Roger Knight's and Martin Wilcox's Sustaining the Fleet suggests that the emergence of a “contractor state” in the early 1800s allowed the British navy sufficient flexibility to meet the challenges of provisioning an enormous fleet engaged in a global war. It is a fascinating work that reveals much about the way the British military provisioned itself. It also successfully explores the nature of business relationships in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The book is an assessment of the performance of the Victualling Board, an enormously vast and complex system of naval bases in England and throughout the world from which manufactured goods were stored and sorted and raw materials were manufactured. At the height of the war, the board was providing 83,428 tons of food and other necessary provisions yearly to 400,000 men employed in the armies fighting in Europe and in naval stations in the Baltic Sea, the Mediterranean, and the West and East Indies (52). Two factors further complicated this already monumental challenge. First, since the board did not have bases throughout the world, it was forced to ship many nonperishable provisions from the five principal bases in England and buy the remainder locally, a serious challenge given the biodiversity of the global naval theaters. Second, despite the massive economic power possessed by the board and the knowledge that failure to provision the fleet would lead to the loss of naval supremacy and, quite possibly, the loss of the war, the government was keen to ensure that the country had enough food and the board was enjoined from manipulating markets to their advantage. It was forced to operate in the markets as it found them (67).

According to Knight and Wilcox, the British military succeeded in part because it operated under a hybrid system of provisioning that combined the actions of public servants, notably the local commanders in chief and agent victuallers, with private contractors hired through a process of competitive tendering. Motivated by a concern to receive the highest quality goods for the cheapest price, the process was, in fact, very simple. The Victualling Board advertised in local newspapers, accepted bids from a range of merchants and artisans, and once the deadline had been reached, the tenders were read and, more often than not, the lowest bid accepted (44–45, 90). Naturally, the government was keen to avoid accepting bids from businesses that had proven unreliable or had provided poor quality goods and could reject these bids in favor of the next cheapest. Furthermore, contracts stipulated penalties for lateness, nonperformance, and overall quality that were stringently applied and not only allowed for abatement of costs in select cases but also inspired greater attention to quality from the contractors themselves. All of this allowed the Victualling Board to better manage its contractors. Beyond its simplicity, this system was enormously flexible. First, by depending on a merchant's experience in local markets and the ability to purchase in markets closed for practical or political reasons to the British state, the navy could acquire provisions anywhere in the world (10–11). Second, it opened the process to allow smaller artisans to compete with larger mercantile houses (102). Finally, it ensured that if one contractor fell on hard times, another would be available to assume that vacancy.

Sustaining the Fleet succeeds on a number of levels. It is in equal parts an administrative history of the Victualling Board and a general history of business practices. Replete with statistics regarding the sheer volume of goods purchased and moved around the country by the government, it provides a real sense of the enormity of the task before the British government. Moreover, the book does an admirable job of debunking the myths of corruption that have dogged the Victualling Board since the Napoleonic War. Rather than a system rife with graft and favoritism that allowed the wealthiest merchants to make unjustified profits, Knight and Wilcox demonstrate that tendering system imposed a fairness on the process that allowed contractors of all levels to at least participate in the system.

That being said, the book is strongest when detailing the workings of the board and weakest when contextualizing the workings of the board in the broader war effort. Knight and Wilcox note that crises struck the board in 1798, 1801, 1807, and 1809–10, which all led to significant reforms in the Victualling Board, but they do not explicitly link these reforms to the operations of the British military in general. As a result, it is difficult to see how or where the reform to the system and operational demands connected. How important, for example, were reforms in victualing to victories at Aboukir Bay, Trafalgar, or Waterloo? No doubt, they were vital, but the book is not as explicit about the connection as it could have been

Moreover, although the book is keen to demonstrate that smaller artisans could compete with the larger mercantile concerns, there is a great deal of evidence in the book that suggests otherwise. Indeed, the authors admit in several places that the majority of contractors, particularly commission agents, were drawn from the mercantile elite (38) or those personally known to the commissioners of the Victualling Board, surely shorthand for the more prominent merchants (151–52). Moreover, it is clear that the board had serious difficulty paying out its accounts. In one case, according to the authors, the board was twenty-two years in arrears (172). Smaller contractors would not have been as able to survive without payment as their larger competitors, like Basil Cochrane. Indeed, in spite of the apparent fairness of the system, the evidence in the book seems to demonstrate advantages in favor of larger contractors. These criticisms aside, the book is a fascinating study of the way the Victualling Board operated and how business was conducted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.