Foreign Jack Tars

'Sara Caputo's Foreign Jack Tars is an impressive debut by a gifted young historian. Based on a heroic trawl of the archives, her study combines clear and concise writing with a command of quantitative methods. It also marries transnational and national history, revealing that the Royal Navy, the focus of much national pride and widely perceived as a symbol of Britishness, in fact relied to a significant extent on foreign manpower.' Stephen Conway, University College London
'This book shows the signal importance of foreign sailors to the British Navy in the Age of Revolutions, while offering original interpretations of wartime manning policies, the impressment debates, race and ethnicity on the ships, and the meaning of national belonging. This is one of the best transnational histories I have read.' Margaret R. Hunt, Uppsala University
'In this very fine book about foreign seamen in the British Navy during the European wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Sara Caputo examines their demographic characteristics, their participation in naval enterprises, their racial, national, linguistic, and religious differences, and their personal experiences in the Navy. ... her book is germane to the current differences between attitudinal and structural/conjunctural approaches to the study of racial and ethnic inequalities. You do not have to be a historian to profit from reading it.' Sam Clark, International Journal of Military History and Historiography
'This book should mark the beginning of a new era in the history of the lower deck. ... It is a sign of a quality work of scholarship that it leaves the reader with an exciting new research agenda.' Evan Wilson, International Journal of Maritime History