Royal Navy

In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, sailors occupied a paradoxical place in the national imagination. They were idealized as the heroic defenders of the nation, yet they were also stigmatized as brutish, misanthropic, and promiscuous. Naval officers described th…

At the beginning of the twenty-first century a burgeoning global private military sector is increasingly involved in areas of defence and security that, up until recently, were popularly thought of as being within the monopolistic preserve of the nation state. Finding itself at …

This dissertation analyzes the intersections between technological innovation, commercial expansion, and the practices of liberal governmentality in nineteenth-century Britain. After the Napoleonic Wars, the steamship began to replace sailing vessels for both commercial and mili…