Colville Q., Davey J. (eds.) A New Naval History

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. — 265 p.A New Naval History brings together the most significant and interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary naval history. The last few decades have witnessed a transformation in how this field is researched and understood and this volume captures the state of a field that continues to develop apace. It examines – through the prism of naval affairs – issues of nationhood and imperialism; the legacy of Nelson; the socio-cultural realities of life in ships and naval bases; and the processes of commemoration, journalism and stage-managed pageantry that plotted the interrelationship of ship and shore. This bold and original publication will be essential for undergraduate and postgraduate students of naval and maritime history. Beyond that, though, it marks an important intervention into wider historiographies that will be read by scholars from across the spectrum of social history, cultural studies and the analysis of national identity.List of figures and tables
Notes on contributors
AcknowledgementsSociocultural analyses of the Royal Navy
Particular skills: warrant officers in the Royal Navy, 1775–1815
‘My dearest Tussy’: coping with separation during the Napoleonic Wars (the Fremantle papers, 1800–14)
The Admiralty’s gaze: disciplining indecency and sodomy in the Edwardian fleet
Navy, nation and empire: nineteenth-century photographs of the British naval community overseas
Salt water in the blood: race, indigenous naval recruitment and British colonialism, 1934–41
Representations of the Royal Navy
Memorialising Anson, the fighting explorer: a case study in eighteenth-century naval commemoration and material
culture
The apotheosis of Nelson in the National Gallery of Naval Art
Naval heroism in the mid-Victorian family magazine
‘What is the British Navy doing?’ The Royal Navy’s image problem in War Illustrated magazine
Patriotism and pageantry: representations of Britain’s naval past at the Greenwich Night Pageant, 1933
Afterword: Britain and the sea: new histories