Our disease is the want of seamen and that we have not in England and its dominions that which is sufficient for both our trade, and for our Fleet.
—The necessity of increasing our English Seamen (c. 1690)Footnote 1The lack of certain people—able and healthy sailors—generated a new kind of police in late Stuart England.Footnote 2 During the wars against France between 1689 and 1714, the clash of strategic ambitions with demographic, economic, and political realities gave rise to new governmental approaches to the multitude of English seamen, their numbers, welfare, and health. In turn, these methods provoked vigorous public debates about potential solutions to the problem of manning the navy. This combination of public discourse and state activity directed at the health and welfare of seafarers marked the birth of naval biopolitics in late Stuart England. However, English naval biopolitics enjoyed a longer life as a genre of state publicity than as a method of mobilizing the population of seamen onto ships. By state publicity, I mean rhetorical works that strove to influence government policy and public opinion by promoting projects that a polemicist argued the state could and should undertake to better govern its subjects.
Any attempt to apply the concept of biopolitics––first advanced in Michel Foucault's 1970s lectures on the rise of modern forms of power, including a kind of disciplinary power (the conduct of conduct) that he called governmentality––to early modern history will no doubt strike many readers as provocative.Footnote 3 Nevertheless, there is much to gain from considering under a Foucauldian optic—the concept of biopolitics—the Royal Navy's implementation between 1690 and 1710 of new and publicly controversial policies, grounded in quantitative technologies, to manage the multitude of English seamen. For as Foucault mobilized the past in order to promote his philosophical program, naval biopolitics meant, mutatis mutandis, mobilizing and promoting political arithmetic in the service of the fiscal-naval state.Footnote 4 Like its distant German descendant called cameralism, late Stuart naval biopolitics was both a new model of statecraft and a form of state publicity.Footnote 5 Naval biopolitics in its directives, legislation, and pamphlet literature projected a fiscal-naval state capable of counting, tracking, and mobilizing the national stock of seamen onto its ships in a predictable, salubrious, and, most crucially, orderly fashion.Footnote 6 However, the chaotic, unhealthy, suspicious, and refractory multitude of seamen endured mostly untouched by the dialectic of experimental policies and publicized proposals directed against the navy's manning problem.
As Foucault theorized, a new kind of state power that applied particularly to bodies emerged in eighteenth-century Europe. This power abstracted subjects into populations, which rulers increasingly targeted in policies intending to quantify and to regulate biological aspects of human life, including health; Foucault called these techniques of rule biopolitics.Footnote 7 Unsurprisingly, both Foucault's thesis and his chronology are controversial, yet it is evident that new theories and modes of governing, grounded in the idea of populations of subjects, did emerge across early modern European polities.Footnote 8 Colonies especially, both proximate and overseas, created possibilities and generated pressures to which regimes responded by conceiving of human collectives as populations whose qualities and numerical sizes could determine success or failure for the sovereign.Footnote 9 To contemporaries, the policy of manipulating human collectives was political arithmetic. Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland is a prime example of a place where English rulers sought to measure and transform particular populations in order to better extract resources and maximize governance.Footnote 10 The employment of surveys, lists, censuses, and other quantitative technologies later became crucial for managing slave populations in the West Indies and North America.Footnote 11 The birth of biopolitics was long and painful for its countless human subjects in European and imperial contexts over the early modern era.
The reasons that the number and the health of seamen became both objects of public policy and matters of public disputation are well known. The Nine Years’ War and the War of the Spanish Succession both demanded huge numbers of sailors.Footnote 12 The English merchant marine, unlike the French or Spanish equivalents, remained operational during wartime to supply the nation and to help fund the war effort through customs duties, which meant that the navy and merchants competed for maritime labor.Footnote 13 Seamen tended to favor the merchant service because it could pay double the 24s per month offered by the navy. The competition for labor was especially fierce during the later seventeenth century. The number of seamen, as with other laboring groups, had declined in relative terms as population growth stalled after 1650. The simultaneous expansion of overseas trade markedly enhanced the value of maritime labor.Footnote 14 There simply were not enough able (that is, qualified) English seamen to “hand, reef and steer” in order to meet the navy's and the merchant marine's work-force demands in wartime. The problem persisted even though, during a war, Navigation Act restrictions on foreigners serving in the merchant service were suspended. Indeed, by 1694 the navy was pressing men “of able bodies, and between eighteen and fifty years” of age. In other words, older seamen were not exempt from the press gang during desperate times.Footnote 15
British maritime and naval historians continue to debate the relative merits and meanings of the subjection of seamen during the “Age of Sail” to the interests of the fiscal-naval state and commercial capitalists.Footnote 16 Scholars argue over, for example, the degree to which the navy's traditional and coercive answer to its chronic shortage of sailors, particularly at war's outbreak—impressment—represented a challenge to the senior armed service's image as the bulwark of national liberty.Footnote 17 The disagreement among historians about the level of coercion versus volunteerism for manning the Royal Navy reflects in turn different judgments about the degree and volume of social conflict within Georgian society and the wider British Empire.Footnote 18 Even scholars who reserve judgment on the paradox of forcing men to serve the cause of British freedoms acknowledge that manning the navy was the most intractable problem confronting the English and then the British imperial state between 1689 and 1815.Footnote 19
However, the literature on the long eighteenth-century Royal Navy's manning problems has overlooked the connections that contemporaries made publicly—primarily via print—between forcing sailors into fighting ships, the health of seamen, and possessing a healthy stock of mariners willing and able to serve the crown. Observers within and without the late Stuart navy perceived the lack of able seamen and the overabundance of sick and wounded sailors as twin symptoms of chronic and systemic disorders in the state's approach to the multitude of mariners. As the epigraph to this article suggests, these disorders were understood to be connected to the overall health of the body politic. What the late seventeenth century witnessed, in other words, was the birth of a form of public discourse that purported to diagnose the disorders underlying the navy's manning problems and that prescribed quantitatively grounded techniques for their cure. As the remainder of this article will show, naval biopolitics in the late Stuart era was both a new style of statecraft that ultimately failed to gain traction and a partially successful genre of fiscal-naval state propaganda, conceived by men who dreamed of applying innovative administrative technologies that would engender a burgeoning population of healthy, able, and well-ordered seamen.
Policing Sick and Injured Bodies: The Navy's Qs and Rs
Soon after the beginning of the Nine Years’ War, the challenge of caring for and keeping seamen in the navy propelled the Admiralty toward a new policy—the Qs (query) and Rs (run)—aimed at disciplining the bodies of sick and injured seamen. That policy in turn provoked for the first time a public debate over the navy's health care administration, which soon became overlaid with public discourses—in print and in Parliament—about new methods for better manning the navy. Indeed, impressment was criticized in print as early as 1689 as a “confused scramble of men” that failed to address properly the national shortage of seafarers. Other polemicists declared that pressing sailors into the navy was unhealthy. “The greatest cause of the distempers which do usually raigne among the seamen,” noted one, “[is] the nastiness of the prest men, who being pick't up and down the streets, so for the most part want clothes and linen to shift them, whereby they fall sick and so infect the rest.”Footnote 20
The existing system of onshore health care only worsened the navy's chronic manning shortage.Footnote 21 For Richard Gibson, intermittently active as an administrator since the 1650s, putting the navy's sick and wounded “in soe many lewd Alehouses in sea port towns” was a “fatall mischief.” This practice shortened the lives of many, retarded the recovery of others, and cost the Treasury dearly because the sick or injured were allowed up to a month's pay while on shore.Footnote 22 In particular, the women who nursed many sick and injured seamen in so-called town quarters became a source of moral and material concern for some naval officials. Landladies were accused of using alcohol and guile to swindle seamen from their pay, delay their recovery, or worst of all, encourage them to desert the service.Footnote 23 According to this argument, the navy's health care administration fostered disease and desertion, logical consequences of placing sick and injured sailors, men who were professionally cut off from the institution of normative manhood—the patriarchal household—into largely female-run dens of disorder.Footnote 24 Thus, a gendered view of effective and disciplined care and cure underlay efforts to modernize the Royal Navy's sick and wounded service after 1689.
By 1691, it was clear to the Admiralty that the existing method of caring for sick and wounded men hemorrhaged countless sailors from active duty. Following a special summit of flag officers at Chatham, the Admiralty introduced a policy intended to stop men who were set ashore sick or wounded from abandoning the service. The policy hinged on a paper technology that regulated navy seamen by monitoring their putative compensation: ships’ pay-books. The Admiralty ordered paymasters to mark “a Query on the Ships Books against each Man's name that shall be sett on Shore Sick or Hurt, for the stopping of their Wages until they shall return to their own or bring Certificates of their Entry on board some other of their Majesties Ships.”Footnote 25 So long as a “Q” stood next to a man's name in his ship's pay-book, he would not receive a wage ticket that normally was exchanged for cash at the Navy Office in London or at a discount with a navy agent or entrepreneurial ticket buyer.Footnote 26 The Admiralty ordered captains to correspond with the commission for sick and wounded seamen, which administered naval health care, so that officials would know who was set down where and when, and also when those same people were well enough to return to the service. Not surprisingly, for the duration of the war and subsequently, there were complaints that commanders did not always maintain correspondence with the sick-and-wounded commissioners as to the whereabouts of their men.Footnote 27 Additionally, seamen sent ashore who then failed to report back to their original vessels in less than thirty days—sometimes because they were transferred to hospitals in London, or were pressed from sick quarters onto other ships, or simply had not yet recovered—risked having Rs, meaning run or deserted, set next to their names in their ships’ pay-books.Footnote 28 To be marked as “Run” meant that the sailor forfeited all his pay on all the naval vessels on which he had served before and after his illness or injury. This designation was potentially a catastrophic sanction against seamen, who often went for very long periods without any pay, especially if they had been pressed from one ship returning to port onto another ship just leaving it—a much-despised practice known as “turning over.” In the meantime, the seaman and especially his dependents could accumulate crippling debts. Thus, the lives of many hundreds of seamen's wives, partners, and children, as well as those of local merchants who extended them credit, were often under severe strain for a long time.Footnote 29 The Qs and Rs cheated many unfortunate sailors and their families of sustenance.Footnote 30
As early as the winter of 1695, complaints about the many seamen (and their families) suffering from the Qs and Rs entered the stream of print-based lobbying raining down on parliamentarians.Footnote 31 For example, William Hodges, a London-based wage-ticket purchaser, directed his frustration for losing money on dead or run sailors at the navy's Qs and Rs. In two pamphlets submitted to Parliament in 1695, Hodges suggested that the Q and R policy was a discouragement to seamen joining the navy and, indeed, a probable cause of illness among sailors. “That fatal Misery of above an Hundred Thousand Seamen sick, this War,” Hodges declared in Great Britain's groans, “may owe its birth half of it unto the two first mentioned Parents,” the Qs and Rs. And, he asked pointedly, “if Men are turn'd from ship to ship until they are sick and then set on Shoar for cure and there dye, and be then Qd or Rd out of their Pay, how in this case can it be safe, to be in the service of the Nation for time to come?”Footnote 32 Were the navy to return to the old method of demobilizing and paying seamen annually, Hodges argued, this would allow them to “recover their Healths, and then they [would] be encouraged to come into the Service again.”Footnote 33
Clearly, heavy doses of self-interest crosscut William Hodges's stated concern for suffering sailors and the navy's manning problem, but his complaints were echoed by other quasi-professional polemicists, including Robert Crosfeild, who launched a series of complaints to Parliament about corruption during the Nine Years’ War. When Crosfeild denounced the navy's administration, he alleged that the Qs and Rs permitted wicked ships’ paymasters and clerks to hold back sailors’ pay, causing immeasurable hardship to them and to their dependents. An unscrupulous paymaster or clerk could, for example, mark a Q or R next to a sailor's name and then pocket his pay while the man languished in an alehouse. Like Hodges, Crosfeild argued that the policy was a key reason for the navy's ongoing manning problem. “The Sailors being inhumanely and barbarously treated,” he asserted, “is the only true cause why they so much decline in the public service … By all which it is plain, that whatever good Laws may be made for the Increase and Encouragement of Seamen, will prove ineffectual so long as these practices continue.”Footnote 34 Similarly, John Dennis, a minor literary figure and agent for seamen's wives, asked directly in a petition to Parliament, “how consistent it is with the Constitution of this Government, the inviolable laws of this realm, the credit of His Majesty's Service, or the Encouragement of seamen,” to withhold formerly sick or injured servicemen's pay.Footnote 35 Another petitioner stated plainly that raising navy sailors’ wages would “prevent them from Deserting His Majesty's Service and in great measure stop for the future Clamours that have been made by the Qs and Rs.”Footnote 36 A policy introduced to keep men from fleeing the navy was in fact stopping them from enlisting and provoking public protest from naval servicemen and their supporters.
Although English seamen had a tradition of representing their views to their betters on a range of subjects dating back at least to the outbreak of the Civil War, the volume of seamen's complaints aimed at Parliament during and immediately after the Nine Years’ War was unprecedented.Footnote 37 Hundreds of sailors had petitioned the Privy Council to take off the Qs and Rs as early as the winter of 1695. Seamen began lobbying Parliament against the Qs and Rs in the spring of 1699, probably out of frustration with the slow pace with which the Admiralty was handling petitions to remove them. Parliament received at least eight petitions against the Qs and Rs in 1699 and 1700 and another seven tracts that spoke to the policy.Footnote 38 The navy's method of managing its sick and injured men became as never before a notable topic of public discourse.
Protesting sailors and polemicists tried to convince Parliament that the navy's Qs and Rs were unjust and a discouragement to service in the Fleet. The House of Lords received a petition from “Thousands of seamen, widows and fatherless children,” complaining that the seamen were “deprived of their pay which they had earned at the hazard of their lives, and never deserted the service but entered themselves on board other ships voluntarily.” In December 1699, George Richardson complained to the House of Commons on behalf of several thousand mariners against the navy's unfairness toward “the Petitioners [who] served in the navy many Years, but are kept out of the Pay, upon the Pretence of Qs and Rs being set upon their names in the Navy Books.” William Eccles promised to the Commons that taking off the Qs would be an “Encouragement for all Saylors, Encouragement for all Persons to trust them, when in Necessity, and will be for the Honour and Credit, of the Nation.”Footnote 39 William Hodges again denounced the policy as unjust, unreasonable, and a discouragement to sailors joining the navy:
[S]ome Rational Rules [should be] laid down and ordered that [sailors] may in case of Sickness or Lameness have their Pay secured, [for] how any man can ever for time to come be safe in serving at that dreadful uncertain rate of Management, since they are no more certain of their Health and Strength and Life, than the Beasts of the Field.Footnote 40
Another pamphleteer, who might have been Rev. George Burghope—a client of John Egerton, earl of Bridgewater and first lord of Admiralty (May 1699 to April 1701)—called the Q and R policy “Barbarous and Inhumane.” G. B. declared that it is “a very hard Case, that a Sailor must lose his Money because he has lost his Health in the Service.” Nor was it rational, he argued, to punish seamen who had been reluctant to return to unhealthy ships. How could the navy expect “that such as have contracted Indispositions and Distempers, by unwholesome Provision or a contagious Air, should after a Months Refreshment in Sick Quarters, or laboring 6 to 12 months under their Maladies in a Hospital, be got to return aboard Ship … disease being more dreadful to sailors than battle or storm.” In 1702, as the nation prepared for another war against France, John Dennis re-emphasized his claim that the navy's Qs not only unjustly punished the sick and their dependents, but also, along with poor pay, discouraged sailors from enlisting. The consequent “great Disgust to our Seamen,” Dennis argued, was “the only Occasion of putting the Government to that inconvenient, delatory, troublesome, and chargeable Method of Impressing.”Footnote 41 Penalizing sick sailors with Qs and Rs, in this view, made even more probable the expense and aggravation of pressing healthy men into the navy.
There were, therefore, principled and practical reasons to attack the Royal Navy's Qs and Rs policy: it unjustly harmed a valuable but vulnerable section of the nation and so discouraged them from coming forward to its defense. Some critiques of the policy, unsurprisingly, were partisan assaults on the Whig grandees running the Royal Navy during the 1690s. For example, John Tutchin, a veteran of Monmouth's rebellion, was a fierce critic of Junto Whig Admiral Edward Russell (Earl of Orford from May 1697) and of what Tutchin perceived to be a naval administration awash with corrupt officials. It was perhaps an understandable view for someone recently dismissed from the Victualling Board after nine years of service.Footnote 42 Tutchin cited the Qs and Rs as yet one more example of Navy Board mismanagement keeping the long-suffering seamen from their desserts. He was also a strong opponent of impressment, claiming that the practice was contrary to Magna Carta: “To say we are a free people when any of us is in effectual slavery is Nonsense; for the same Power that deprives part of the People of their Liberty, may deprive the whole People.” Seafarers themselves also questioned in at least one petition to the Commons the legitimacy of the crown's power over sick and injured sailors’ livelihoods. “We cannot find in any of your Acts,” a group of sailors submitted, “the Commissioners of the Navy empowered to stop our Wages, under pretence of Qs and Rs. We believe our selves to be English Men, entitled to our Franchises and free Birthrights.”Footnote 43 Indeed, the last printed critique of the Qs and Rs appeared in a radical Whig tract that condemned both the policy and impressment as contrary to the ancient constitution. Since the Revolution, the author of The Old and True Way of Manning the Fleet claimed, some naval officers had assumed a “Sovereign power, by making such laws concerning the seamen as are contrary to the Magna Carta” and “making them lose their Pay, under pretence of Queries and Runs, without due Course of Law, or by the verdict of a Jury.”Footnote 44 The polemicist suggested that “Revolutioners” such as Orford who had retained “those Abuses introduced into the management of our Fleet since the Restoration,” and who later had implemented unjust and illegitimate policies, should not have been surprised by the politicization of manning the navy and the clamors of seamen and their families.Footnote 45
At first, the Admiralty and then parliamentarians essentially brushed off complaints about the Qs and Rs. On the final day of the spring 1699 parliamentary session, the Admiralty, then still mostly a Whig board, insisted to the House of Lords that, in cases where there was some doubt as to whether or not a Q was unjustly placed next to a seaman's name, the burden of proof fell on him to show that he had in fact re-entered his ship or another naval vessel upon cure. Indeed, to get their Qs or Rs removed, petitioning seamen had been ordered to demonstrate to the Admiralty and the Navy Board's satisfaction such facts as, for example, their whereabouts on particular dates or that they were truly in prison when they claimed they were, that they had leave to be on shore as stated, or in one case that he had truly broken a leg. The Admiralty had been reviewing petitions from seamen to have their Qs or Rs removed since November 1698, claiming that no less than 750 of the 1,700 petitioners had Qs or Rs taken off.Footnote 46 However, within days of this pronouncement, Orford resigned from the Admiralty under increasing pressure from anti-Junto elements in the Commons; soon four other commissioners were purged. By July 1699, the reconstituted Admiralty decided to return responsibility for the seamen's petitions for pay back to the Navy Board.Footnote 47
During the following parliamentary session, the Admiralty (and the Navy Board) defended the Q and R policy as necessary to preserving the discipline of the service—the whole idea of the Qs was to oblige men who had been set ashore sick to report back for duty upon recovery. Moreover, a blanket lifting of the Qs would, the Navy Board supposed, “ease this Office of the clamorous and troublesome business that belong to it,” while at the same time adding a considerable sum of money to the already enormous navy debt. The Navy Board also blamed Parliament for forcing the Admiralty to introduce the Qs. The old system of paying seamen at the end of each year was not possible during the 1690s because Parliament had not voted enough money for the Fleet.Footnote 48 What the Navy Board did not mention, however, was that when it had money there was usually no rush to reward the sailors. The contractors’ bills, which accrued interest, were paid first and the seamen's wages last.Footnote 49 An anonymous pamphlet, probably composed by a naval official, likewise claimed that stopping the pay of sick and injured seamen had been necessary during the recent war “for the Security of [the country's] Religion and Liberties.” Without the Qs the “walls of our Country” would have been “slenderly mann'd.” According to this tract, seamen suffered not because the navy stopped their pay while they were sick but rather from “these bloodsuckers … who trust the poor sailors at more than 50% Profit [and] that industriously spread abroad the Injuries done by these Qs and Rs.”Footnote 50 In other words, the very agents—such as Hodges and Dennis—taking up the seamen's cause before Parliament were, in this view, the true cause of seafarers’ financial miseries. Thus, the navy's advocates acknowledged that sailors as a group were indispensable to the state, but in the absence of some form of discipline over their bodies, whether sick or healthy, they could not be trusted to serve its interest as needed.
The debate about Qs and Rs was a public response to a primitive attempt at biopolitics. Early in the Nine Years’ War, the Admiralty introduced the Q policy to solve a potentially crippling resource crisis: to stop an uncontrolled bleeding of men and treasure, which the loosely supervised system of onshore casualty care, which was very dependent upon female labor, facilitated. The Admiralty's use of its pay books to stop sick and injured seamen from deserting with the threat of penury was intrinsically linked to the problem of finding and keeping sufficient manpower for the navy. The Qs and Rs were about numbers of men and amounts of pay—ideally managed by clerks on ships, in the sick-and-wounded office, and in the Navy Office. The Qs and Rs were police in action: an administrative technique designed to keep the bodies of seamen within the navy's control while they were temporary dis-abled from serving. The policy remained in place at the start of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1702, but it did not generate nearly the same level of protest or comment as it previously had. This was probably due to a combination of factors, including a greater reliance on privately contracted hospitals on shore, which was supposed to make deserting more difficult; better communication between ships’ captains and the navy's commission for sick and wounded concerning the whereabouts of seamen; and the fact that at least some commanders simply ignored the policy.Footnote 51
The controversy over the Qs and Rs is nonetheless significant as generating a noteworthy biopolitical dialectic within England. The Admiralty introduced a new administrative technique, which envisioned the careful, steady recording of data about where sick and injured seamen were and for how long. The Qs and Rs promised to restore order to the disorders of a loosely organized system of health care. What the policy provoked, in fact, were open opposition and the first public debate in England about how the fiscal-naval state managed a population of temporary but crucially important servants.
Bringing in the Bodies: The Register of Seamen
There was a well-established economic and political literature about the multitude of English seamen by the time lobbyists such as William Hodges and Robert Crosfeild publicly protested that the Qs diminished the number of seafarers at the navy's disposal.Footnote 52 Early Stuart mercantilists pointed out that the growing commerce with India, and the Newfoundland fishery, demanded more labor, which encouraged more men to go to sea. The rise in the number of merchant mariners would ultimately help the nation's navy.Footnote 53 Others argued for a national policy to increase the stock of sailors. For example, William Petty's Political Arithmetick, written in the 1670s and first published in 1690, contained a proposal for bringing 6,000 tradesmen into the sea services over a period of four years so that the merchant marine and the navy would have 36,000 seamen each.Footnote 54 Five years later, Francis Brewster complained that the war with France had “damaged trade by eating up seamen.” The solution that he suggested echoed earlier commercialist writers in calling for an increase in trade. Brewster believed that the root of the problem of manning both the navy and the merchant marine was that England did not have enough sailors to meet the demands of both, especially in wartime. Other commentators argued that what England really needed was not more sailors—there were enough already—but rather a more rational system of manning the navy, one based on the certainty of numbers, along with a better complement of inducements or encouragements. Thankfully, an example of just such a scheme, an “exact registry” of all seamen, lay just across the Channel.Footnote 55
The French Inscription Maritime was arguably “the most remarkable administrative innovation” of the late-seventeenth century, the first “modern system of conscription” that continued to function at least until the Napoleonic wars. Local officials registered sailors into different classes, which during wartime rotated into la Marine every four or three years for twelve months’ service.Footnote 56 This method did not enable the French navy to find and deploy many more sailors than the Royal Navy, despite France's much larger population. The Inscription Maritime also could not overcome manpower losses from desertion or capture by enemy forces, factors that proved devastating to la Marine during the 1750s.Footnote 57 Nonetheless, at a war's outbreak the French navy was manned much faster and with less trouble than the Royal Navy.Footnote 58 Indeed, during the early stages of the Nine Years’ War, Parliament had considered but rejected a similar system. Soon thereafter, a member of the Navy Board who had seen the Inscription Maritime in action while a prisoner of war sparked a public debate over the Royal Navy's manning method with a tract addressed to Parliament entitled England's Safety.Footnote 59
Manning the navy through a national register of seamen was initially promoted as an orderly way to solve the manpower shortage, with the additional benefit of fostering greater social order. George St. Lo argued that a general register of all seamen, modeled on the Inscription Maritime, was a better way of raising qualified seamen than forcing men, especially “Raw Landsmen and persons never at Sea,” into the navy through impressment. He also raised the issue of the sailors’ welfare, proposing that the navy introduce “a constant Provision for all such as shall be wounded in service against the enemy” as an encouragement for men to register. A register supported by Parliament was, he thought, a “sure method for raising qualified seamen,” which would also present communities with the opportunity to rid themselves of poachers, beggars, and vagrants.Footnote 60 Thus, compulsory registration and service in the navy would transmute socially burdensome and disorderly multitudes into useful public servants. Another proponent of a compulsory general register of seamen, John Perry, claimed that under such a method “the liberty of the subject would be no more infringed than it is already, and a grievous penalty would be removed.” This assertion was true, because under “the power of the Press there is oft made no distinction (for seamen cannot be known by their Faces) but Landsmen as well as Seamen are hurried away to the great detriment of many.”Footnote 61 An anonymous paper submitted to Admiralty Commissioner Richard Rich proposed that the officials from county hundreds choose one or two men, seamen or landsmen, for service in the Royal Navy: “neither old men nor boyes, nor lame, nor blind, between twenty and thirty-six years old.” Such a scheme would, the author argued, “create a number of seamen and those able and good,” truly “the best seamen in the world,” of whom 12,000 would voluntarily register to serve their country.Footnote 62
Robert Crosfeild, by contrast, was opposed to impressment on principled grounds, and unlike St. Lo, Crosfeild saw the navy's manning problem as an opportunity not for social cleansing but for promoting the welfare of maritime workers. Crosfeild proposed that Parliament create a pension scheme for both merchant mariners and navy seafarers and their dependents, a scheme that “would plainly be an inducement to many thousands of People to take to the Sea, who are now afraid of it, in fear of losing their limbs and becoming Vagabonds.” He suggested that a tax on trade would pay for the pensions and that “in a little time there might be very good hospitals built in all the considerable Ports of the Kingdom to the great relief of the Poor and to the Interest and Honour of the Nation.”Footnote 63 A compulsory national register of seafarers and generous state-sponsored health and welfare provision, along with plans forcibly to transform the poor and marginalized but otherwise able-bodied into able seamen, were thus key elements of the policies proposed by first-wave naval biopoliticans.
Both St. Lo and Crosfeild believed that England already possessed enough mariners for the navy and the merchant marine.Footnote 64 At least one commentator disagreed publicly, albeit anonymously. The author of Proposals to Encrease Seamen for the Service and Defence of England argued in near-natalist terms that “nothing but a Project to Breed Seamen, well Executed, will make this Nation Glorious upon the Sea.” Moreover, the chief problem with impressment, according to this tract, was that it made able-bodied sailors sick. “The Infirmities that have attended our Fleet these 3 or 4 years,” he declared, “have arose from the Nastiness of the many Landmen,” most of whom “cannot forbear Vomiting, nor have the command of their Legs to go upon the Deck and do it over the Gunnel of the Ship, but empty themselves every way … to the great Annoyance of all the rest of the Crew, who are hereby exposed to so many Diseases.” The author's proposed “remedies” for the lack of able-bodied seamen included allowing watermen to take two apprentices instead of one and forcing colliers’ boats to take one landsman on board for every dozen cauldrons of coal they transported.Footnote 65 Here again, landsmen would be transmuted via policy and, through time and training, into seamen.
As its proponents projected, a register of seamen was a quantitative technology that would allow the state to monitor and direct its seafaring multitude onto warships in an orderly and hence healthy manner. Embittered former shipwright George Everett observed that the present method, forcing men on board the king's ships “in a poor and ragged Condition,” was “one main Occasion of Sickness and Distempers on board the Fleet; and for such Reasons many refuse to go to Sea.” A national register of all seafarers aged sixteen to sixty, which Everett called “civil impressment,” would enable the navy “to know who is in Service and who is not,” so that at any time the navy “may be ready manned with able Seamen, and no Hiding Place left for Deserters or others.”Footnote 66 To the advocates of a register of seamen, knowing how many sailors’ bodies there were, and where they were, was to be the ground of orderly, efficient, and salubrious naval manpower management.Footnote 67
Everett asserted that his project for a general register of seamen had the “especiall Approbation of Honourable Admiral Russell and several other eminent Persons of known Experience in Maritime Affairs.”Footnote 68 Whether or not the great Whig admiral deigned to give his imprimatur to Everett's plan, from as early as 1692, Williamite governments were keenly aware that the fleet's tremendous expansion, combined with huge losses of men due to sickness, injury, and desertion, presented the Royal Navy with an unprecedented manpower problem. Although naval manning strictly speaking was an executive brief under the Admiralty, government figures including William III clearly wanted Parliament to get involved, despite skepticism that the legislature would never give the navy the necessary tools to better man the fleet.Footnote 69 The regime was prepared to consider seriously adopting a new manning method, including a register of seamen, despite doubts within officialdom that the traditional measures were really in crisis.Footnote 70 As late as December 1694, the Navy Board told the Admiralty that the old method of encouraging some men and pressing others, “vigorously put in practice again, with good usage of the seamen, good payment of wages, a known Provision settled for the relief of the sick and wounded,” should procure as previously the requisite manpower for the Fleet. Addressing the Admiralty in April 1695 from Cadiz, Russell disagreed. The fact that seamen were slow to enter the service, “cannot otherwise be expected,” he wrote, “unlesse the Parliament will resolve upon a Method to have that Service more effectually performed.”Footnote 71 Elements of the Junto Whig ministry, including Russell, were evidently prepared to transpose what should have been an administrative problem—manning the navy—into a political question.
The new method for manning the Fleet that Parliament eventually approved met the approbation of Junto Whigs wedded to the ministry and to Country-minded members wary of enhanced state power: there was to be a register of seamen but not a compulsory one as the biopolitical polemicists demanded in print. In the spring of 1695, a bill for a register of seamen again found insufficient support. That summer, however, the press became increasingly unpopular. In the autumn, both the Privy Council and the Admiralty again got behind the idea of a register, with the king's throne speech calling for “some good Bill for the Encouragement and Increase of Seamen.”Footnote 72 Two members, Richard Onslow and Sir Rowland Gwynne, who were acceptable both to Whigs linked to the ministry and country-minded men in the Commons, introduced another bill “for the encouragement of seamen” at the end of the year. That bill, with its emphasis on encouragements and rewards, both short- and long-term, passed both Houses in March 1696. Against the advice of the Navy Board, the Act for the Increase and Encouragement of Seamen, commonly called the Register Bill, promised a 40s bounty to men who signed up.Footnote 73 Crucially, enrollment was voluntary. Seamen's wives could be assigned two months of their husbands’ pay. Disabled registered seamen were to get priority admission to the recently founded Greenwich Hospital but not before contributing 6d per month from their wages to support the construction and then upkeep of the palatial tribute to Williamite benevolence.Footnote 74
Counting up Bodies in War and Peace: The Seamen's Register in Action
The seamen's register operated under the oversight of between two and four commissioners for three and a half years. Although the commissioners had their own staff, it was Customs officials at key ports who performed the crucial work of tracking down ships, registering men, and collecting sailors’ contributions to Greenwich hospital.Footnote 75 The record suggests that the job of registering men was not simple. Some sailors evidently used the scheme not for their welfare but to avoid naval service altogether. For example, in January 1697, a seaman from the Constant produced one Peter Moor's Certificate of Registration, which the man confessed under questioning to have procured from the real Moor while lying sick on shore at Gosport. The impersonator hoped that the Certificate would save him having to rejoin the Constant. Other sailors who did take the Register seriously were later disappointed at what it did not do; registration did not, despite the views of the commissioners, protect registered seamen from being turned over from ships entering port to ships leaving port.Footnote 76 Captain Robinson of the Hampton Court reported from Portsmouth that he had registered fifty men, and could have registered many more, but the “men who had given in their names to be Registered who were turned over say ‘they'll be damned before they will be Register'd,’ and others that is Registered swears they'll burn their Certificates.” Representatives of forty registered seamen turned over from the Norfolk to the Bonadventure wrote the commissioners promising to return their certificates and to “send to the parlement and see if they will rite us for this is contrary to the act of parlement.”Footnote 77 The fact that the registry system struck others as intrinsically unfair cannot have helped. For example, Royal Watermen were exempt, and occasionally, as was alleged by Thames watermen, called registered seamen “slavish Doggs with diverse other reproachful words not only to the great discouragement of them but they preventing others to Register themselves.”Footnote 78 Early on, the register office undoubtedly experienced growing pains in gaining the trust of sailors.
Nevertheless, despite problems of fraud and exasperated seamen, neither the navy nor Parliament was prepared to jettison the registry office as King William's war wound down. In the spring of 1697, on the advice of the commissioners and the Admiralty, Parliament amended the Act for Increase and Encouragement to make registration easier and to enhance the inducements to sign up. For example, disabled seamen would be permitted to apply to Greenwich Hospital in the order of their registration, and the number of certificates from a JP confirming a seamen's home parish was reduced from two to one.Footnote 79 Neither did the return of peace mean the end the registry. Early in 1698, the Lords discussed the registry's performance and cost and concluded that they had the same good reasons for maintaining it—to make manning the navy easier and to obviate impressment—as they had had for introducing it. Although roughly 13,000 seamen were registered by March 1698, well under of the hoped-for sum of 30,000, the Commons voted money to pay the promised 40s bounty and to fund the registry office for the rest of the year.Footnote 80 The seamen might have been skeptical, but Parliament still believed in the registry's promise of a better, more orderly, and reliable method of manning the Royal Navy.
The registry did not survive much longer for two reasons, one financial and long-recognized and the other administrative and not yet fully appreciated. First, the registry failed because Parliament did not keep its word to the seamen: the 40s bounty was never paid. Within weeks of the Commons voting money toward the registered seamen's bounty, the registry commissioners, George Byng, Benjamin Timewell, and John Hill, reported to the Admiralty that the seamen and their families were increasingly agitated: “wee fear that want of this Money will be a great Prejudice to the Registry.” The month prior (7 March 1698), the registry commissioners evidently wrote to the Navy Board to report that “the Registered Seamen with their Wives and Relations of such of them as were at sea were Dayly applying at the Office very Clamorous for their Money.”Footnote 81 Their pleas went unanswered. Nearly a year later, registered seamen reminded the Commons of the March 1698 promise to pay the bounty, “but [that] no particular fund was appointed and the registered seamen have never received any part of such intended Bounty money, and many of them are since dead.” Again, nothing happened. Significantly, in December 1702 the Commons learned from the registered seamen's wives that not paying the promised bounty “has been a discouragement to the Sailors, and a great Hindrance to the speedy manning of the Navy.” The seamen's women were the ones, in other words, whose petition highlighted their governors’ failure to take good paternalistic care of their humble seamen, with damaging consequences for national security. By that point there were 17,006 registered seamen, and the estimated total bounty owed to them was £131,347.Footnote 82
Polemicists echoed the registered seamen's complaints in pamphlets that they composed for parliamentarians. William Hodges noted the injustice that “there are several commissioners and clerks [who] have some Hundreds a year for their salary to live Great, and not the poor miserable seamen that are Registered.”Footnote 83 An anti-Orford agitator, Hugh Speke, described the register, in a tract submitted to Parliament, as another scheme concocted by the ministry to enrich the Junto Whig's clients in the navy administration. Speke named and blamed Thomas Reynolds, Orford's steward, responsible for deducting 6d monthly out of each navy sailor's pay, “and none of the registered seamen have as yet been paid.” Thus, an innovative but fatally underfunded technique for managing maritime labor betrayed the seamen's trust, provoked their wives’ righteous anger, and generated harsh public criticism.Footnote 84
The second and equally damaging factor contributing to the registry's demise in the short term was a series of decisions that first overburdened and then broke the registry commission's ability to function. In essence, the registry office became collateral damage of postwar retrenchment, the fall of Orford, and their consequences for how the Admiralty managed the sailors’ petitions to remove their Qs and Rs. In May 1698, King William ordered that the sick-and-wounded commission be dissolved in order to reduce the navy's expenditure.Footnote 85 The following month, the registry commissioners took over managing the care of sick and injured sailors under the navy's peacetime establishment. Then, just over one year later, following the advice of the Navy Board—which had by then “little prospect” of “the service to be Expected from the present Office for Registering seamen”—the Admiralty dissolved the registry office as a further cost-saving measure. Two members of the Navy Board “not charged with any particular offices” subsequently assumed the management of both the sick-and-wounded and the register branches.Footnote 86 Within weeks of this retrenchment and in the wake of Orford's resignation, the Admiralty also gave the Navy Board the job of reviewing the petitions from seamen concerning the Qs and Rs. Between July and September 1699, the number of officials employed in the registry office fell by two-thirds, from thirty-four to eleven; by December 1700, only five clerks remained. The retrenchment lowered the registry office's wage bill from £1,826 to £320 per annum, but an office with only a handful of employees, managed by a small number of “part-time” navy commissioners, could not realistically aspire to encourage over 10,000 seamen to register while also managing complaints about the previous ministry's policy to stop sick or injured sailors from deserting.Footnote 87 The registry office died of ministerial apathy and administrative atrophy, compelling the remaining registered seamen to turn their anger about the lack of bounty money toward Parliament.
Compelling the Bodies: Proposals for a Compulsory Register of Seamen
The demise of the Royal Navy's one and only office for registering seamen during the Age of Sail transported naval biopolitics from the level of public administration up into the realm of state publicity. The promotion of a reformed register of seamen survived long after the administrative dénouement of the navy's registry office. Most advocates of a renewed register, including the commissioners themselves in January 1699, suggested that it become compulsory for all seafarers, with similar suggestions submitted to Parliament in the early years of the War of the Spanish Succession. For example, John Dennis proclaimed that a general and empire-wide register, coupled with a general increase in navy sailors’ pay, would give “due Encouragement to the Seamen: effectually Manning the Navy at all times.” A compulsory register would undoubtedly expand the government's knowledge about and power over the nation's maritime labor force, a prospect that its supporters believed could be justified by securing what Queen Anne in her 1703 throne speech called “an easy and less chargeable method” for the “speedy and effectual manning the Fleet.”Footnote 88 Assessments varied, but commentators such as C. W. believed that the voluntary registry-plus-impressment method was inefficient and enormously expensive, both in money and in lives. A compulsory register would “put sole power of all Seamen primarily into Her Majesty's hands, but give her the Pre-option or Choice of them to serve the Fleet for the Publick Good.”Footnote 89 Peter Rowe, author of a tract proposing a True method for the increase of seamen, argued that certain knowledge of seafarers’ numbers and whereabouts was preferable to the haphazard and occasionally violent press gangs, “whose rude and disorderly management is very displeasing and … attended with many Inconveniences.” Daniel Defoe proposed a general register partly because impressment was riddled with abuses, injustices, violence, “oppressions, Quarrelling and oftentimes Murthers.” The press was simply, Defoe testified to the Lords, too inconvenient not to try a compulsory register to man the Royal Navy. Similarly, Alexander Justice characterized “pressing promiscuously seamen and landsmen into the Sea-service” as the sort of “Rude and Barbarous” practice “not to be heard of, even under the arbitrary and despotick Government of Louis XIV.” The French register was not, Justice claimed somewhat optimistically, an outgrowth of “Tyrannical Government; For there none but Seamen are obliged to go into the Sea-service, and they for the most part are as willing to serve the King as he is desirous of their service.”Footnote 90 Manning the Royal Navy through a cost-effective and compulsory register of all seamen would better reflect, its supporters maintained, the civility of the nation whose interest the navy gallantly served. Such a register would also be better for the sailors’ health.
Promoters of a reformed seamen's register emphasized its benefits to sailors’ welfare. Indeed, prior to its retrenchment, the registry's commissioners insisted to the Admiralty that preserving some sort of link between manning and seamen's long-term well-being was important: “[T]he Advantages to seamen of access to Greenwich Hospital are so considerable,” they asserted, “that the Commissioners cannot think of any thing else that would induce them to register.”Footnote 91 Similarly, C. W. argued in Tack About that it was “absolutely necessary” that seamen be “taken care of in a particular manner,” since they are “so useful a Race of men to our nation.” The tract called on the navy to appoint physicians in coastal communities to look after sick and injured naval seamen, “the Useful Race of mankind, so necessary to be preserved.”Footnote 92
Proponents of naval biopolitics saw it as an antidote to the disorders that accompanied pressing seamen into navy ships. For example, John Swanne, a former navy chaplain, proposed a national program of funneling poor boys into the navy and merchant marine as apprentices, as a way to increase the total number of seamen. Such a program would be, he claimed, both cheaper and healthier than impressment. Swanne believed that this was true because experience showed him that youths and volunteers were better able to adapt to the rigors of life at sea. “It hath always been observed in the long East or West India Voyages, etc, that the Boys or Youths enjoy their Health much better than men,” Swanne declared, since boys’ “constitutions being yet green and unfixt, any Climate seems (as it were) natural or indifferent to them.” Pressed seamen, by contrast, were sickly by nature: “being thus dispos'd of against their Wills, the commotion of their Spirits hath such an Influence upon their Bodies, that they do nothing with Cheerfulness which naturally brings them to Distempers.” Unhealthiest of all were large numbers of pressed landsmen, “who not only fall sick themselves, but too often Infect the whole Fleet with Diseases.” The implication of all this discourse was clear: an orderly and well-regulated method of naval manning, one in which the state encouraged the transmutation of poor boys into seamen, would “save the Nation Money, since one Sea-man bred up from his youth to the sea, is worth generally two others, both for his Health and understanding of his business.”Footnote 93 In addition, according to a radical Whig critique of corruption in the post-Revolution navy's administration, the over-reliance on impressment to man the Fleet, and the lack of concern for sick and injured seamen, had serious biopolitical consequences for the whole nation. According to the polemicist, the press “discourages young seamen from marrying.” When seamen stop making babies, the tract's author continued,
the hindrance of propagation is a loss to the Nation's Capital Stock, so that except these Abuses be redress'd, and the war brought to a speedy conclusion, the Numbers of our People must needs diminish; and we shall not only want Seamen, but land soldiers, and other useful Hands that might have been imploy'd in Manufactures, Husbandry, Planting and other ways for the Defence of our Country, and increase of our wealth.Footnote 94
This prediction of demographic and economic catastrophe was a logical outcome of thinking through the consequences of what could happen should the nation get the biopolitics of manning the Royal Navy wrong. It is also exactly the sort of rhetorical flourish that one would expect to find in promotional literature: adopt our manpower policy, fiscal-naval projectors such as Swanne declared, or face a national crisis.
Parliamentary debates during the War of the Spanish Succession about the best method of manning the navy were not only about numbers and speed; they also concerned navy sailors’ health. In December 1703, for example, a parliamentary committee ordered the Admiralty and Navy Board to report on how to speed up naval manning and on the committee's “opinion [about] what way most contributes to the health of the seamen in the said Service by supplying them with Fresh Provisions or otherwise.”Footnote 95 However, whereas King William's second parliament, with a large Whig majority, was willing to experiment with a voluntary seaman's register and additional benefits as a new method to encourage enlistment, the Commons in Queen Anne's first and second parliaments proved unwilling to let the Admiralty introduce a compulsory register. On two occasions, a bill for speedier manning that centered on a general compulsory register of seamen passed the Lords only to fail in the Commons, despite the fact that, in the second case, the bill incorporated the findings of a joint Admiralty–Navy Board committee on manning.Footnote 96 Rather than establish a reformed register, during the War of the Spanish Succession, Anne's parliaments tried to increase the number of seamen. In effect, Parliament encouraged parishes to start the transmutation of boys into seamen by sending male wards aged ten and over into the merchant marine. There they would serve up to age twenty-one, exempt from impressment until age eighteen. Thus, Anne's parliament could align itself with a locally managed naval biopolitics if doing so reduced the social and financial burden of parish governance.Footnote 97
By contrast, proposals for a general register failed because enough Tories and skeptical Country-minded members distrusted, or perhaps wanted to be seen to distrust, measures that they associated with Whig grandees in the Lords like Orford. Additionally, the gentry probably feared the potential cost of a national register, while merchants were unwilling to give the state precedence in the maritime labor market.Footnote 98 However, political ideology or partisan allegiance do not map clearly onto parliamentarians’ approaches to the navy's manning problem at the outset of Queen Anne's war. The Act to Increase the national stock of seamen by turning poor boys into useful sailors echoed the proposals of some Tories in the December 1703 committee that had studied manning, but otherwise it was not in principle objectionable to Whigs or Country members.Footnote 99 On the controversial question of whether or not England already possessed sufficient sailors to find adequate labor for both the navy and the merchant marine, the Whig James Brydges, the Tory Sir Edward Seymour, and a political neutral such as Treasury Secretary William Lowndes could all agree that there were indeed enough seamen in England. It is clear that most members were sufficiently underwhelmed by the performance of the voluntary register and overwhelmed by the outstanding debt for registered seamen's bounties, more than £410,000 early in 1710, to terminate the office and to quash its liabilities later that year.Footnote 100
Nevertheless, proposals for a compulsory register lived on because the problem of manning the Royal Navy did not die. In the spring of 1720, Admiral Sir John Norris, whose father-in-law, Matthew Aylmer, was appointed to the registry commission in 1696, presented to the Commons what was an unsuccessful bill for a register of seamen.Footnote 101 The bill probably provoked the printed criticism of one John Orlebar, who claimed that “the seamen are so disgusted about the former Register (as to which they have been Money out of pocket instead of Receiving) that hardly any Inducement will engage them to come into another.”Footnote 102 Nonetheless, Norris again proposed a general register to the Cabinet in the autumn of 1739; this promoted yet another debate in the Commons over a compulsory register of seamen early the next year. Sir Robert Walpole, a former member of the 1706 Admiralty–Navy Board committee that had proposed a general register of seamen, was among the members speaking in favor of the registry bill.Footnote 103 In response to claims that a compulsory register represented a heinous assault on the seamen's liberty, such that “the loss of fleets, of armies, of dominions” would be less dreadful, Walpole recapitulated Crosfeild, Defoe, Dennis, and Swanne's assertions that impressment was “found ineffectual and insufficient for the attainment of its end.”Footnote 104 Since both a compulsory register and impressment deprived seamen of their freedom, Walpole denied that liberty was truly the lens through which to view the bill. At its core, the navy's manning problem threatened national security, for “the naval armaments of Britain become far less useful to herself and less formidable to her enemies by the delays, with which we are always obstructed.” Whatever method the state employed to man the navy, the seamen's freedom—and their bodies—were subject to the national interest. Any restraints that the government might impose on the seamen were simply, Walpole contended, “tacit acknowledgement of their usefulness, and an honourary distinction of those men who contribute most to the safety and prosperity of Britain.”Footnote 105 However, the 1740 register bill failed. A plan for “speedily manning the navy” proposed in 1749 likewise died before passage, as did another register bill in 1759. Nevertheless, the fiscal-naval state continued to treat sailors differently from most other British subjects throughout the long eighteenth century. Seamen were a special population because of what their bodies could do for the nation and because there were too few of them to be found where and when they were most needed.Footnote 106
Conclusion
In the introduction to his 450-page Memoirs of Transactions at Sea, Admiralty Secretary Josiah Burchett marveled that, during the 1690s, the average number of seamen serving in the Royal Navy in any given month was 40,000 men, the highest number ever. Not insignificantly, Burchett suggested that “the looking well after them, when Wounded, or Sick, at Sea, and when they are put on Shore,” was the first duty of the navy toward its sailors. The execution of “Just and Charitable Care” in the management of seamen's health would, he proposed, “much contribute, not only to the Preservation of the Seamen, but to the confirming in them a hearty Love and Affection to the Publick Service.”Footnote 107 Burchett's declaration was a hopeful assertion in a biopolitical idiom of the seamen's love for a “caring” fiscal-naval state.Footnote 108 The more the state cared for the bodies of seamen, the more seamen would be available, and from that healthy multitude of seamen more men would willingly risk life and limb to serve in the Royal Navy. Expressions of a similar biopolitical calculus were not limited to promoters of the armed forces. Indeed, around the end of Queen Anne's war, a Quaker merchant, John Bellers, advertised for poor people's hospitals because the “death of people from curable diseases is a loss to national wealth.” He also claimed that a college to teach industrious arts to the poor would “imploy many of our Disbanded Army, and be a means to draw Thousands of Foreigners to us, and the more People we get from foreign countries, the more we draw off their strength to our selves.”Footnote 109 Bellers's zero-sum calculation of demographic strength was probably idiosyncratic, but biopolitical thinkers like him shared the conviction that boosting the number of the right sort of people depended on an increased application of effective state power. It is also clear that they thought that more and healthier subjects, and a better nation, demanded a state that used superior administrative technologies to better regulate and enhance human life.
Foucault's concept of biopolitics invites historians to re-assess the importance of governmental and public concerns for the health of servicemen as factors for extending and intensifying the scope and power of Britain's imperial state, a state that spent most of its money on war between 1689 and 1815.Footnote 110 Late Stuart naval biopolitics underlined that certain kinds of men must be created, disciplined, and preserved in order for the nation to achieve the requisite degree of power, prosperity, and peace. The register of seamen's failure did not stop polemicists from promoting an improved version of the technology, nor did politicians throughout the eighteenth century stop groping after new methods to boost the nation's stock of seamen.Footnote 111 Indeed, British seamen were the one class of subjects whose health and welfare consistently concerned, if only periodically, Georgian politicians and officials. The vast amounts of treasure spent on British naval hospitals, at first for Mediterranean and Caribbean stations and then at Portsmouth and Plymouth, manifested the fiscal-naval state's vision of seafarers as a strategic population.Footnote 112
The Royal Navy's treatment hospitals and Greenwich naval hospital were always about more than healing and caring for sailors as a way of encouraging their heartfelt-love for public service. The hospitals’ enormous size advertised the power and beneficence of the state, while their architecture promoted a seamless and orderly vision of monarchical charity.Footnote 113 The hospitals’ regulations and disciplinary procedures similarly sought to foster orderly and pious habits among grateful communities of pensioners.Footnote 114 Although locals and visitors to London, and later to Plymouth and Portsmouth, were no doubt suitably impressed by the naval hospitals’ scale and magnificence, the navy's ongoing struggles to maintain order within them and to acquire enough able-bodied seamen during wartime suggest that sailors were not wholly convinced of the justice and charity underlying the navy's health care infrastructure.
Naval biopolitics promoted quantitatively based techniques as a means to establish order over an often chaotic and obstreperous multitude of men.Footnote 115 It emerged as the contingent product of domestic political developments and a long, expensive foreign war. After 1689, there was as never before a consistently high demand for seamen for both the Royal Navy and the merchant marine. There was, simultaneously, greater need than ever before for the government to appeal to the political nation and to ordinary people for massive levels of financial and moral support to sustain the war effort. Parliament, polemicists, and the public responded by calling William's and Anne's regimes to account for the conduct of their wars—appeals that were often delivered in print. Petitions denouncing bureaucratic corruption along with pamphlets outlining projects to improve the workings of governance rained down on Westminster and the streets of London.Footnote 116 Naval biopolitics proposed ambitious and innovative solutions to an old administrative problem using a newly emerging form of political rhetoric: political arithmetic—a rhetoric of state power by, in, and of numbers of people. Thus, the late Stuart public sphere was the unwitting but necessary midwife at the birth of British fiscal-naval biopolitics.Footnote 117
