, crucially, unmoored from – the terrestrial polities that birthed and often enlisted them, the seafaring populations of the modern and early modern Atlantic produced ephemeral cultures of radicalism that scholars have, in recent decades, skillfully disinterred. The influential work of Markus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh has foregrounded sailors’ articulation of radical positions on labor, sovereignty, equality, and racial inclusivity, with states invariably the authorities whose dictates are contested.Footnote ¹ More recent work in literary studies has reapplied a similar critical lens, attending in particular to the ways maritime fiction, as well as print culture among sailors, have expressed projects, desires, and fantasies running counter to the restrictive conditions of modernity.Footnote ² Around the nodes of transoceanic contact that sailors mapped out across the Atlantic world, modern contours of global commerce, imperial politics, and nationalism were thus not only sculpted, but also vigorously questioned.

It is against this interpretive backdrop that one ought to read Nathan Perl-Rosenthal's Citizen Sailors, which debuts the story of US maritime citizenship between independence and the War of 1812 – a story whose radical crux has to do with collaboration, rather than contestation, between sailors and the state. During this period, American independence disrupted traditional methods of defining sailors’ nationalities based on “commonsense” associative relationships between language, culture, and sovereignty; British and American sailors, with their shared linguistic and cultural heritage, were difficult to distinguish on these old grounds (43). Maritime warfare between Britain and France during the last decade of the eighteenth century left undocumented American sailors vulnerable to fraudulent impressment by the British Navy, and left their neutral ships vulnerable to seizure by French privateers – fast-moving ships that engaged in legalized, though poorly regulated, “commerce raiding” during times of war (36). In either scenario, the mere plausibility of the argument that a neutral American vessel was British or contained British sailors – a door left open by the absence of systematic documentation – proved economically ruinous, as hundreds of sailors and ships were wrongly seized under exactly that false pretense.

In an effort to curb these behaviors and mitigate its losses, the US government began after 1800 to distribute paper certificates that attested to the citizenship of every sailor who manned its commercial vessels. For Perl-Rosenthal, Custom House protection certificates, as these documents were known, introduced a form of citizenship that was “precocious” and “pregnant with radical possibilities” (14). More often than not, as his impressive research shows, their protections extended to seafarers of all economic and even racial backgrounds. Though nation-states had been issuing passports for centuries, such documents were accessible almost exclusively to elites. Custom House protection certificates, meanwhile, authenticated the national affiliation of not only masses of white working-class sailors, but also free (and, on rarer occasions, even enslaved) black sailors.

Perl-Rosenthal includes enough stories of black and mulatto US sailors encountering special difficulties with press gangs and foreign tribunals to make clear that the equality implied by their possession of maritime citizenship did not translate to real social equality, or even always to the same level of protection that white sailors enjoyed. Among the most striking of the book's many examples is that of the HMS Actaeon, a ship whose crew composition suggested that its press gangs were, Perl-Rosenthal argues, targeting “just those Americans whom they knew would be most vulnerable to impressment”: of the 121 impressed Americans who sought the government's help while serving on the Actaeon, twenty-three were of African descent (195–96). Citizen Sailors does, however, illustrate convincingly that US maritime citizenship in the early 1800s consciously involved a level of racial inclusivity that would not be seen on dry land for another century. There was recognition at all levels of the national hierarchy that “the value of sailors to the nation made it crucial to look past race and birthplace – even to look past enslavement – in order to enfold these men within the state's protection” (273). Indeed, this logic became so ingrained over time that, in 1812, Secretary of State James Monroe “sharply rebuked” a customs officer in New Orleans for issuing different documents to African Americans – there was, Monroe explained, “no legal basis” for doing so (224).

Consistent with this picture of unprecedented and indiscriminate issuance of protection certificates is Perl-Rosenthal's steady reluctance to paint US sailors as rootless renegades to whom reductive national affiliation was simply assigned by the state as a means of control. He shows, rather, that sailors “willingly participated in and even led the process of creating American national citizenship … It was their pleas” – pleas concerning the threats posed by external states – “that started the federal government down the path of embracing them as citizens, not the other way around” (15). As Perl-Rosenthal shows in great detail in chapters 6 and 7 – the book's most stimulating pages – sailors went so far as to supplement their vocal (and temporarily unmet) demands for citizenship documents with a new repertoire of gestural and declarative practices that performed their attachment to US state power: they took oaths of loyalty, marked their bodies with gunpowder tattoos, and swore affidavits for one another (207). Even when the federal government did appoint itself the mandatory and exclusive arbiter of maritime citizenship in 1803, mariners became voluntary participants in extending this new regime. Over a hundred thousand Custom House protection certificates were issued between 1796 and 1815; compare that with the twenty-two thousand passports issued by the State Department during the entire first half of the nineteenth century, and the sheer magnitude of this effort – a democratic collaboration between sailors and the state, in Perl-Rosenthal's view – becomes clear (221–22).

This refusal to directly oppose American sailors to the US state distinguishes Perl-Rosenthal meaningfully from other scholars of belonging in the early republic, who have stressed the coincident emergence of citizenship privileges and state-sanctioned discrimination in the US's national and imperial territories. Perl-Rosenthal rightly accedes to this line of thinking, albeit in reference to a later moment – that of Dred Scott v. Sandford, which categorically denied African Americans citizenship in 1857: “The triumph of nationality in … newly powerful states,” he writes, “went hand in hand with the development of a selective, even discriminatory vision of who belonged” (9). What Citizen Sailors nonetheless gestures toward is the copresence, however fleeting, of a multitude of distinct moments – scattered all across the Atlantic – in which one may find traces, or “glimmers,” of an alternative to this story of violent exclusion (273). By patiently deferring the resolution of a historical narrative that would sooner have him forget the moments to which he attends, Perl-Rosenthal has offered a substantial testament to the importance of buoying seemingly marginal pasts, of keeping them afloat long enough to preserve their vital energies.