The Evil Necessity is an ambitious book. It purports to be a study of British naval impressment in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. In fact, it is rather less: a study of naval impressment before the American Revolution in an Atlantic context. That context is important not only because Britain impressed sailors in virtually every commercial sea where it was engaged but also because Denver Brunsman wants to emphasize the contradictory effects of impressment. An important aspect of the fiscal military state, and more controversially “a fundamental aspect” of imperial expansion, impressment prompted resistances and evasions that proved the undoing of Britain's first empire. Nowhere was this more evident than in Western colonial settings, where statutory controls, legislative leanings, libertarian ideology, and port resistance made impressment a nonstarter on land and a difficult, vexatious mode of recruitment at sea. For Brunsman, the crucial and emblematic protest against impressment took place in Boston in November 1747 when a broadly based crowd reacted to Admiral Knowles's highhanded tactics of impressment by taking hostages of some of his officers, burning one of his small boats, besieging the House of Representatives, and intimidating Governor Shirley into inaction. “The Boston Knowles Riot,” writes Brunsman, “showed what could result when the violence of Atlantic impressment riots combined with the communitarian ethic of American colonial societies and weak systems of imperial law enforcement” (233). In 1747 Britain was confronted with imperial overreach, a lesson not lost on American colonists in their future battles with the metropole.

Aspects of the colonial story have been told before: by Douglas E. Leach, John Lax and William Pencak, Jesse Lemisch, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, and Richard Pares (for the West Indies). No one has quite tied it together so ably, and here Brunsman displays considerable powers of synthesis and historical engagement as well as a fine writing style. The problem lies in the contrast that is inherent in the overall thesis. Essentially, Brunsman wants to argue that impressment worked in Britain and was broadly, if reluctantly, accepted as a method of naval recruitment, a more acceptable mode of enlistment than the French inscription maritime or some equivalent, which smacked of state “despotism.” It is in the Western Hemisphere that protests against impressment were most vociferous and effective, setting the stage, in the United States at least, for the citizen-making protests against the impressment of Americans in the War of 1812.

Brunsman is sure-footed in the colonial context, but his knowledge of impressment in the British Isles is a lot more superficial, heavily reliant on secondary sources and heavily dependent on my near-namesake N. A. M. Rodger, who seeks to defend impressment at every turn. In discussing the emergence of the impress service on land, Brunsman states (76) that the press gangs fell under the jurisdiction of the Navy Board, which was also responsible for the fitting and servicing of ships. In fact, the Navy Board was really only responsible for the financial side of the press gang operations; overall policy, the dealings of the regulating officers with the civil authorities, and any litigation that might emerge from impressing men remained firmly with the Admiralty. Had he closely investigated the letters of regulating officers in the ports, he would have realized this, and other matters.

Brunsman essentially wants to resuscitate the reputation of the British press gangs, which he believes have been unfairly maligned by myself and others. Brunsman argues that the press gangs were fundamentally interested in recruiting skilled men, not in picking up the riffraff from the streets. I agree. But that did not mean, as Brunsman seems to suppose, that they were really only interested in able seamen, the topmen essential for men of war, or that able seamen were the majority of men impressed. Press warrants talked of recruiting seamen, seafaring men, and “such persons whose Occupations and Callings are to work in vessels and Boats upon Rivers” (5), and as my forthcoming documentary volume on Bristol impressment will reveal, press gangs took that mandate seriously. They did so because they realized the huge potential of coastal workers in particular as nurseries for the navy. Severn trowmen, some of whom sailed in vessels with topsails, knew how to handle boats in rough weather. So, too, did British Channel pilots, Cornish fishermen, and North Sea colliers. There was a huge diversity of seafaring skills that the navy wanted to tap, and in trying to do this as the navy rapidly expanded, they intruded dramatically on coastal and wharf-side communities.

Those intrusions were met by evasion and resistance. The scale of resistance was formidable. Quite apart from trade in protections and other means of evading the press, I have uncovered to date 640 serious affrays in the period 1740–1815, making anti-impressment riots the second most typical mode of collective violence in Britain after bread riots, and conspicuously more fatal to its participants. The litigious, vexatious, violent nature of impressment wore press gangs down, generated significant tensions between government and the merchants of the ports, and in some cases resulted in virtual no-go areas where the Admiralty more or less abandoned impressment. It's more than a stretch to suggest that this system operated efficiently or that it was broadly accepted. Brunsman tries to discount the volume of protest by suggesting it was fuelled by a “moral economy” of what was acceptable practice in impressment and what was not. But there is no compelling evidence that this was the case, and Brunsman doesn't provide any. Many of the most formidable anti-impressment riots in Britain were rights-based protests; as the print literature demonstrated, they protested the servitude sailors endured in the land of liberty, a class-inflected servitude that stood in stark contrast to their role as the purported guardians of that liberty in Britain's wooden walls. Impressment was a dysfunctional, destabilizing phenomenon that nearly came to grief on several occasions. In the summer of 1779, the Admiralty impressed everyone, even those with statutory exemptions, and then sought parliamentary indemnity for its actions. In 1795, it was so desperate for men that it had to begin impressing from inland counties under the Quota Act. By 1811, impressment in ports like Bristol had slowed down to such an extent that the Admiralty considered trimming its operations, at the same time encouraging press gang officers to become niggardly officious in its policing of protected men such as trowmen, watermen, and pilots. Brunsman overlooks this evidence and the bottlenecks of recruitment that confronted the government. He also ignores the fact that in a crunch the navy was not particularly choosy about whom it would take. The dramatic drop in male theft at the outset of war, well documented by John Beattie, Peter King, and Douglas Hay, suggests that mopping-up operations did happen.

Britain's maritime supremacy had little to do with impressment or even with the quality of its seamanship, although some naval historians would squawk at that. It had more to do with the country's ability to finance the navy and its fleets, and to provide, in periods of difficult recruitment, bounties substantial enough to attract men into the service on a voluntary basis, especially from an overpopulated, underemployed Ireland, which provided a third of all naval recruits in the final decades of the eighteenth century.

Brunsman's dyadic model doesn't work: it simplifies the dynamics of impressment to an operationally successful center and a rebellious periphery. It would have been better had Brunsman developed his insightful comments on the “cultures of impressment” based on different parts of Britain so that one could map the complex interactions of Atlantic impressment in terms of local customs, “legalities,” conventions of self-government, social hierarchies, and economies. Guernsey offers an interesting example of an island that believed, like the American and Caribbean colonies, that it was exempt from impressment, and had the Court of Jurats back up the claim in a maritime world of illicit commerce. Scotland in the 1750s poses the question of just how intrusive a London-based government was prepared to be in a country where smuggling was commonplace and disaffection rife, at least in the Highlands. More examples like these would allow one to break from a dyadic model that in Brunsman's current formulation reads a little like another variant of American exceptionalism. We don't need the American empire striking back so much as a model that accommodates the different rhythms and modalities of impressment in a diverse Atlantic world; a transnational model rather than a thinly veiled national one in which Boston (and New York) are predictably the epicenter of libertarian practice, where opposition to impressment always had more radical consequences. But such a model takes time to research and fits poorly with the dominant artisan mode of historical production operating in North America—a problem, perhaps, for all studies that aspire to transcend oceans and continents.